Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Jorge Timón jti...@jtimon.cc wrote: Whatever...let's use the current subsidies, the same argument applies, it's just 20 + 25 = 45 btc per block for miner B vs 27 btc for miner B. Miner B would still go out of business, bigger blocks still mean more mining and validation centralization Sorry, but that's ridiculous. If Miner B is leaving 18BTC per block on the table because they have bad connectivity, then they need to pay for better connectivity. If you are arguing I should be able to mine on a 56K modem connection from the middle of the Sahara then we're going to have to agree to disagree. So: what is your specific proposal for minimum requirements for connectivity to run a full node? The 20MB number comes from estimating costs to run a full node, and as my back-and-forth to Chang Wung shows, the costs are not excessive. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On May 31, 2015 5:08 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Jorge Timón jti...@jtimon.cc wrote: Whatever...let's use the current subsidies, the same argument applies, it's just 20 + 25 = 45 btc per block for miner B vs 27 btc for miner B. Miner B would still go out of business, bigger blocks still mean more mining and validation centralization Sorry, but that's ridiculous. If Miner B is leaving 18BTC per block on the table because they have bad connectivity, then they need to pay for better connectivity. Well, I was assuming they just can't upgrade their connection (without moving thei operations to another place). Maybe that assumption is ridiculous as well. If you are arguing I should be able to mine on a 56K modem connection from the middle of the Sahara then we're going to have to agree to disagree. No, I'm not suggesting that. So: what is your specific proposal for minimum requirements for connectivity to run a full node? The 20MB number comes from estimating costs to run a full node, and as my back-and-forth to Chang Wung shows, the costs are not excessive. Well, you were I think assuming a new desktop connecting from somewhere in the US. I would be more confortable with an eee pc from a hotel in India, for example. But yeah, targeting some concrete minimum specs seems like the right approach for deciding how far to go when increasing centralization. But hitting the limit will be chaos seems to imply that completely removing the consensus maximum blocksize is the only logical solution. What happens when we hit the limit next time? When do we stop kicking the can down the road? When do we voluntarily get that chaos? Again, that's too far away in the future to worry about it is not a very conving answer to me. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:05 AM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: Yeah, I'm pretty surprised myself that Gavin never accepted the compromises offered by others in this space for a slow growth solution What compromise? I haven't seen a specific proposal that could be turned into a pull request. Something important to note in Gavin Andresen's analysises of this issue is that he's using quite optimistic scenarios for how nodes are connected to each other. NO I AM NOT. I simulated a variety of connectivities; see the .cfg files at https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoin_miningsim The results I give in the are bigger blocks better blog post are for WORST CASE connectivity (one dominant big miner, multiple little miners, big miner connects to only 30% of little miners, but all the little miners connected directly to each other). For instance, assuming that connections between miners are direct is a very optimistic assumption Again, I did not simulate all miners directly connected to each other. I will note that miners are VERY HIGHLY connected today. It is in their best interest to be highly connected to each other. that depends on a permissive, unregulated, environment where miners co-operate with each other - obviously that's easily subject to change! Really? How is that easily subject to change? If it is easily subject to change, do bigger blocks have any effect? Why are 1MB blocks not subject to change? I talk about what if your government bans Bitcoin entirely here: http://gavinandresen.ninja/big-blocks-and-tor ... and the issues are essentially the same, independent of block size. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Jorge Timón jti...@jtimon.cc wrote: Here's a thought experiment: Subsidy is gone, all the block reward comes from fees. I wrote about long-term hypotheticals and why I think it is a big mistake to waste time worrying about them here: http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
Whatever...let's use the current subsidies, the same argument applies, it's just 20 + 25 = 45 btc per block for miner B vs 27 btc for miner B. Miner B would still go out of business, bigger blocks still mean more mining and validation centralization. The question is how far I we willing to go with this scaling by sacrificing decentralization, but the answer can't be that's to far away in the future to worry about it, right now as far as we think we can using orphan rate as the only criterion. On May 31, 2015 4:49 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Jorge Timón jti...@jtimon.cc wrote: Here's a thought experiment: Subsidy is gone, all the block reward comes from fees. I wrote about long-term hypotheticals and why I think it is a big mistake to waste time worrying about them here: http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On 05/29/15 23:48, Gavin Andresen wrote: On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me mailto:bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: Sadly, this is very far from the whole story. The issue of miners optimizing for returns has been discussed several times during this discussion, and, sadly, miners who are geographically colocated who are optimizing for returns with a free-floating blocksize will optimize away 50% of the network! I must have missed that analysis-- link please? Or summary of HOW they will optimize away 50% of the network? Or are you assuming that 50% of the network is colocated... (which is a potential problem independent of blocksize) If, for example, the majority of miners are in China (they are), and there is really poor connectivity in and out of China (there is) and a miner naively optimizes for profit, they will create blocks which are large and take a while to relay out of China. By simple trial-and-error an individual large miner might notice that when they create larger blocks which fork off miners in other parts of the world, they get more income. Obviously forking off 50% of the network would be a rather extreme situation and assumes all kinds of simplified models, but it shows that the incentives here are very far from aligned, and your simplified good-behavior models are very far from convincing. In addition, I'd expect to see analysis of how these systems perform in the worst-case, not just packet-loss-wise, but in the face of miners attempting to break the system. See http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-better-for-bigger-miners for analysis of but that means bigger miners can get an advantage argument. Executive summary: if little miners are stupid and produce huge blocks, then yes, big miners have an advantage. I'll talk about transaction fees in a second, but there are several problems with this already. As pointed out in the original mail, gfw has already been known to interfere with Bitcoin P2P traffic. So now by little miners, you mean any miner who is not located in mainland China? Whats worse, the disadvantage is symmetric - little miners are at a disadvantage when *anyone* mines a bigger block, and miners dont even have to be evil for this to happen - just optimize for profits. But the disadvantage is tiny. And essentially zero if they connect to your fast relay network (or anything like it). The disadvantage is small with 1MB blocks, but already non-zero. 20MB blocks are much, much worse (lots of things here dont scale linearly, even just transfer over a high-packet-loss-link). I mentioned this in my original email as something which doesnt make me comfortable with 20MB blocks, but something which needs simulation and study, and might actually be just fine! But they're not, so they won't. I dont know what you're referring to with this. Are you claiming little miners today optimize for relay times and have good visibility into the Bitcoin network and calculate an optimal block size based on this (or would with a 20MB block size)? Do you have another explanation for why miners choose to leave fee-paying transactions in their mempool and create small blocks? Defaults? Dumb designs? Most miners just use the default 750K blocks, as far as I can tell, other miners probably didnt see transactions relayed across several hops or so, and a select few miners are doing crazy things like making their blocks fit in a single packet to cross the gfw, but that is probably overkill and not well-researched. Until the block reward goes away, and assuming transaction fees become an important source of revenue for miners. I think it is too early to worry about that; see: http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away You dont make any points here with which I can argue, but let me respond with the reason /I/ think it is a problem worth thinking a little bit about...If we increase the blocksize sufficiently such that transaction fees are not the way in which miners make their money I'm not suggesting that we increase the blocksize sufficiently such that transaction fees are not the way in which miners make their money. I'm suggesting the blocksize be increased to 20MB (and then doubled every couple of years). Do you have convincing evidence that at 20MB miners will be able to break even on transaction fees for a long time? (The answer is no because no one has any idea how bitcoin transaction volumes are going to scale, period.) And in which miners make their money is the wrong metric-- we want enough mining so the network to be secure enough against double-spends. Sure, do you have a value of hashpower which is secure enough (which is a whole other rabbit hole to
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
Stop trying to dictate block growth limits. Block size will be determined by competition between miners and availability of transactions, not through hard-coded limits. Do you even game theory, bro? It doesn't work that way. Mike Hearn described the problem in this article: https://medium.com/@octskyward/hashing-7d04a887acc8 But the solution he's proposing is ridiculously bad and unsound: he expects business owners to donate large sums of money towards mining. If it comes to this, what sane business owner will donate, say, 100 BTC to miners instead of seeking some alternatives? Proof-of-stake coins are already there. I'm well aware of theoretical issues with PoS security, but those theoretical issues aren't as bad as donation-funded cryptocurrency security. But you know what works? Mining fees + block size limit. Users and merchants are interested in their transactions being confirmed, but block size limit won't allow it to turn into a race to bottom. This is actually game-theoretically sound. I see now the temporary 1MB limit was a mistake. It should have gone in as a dynamic limit that scales with average block size. This means that miners will control it, and miners couldn't care less about things like decentralization and about problems of ordinary users. This means that in this scenario Bitcoin will be 100% controlled by few huge-ass mining operations. Possibly a single operation. We already saw GHASH.IO using 51% of total hashpower. Is that what you want? Miners are NOT benevolent. This was already demonstrated. They are greedy. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: Hello. I am from F2Pool. We are currently mining the biggest blocks on the network. Thanks for giving your opinion! Bad miners could attack us and the network with artificial big blocks. How? I ran some simulations, and I could not find a network topology where a big miner producing big blocks could cause a loss of profit to another miner (big or small) producing smaller blocks: http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-better-for-bigger-miners (the 0.3% advantage I DID find was for the situation where EVERYBODY was producing big blocks). We think the max block size should be increased, but must be increased smoothly, 2 MB first, and then after one or two years 4 MB, then 8 MB, and so on. Thanks. Why 2 MB ? You said that server bandwidth is much more expensive in China; what would be the difference in your bandwidth costs between 2MB blocks and 20MB blocks? -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
Matt brought this up on Twitter, I have no idea why I didn't respond weeks ago (busy writing blog posts, probably): On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: * Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. If block propagation isn't fixed, then mines have a strong incentive to create smaller blocks. So the max block size is irrelevant, it won't get hit. In addition, I'd expect to see analysis of how these systems perform in the worst-case, not just packet-loss-wise, but in the face of miners attempting to break the system. See http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-better-for-bigger-miners for analysis of but that means bigger miners can get an advantage argument. Executive summary: if little miners are stupid and produce huge blocks, then yes, big miners have an advantage. But they're not, so they won't. Until the block reward goes away, and assuming transaction fees become an important source of revenue for miners. I think it is too early to worry about that; see: http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away * I'd very much like to see someone working on better scaling technology, both in terms of development and in terms of getting traction in the marketplace. Ok. What does this have to do with the max block size? Are you arguing that work won't happen if the max block size increases? * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. Again, see http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away for what I think about that. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On 05/29/15 22:36, Gavin Andresen wrote: Matt brought this up on Twitter, I have no idea why I didn't respond weeks ago (busy writing blog posts, probably): On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me mailto:bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: * Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. If block propagation isn't fixed, then mines have a strong incentive to create smaller blocks. So the max block size is irrelevant, it won't get hit. Sadly, this is very far from the whole story. The issue of miners optimizing for returns has been discussed several times during this discussion, and, sadly, miners who are geographically colocated who are optimizing for returns with a free-floating blocksize will optimize away 50% of the network! In addition, I'd expect to see analysis of how these systems perform in the worst-case, not just packet-loss-wise, but in the face of miners attempting to break the system. See http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-better-for-bigger-miners for analysis of but that means bigger miners can get an advantage argument. Executive summary: if little miners are stupid and produce huge blocks, then yes, big miners have an advantage. I'll talk about transaction fees in a second, but there are several problems with this already. As pointed out in the original mail, gfw has already been known to interfere with Bitcoin P2P traffic. So now by little miners, you mean any miner who is not located in mainland China? Whats worse, the disadvantage is symmetric - little miners are at a disadvantage when *anyone* mines a bigger block, and miners dont even have to be evil for this to happen - just optimize for profits. But they're not, so they won't. I dont know what you're referring to with this. Are you claiming little miners today optimize for relay times and have good visibility into the Bitcoin network and calculate an optimal block size based on this (or would with a 20MB block size)? Until the block reward goes away, and assuming transaction fees become an important source of revenue for miners. I think it is too early to worry about that; see: http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away You dont make any points here with which I can argue, but let me respond with the reason /I/ think it is a problem worth thinking a little bit about...If we increase the blocksize sufficiently such that transaction fees are not the way in which miners make their money, then either miners are not being funded (ie hashpower has to drop to very little), or the only people mining/funding miners are large orgs who are running Bitcoin (ie the web wallets, payment processors, big merchants, and exchanges of the world). Sadly, this is no longer a decentralized Bitcoin and is, in fact, pretty much how the banking world works today. I'm not sure who, if anyone, claims Bitcoin is novel or interesting for any reason other than its decentralization properties, and, in a world which you are apparently proposing, the natural course of things is to very strongly centralize. * I'd very much like to see someone working on better scaling technology, both in terms of development and in terms of getting traction in the marketplace. Ok. What does this have to do with the max block size? Are you arguing that work won't happen if the max block size increases? Yes, I am arguing that by increasing the blocksize the incentives to actually make Bitcoin scale go away. Even if amazing technologies get built, no one will have any reason to use them. * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. Again, see http://gavinandresen.ninja/when-the-block-reward-goes-away for what I think about that. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
Hello. I am from F2Pool. We are currently mining the biggest blocks on the network. So far top 100 biggest bitcoin blocks are all from us. We do support bigger blocks and sooner rather than later. But we cannot handle 20 MB blocks right now. I know most blocks would not be 20 MB over night. But only if a small fraction of blocks more than 10 MB, it could dramatically increase of our orphan rate, result of higher fee to miners. Bad miners could attack us and the network with artificial big blocks. As yhou know, other Chinese pools, AntPool, BW, they produces ASIC chips and mining mostly with their own machines. They do not care about a few percent of orphan increase as much as we do. They would continue their zero fee policy. We would be the biggest loser. As the exchanges had taught us, zero fee is not health to the network. Also we have to redevelop our block broadcast logic. Server bandwidth is a lot more expensive in China. And the Internet is slow. Currently China has more than 50% of mining power, if block size increases, I bet European and American pools could suffer more than us. We think the max block size should be increased, but must be increased smoothly, 2 MB first, and then after one or two years 4 MB, then 8 MB, and so on. Thanks. On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 6:02 AM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: OK, so lets do that. I've seen a lot of I'm not entirely comfortable with committing to this right now, but think we should eventually, but not much I'd be comfortable with committing to this when I see X. In the interest of ignoring debate and pushing people towards a consensus at all costs, ( ;) ) I'm gonna go ahead and suggest we talk about the second. Personally, there are several things that worry me significantly about committing to a blocksize increase, which I'd like to see resolved before I'd consider supporting a blocksize increase commitment. * Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. I'd expect to see these not only implemented but being used in production (though I dont particularly care about them being all that stable). I'd want to see measurements of how they perform both in production and in the face of high packet loss (eg across the GFW or in the case of small/moderate DoS). In addition, I'd expect to see analysis of how these systems perform in the worst-case, not just packet-loss-wise, but in the face of miners attempting to break the system. * I'd very much like to see someone working on better scaling technology, both in terms of development and in terms of getting traction in the marketplace. I know StrawPay is working on development, though its not obvious to me how far they are from their website, but I dont know of any commitments by large players (either SPV wallets, centralized wallet services, payment processors, or any others) to support such a system (to be fair, its probably too early for such players to commit to anything, since anything doesnt exist in public). * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. If we're just building Bitcoin to work in five years, great, but if we want it all to keep working as subsidy drops significantly, I'd like a better answer than we'll deal with it when we get there or it will happen, all the predictions based on people's behavior today say so (which are hopefully invalid thanks to the previous point). Ideally, I'd love to see some real free pressure already on the network starting to develop when we commit to hardforking in a year. Not just full blocks with some fees because wallets are including far greater fees than they really need to, but software which properly handles fees across the ecosystem, smart fee increases when transactions arent confirming (eg replace-by-fee, which could be limited to increase-in-fees-only for those worried about double-spends). I probably forgot one or two and certainly dont want to back myself into a corner on committing to something here, but those are a few things I see today as big blockers on larger blocks. Luckily, people have been making progress on building the software needed in all of the above for a while now, but I think they're all very, very immature today. On 05/07/15 19:13, Jeff Garzik wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me mailto:bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: -snip- If, instead, there had been an intro on the list as I think we should do the blocksize increase soon, what do people think?, the response could likely have focused much more around creating a specific list of things we should do before we (the technical community) think we are prepared for a blocksize increase. Agreed, but that is water under the bridge at this point. You - rightly - opened the topic here and now we're discussing it.
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 4:08 AM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: I wonder if having a miner flag would be good for the network. Makes it trivial to find miners and DoS attack them - a huge risk to the network as a whole, as well as the miners. To mitigate against this, two chaintips could be tracked. The miner tip and the client tip. Miners would build on the miner tip. When performing client services, like wallets, they would use the client tip. The client would act exactly the same as any node, the only change would be that it gives miner work based on the mining tip. If the two tips end up significantly forking, there would be a warning to the miner and perhaps eventually refuse to give out new work. That would happen when there was a miner level hard-fork. That'd be an excellent way to double-spend merchants, significantly increasing the chance that the double-spend would succeed as you only have to get sufficient hashing power to get the lucky blocks; you don't need enough hashing power to *also* ensure those blocks don't become the longest chain, removing the need to sybil attack your target. To launch that attack, you need to produce fake blocks. That is expensive. Stephen Cale's suggestion to wait more than one block before counting a transaction as confirmed would also help mitigate. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 5:39 AM, Stephen stephencalebmo...@gmail.com wrote: I think this could be mitigated by counting confirmations differently. We should think of confirmations as only coming from blocks following the miners' more strict rule set. So if a merchant were to see payment for the first time in a block that met their own size restrictions but not the miners', then they would simply count it as unconfirmed. In effect, there is a confirm penalty for less strict blocks. Confirms = max(miner_confirms, merchant_confirms - 3, 0) Merchants who don't upgrade end up having to wait longer to hit confirmations. If they get deep enough in the chain, though, the client should probably count them as being confirmed anyway, even if they don't meet the client nodes' expectation of the miners' block size limit. This happening probably just means that the client has not updated their software (or -minermaxblocksize configuration, depending on how it is implemented) in a long time. That is a good idea. Any parameters that have miner/merchant differences should be modifiable (but only upwards) in the command line. Why are my transactions taking longer to confirm? There was a soft fork to make the block size larger and your client is being careful. You need to add minermaxblocksize=4MB to your bitcoin.conf file. Hah, it could be called a semi-hard fork? -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
Comments in line: On May 8, 2015, at 11:08 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: Makes it trivial to find miners and DoS attack them - a huge risk to the network as a whole, as well as the miners. Right now pools already get DoSed all the time through their work submission systems; getting DoS attacked via their nodes as well would be a disaster. It seems that using a -miner flag to follow rules about smaller blocks would only reveal miner nodes if one sent the node a solved block that that was valid in every way except the block size. While not impossible, I wouldn't call this trivial, as it still requires wasting an entire block's worth of energy. When in miner mode, the client would reject 4MB blocks and wouldn't build on them. The reference client might even track the miner and the non-miner chain tip. Miners would refuse to build on 5MB blocks, but merchants and general users would accept them. That'd be an excellent way to double-spend merchants, significantly increasing the chance that the double-spend would succeed as you only have to get sufficient hashing power to get the lucky blocks; you don't need enough hashing power to *also* ensure those blocks don't become the longest chain, removing the need to sybil attack your target. I think this could be mitigated by counting confirmations differently. We should think of confirmations as only coming from blocks following the miners' more strict rule set. So if a merchant were to see payment for the first time in a block that met their own size restrictions but not the miners', then they would simply count it as unconfirmed. If they get deep enough in the chain, though, the client should probably count them as being confirmed anyway, even if they don't meet the client nodes' expectation of the miners' block size limit. This happening probably just means that the client has not updated their software (or -minermaxblocksize configuration, depending on how it is implemented) in a long time. I actually like Tier's suggestion quite a bit. I think we could have the default client limit set to some higher number, and have miners agree out of band on the latest block size limit. Or maybe even build in a way to vote into the blockchain. Best, Stephen -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
08.05.2015 at 5:49 Jeff Garzik wrote: To repeat, the very first point in my email reply was: Agree that 7 tps is too low For interbank trading that would maybe enough but I don't know. I'm not a developer but as a (former) user and computer scientist I'm also asking myself what is the core of the problem? Personally, for privacy reasons I do not want to leave a footprint in the blockchain for each pizza. And why should this expense be good for trivial things of everyday life? If one encounters the block boundary, he or she will do more effort or give up. I'm thinking most people will give up because their transactions are not really economical. It is much better for them to use third-partys (or another payment system). And that's where we are at the heart of the problem. The Bitcoin third-party economy. With few exceptions this is pure horror. More worse than any used car dealer. And the community just waits that things get better. But that will never happen of its own accord. We are living in a Wild West Town. So we need a Sheriff and many other things. We need a small but good functioning economy around the blockchain. To create one, we have to accept a few unpleasant truths. I do not know if the community is ready for it. Nevertheless, I know that some companies do a good job. But they have to prevail against their dishonest competitors. People take advantage of the blockchain, because they no longer trust anyone. But this will not scale in the long run. - oliver -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Personally, for privacy reasons I do not want to leave a footprint in the blockchain for each pizza. And why should this expense be good for trivial things of everyday life? Then what's the point? Isn't this supposed to be an Open transactional network, it doesn't matter if you don't want that, what matters is what people want to do with it, and there's nothing you can do to stop someone from opening a wallet and buying a pizza with it, except the core of the problem you ask yourself about, which is, the minute this goes mainstream and people get their wallets out the whole thing will collapse, regardless of what you want the blockchain for. Why talk about the billions of unbanked and all the romantic vision if you can't let them use their money however they want in a decentralized fashion. Otherwise let's just go back to centralized banking because the minute you want to put things off chain, you need an organization that will need to respond to government regulation and that's the end for the billions of unbanked to be part of the network. http://twitter.com/gubatron On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 6:37 AM, Oliver Egginger bitc...@olivere.de wrote: 08.05.2015 at 5:49 Jeff Garzik wrote: To repeat, the very first point in my email reply was: Agree that 7 tps is too low For interbank trading that would maybe enough but I don't know. I'm not a developer but as a (former) user and computer scientist I'm also asking myself what is the core of the problem? Personally, for privacy reasons I do not want to leave a footprint in the blockchain for each pizza. And why should this expense be good for trivial things of everyday life? If one encounters the block boundary, he or she will do more effort or give up. I'm thinking most people will give up because their transactions are not really economical. It is much better for them to use third-partys (or another payment system). And that's where we are at the heart of the problem. The Bitcoin third-party economy. With few exceptions this is pure horror. More worse than any used car dealer. And the community just waits that things get better. But that will never happen of its own accord. We are living in a Wild West Town. So we need a Sheriff and many other things. We need a small but good functioning economy around the blockchain. To create one, we have to accept a few unpleasant truths. I do not know if the community is ready for it. Nevertheless, I know that some companies do a good job. But they have to prevail against their dishonest competitors. People take advantage of the blockchain, because they no longer trust anyone. But this will not scale in the long run. - oliver -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
The nice thing about 1 MB is that you can store ALL bitcoin transactions relevant to your lifetime (~100 years) on one 5 TB hard drive (1*6*24*365*100=5256000). Any regular person can run a full node and store this 5 TB hard drive easily at their home. With 10 MB blocks you need a 50 TB drive just for your bitcoin transactions! This is not doable for most regular people due to space and monetary constraints. Being able to review all transactions relevant to your lifetime is one of the key important properties of Bitcoin. How else can people audit the financial transactions of companies and governments that are using the Bitcoin blockchain? How else can we achieve this level of transparency that is essential to keeping corrupt governments/companies in check? How else can we keep track of our own personal transactions without relying on others to keep track of them for us? As time passes, storage technology may increase, but so may human life expectancy. So yes, in this sense, 1 MB just may be the magic number. Assuming that we have a perfectly functional off-chain transaction system, what do we actually gain by going from 1 MB to 1000 MB (my approximate limit for regular users having enough processing power)? If there is no clear and substantial gain, then it is foolish to venture into this territory, i.e. KEEP IT AT 1 MB! For example Angel said he wants to see computers transacting with computers at super speeds. Why do you need to do this on the main chain? You will lose all the transparency of the current system, an essential feature. On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 10:36 PM, Angel Leon gubat...@gmail.com wrote: I believe 100MB is still very conservative, I think that's barely 666 tps. I also find it not very creative that people are imagining these limits for 10 billion people using bitcoin, I think bitcoin's potential is realized with computers transacting with computers, which can eat those 666 tps in a single scoup (what if bittorrent developers got creative with seeding, or someone created a decentralized paid itunes on top of bitcoin, or the openbazaar developers actually pulled a decentralized amazon with no off-chain transaction since they want the thing to be fully decentralized, bitcoin would collapse right away) I truly hope people see past regular people running nodes at home, that's never going to happen. This should be about the miner's networking, storage and cpu capacity. They will have gigabit access, they will have shitload of storage, and they already have plenty of processing power, all of which are only going to get cheaper. In order to have the success we all dream we'll need gigabit blocks. Let's hope adoption remains slow. http://twitter.com/gubatron On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Actually I believe that side chains and off-main-chain transactions will be a critical part for the overall scalability of the network. I was actually trying to make the point that (insert some huge block size here) will be needed to even accommodate the reduced traffic. I believe that it is definitely over 20MB. If it was determined to be 100 MB ten years from now, that wouldn't surprise me. Sent from my overpriced smartphone On May 8, 2015 1:17 PM, Andrew onelinepr...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: This isn't about everyone's coffee. This is about an absolute minimum amount of participation by people who wish to use the network. If our goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure. If even 5% of the world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above 100 tps. And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations) that want to use it. The goals of a global transaction network and everyone must be able to run a full node with their $200 dell laptop are not compatible. We need to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly audited by everyone and their mother. The important feature of the network is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it. But not everyone is required to. Trying to promote a system wher000e the history can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach, even with our miniscule 7 tps. Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system These are good points and got me thinking (but I think you're wrong). If we really want each of the 10 billion people soon using bitcoin once per month, that will require 500MB blocks. That's about 2 TB per month. And if you relay it to 4 peers, it's 10 TB per month. Which I suppose is doable for a home desktop, so you can just run a pruned full node with all transactions
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/09/2015 02:02 PM, Andrew wrote: The nice thing about 1 MB is that you can store ALL bitcoin transactions relevant to your lifetime (~100 years) on one 5 TB hard drive (1*6*24*365*100=5256000). Any regular person can run a full node and store this 5 TB hard drive easily at their home. With 10 MB blocks you need a 50 TB drive just for your bitcoin transactions! This is not doable for most regular people due to space and monetary constraints. Being able to review all transactions relevant to your lifetime is one of the key important properties of Bitcoin. How else can people audit the financial transactions of companies and governments that are using the Bitcoin blockchain? How else can we achieve this level of transparency that is essential to keeping corrupt governments/companies in check? How else can we keep track of our own personal transactions without relying on others to keep track of them for us? As time passes, storage technology may increase, but so may human life expectancy. So yes, in this sense, 1 MB just may be the magic number. How many individuals and companies do you propose will ever use Bitcoin (order of magnitude estimates are fine) Whatever number you select above, please describe approximately how many lifetime Bitcoin transactions each individual and company will be capable of performing with a 1 MB block size limit. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVTgNcAAoJECpf2nDq2eYjM8AP/2kwSF+HMPR1KdaZsATL4rog xSS97Q5iEX8StA61jUqHQmpXL5pG6z5DeeKT/liwcMnYnVqOEOLvoVctr3gXfgRz 9GJeTOlmN5l9xBeX/nWa0A2ql0kWZpYolBS1FwYadWReAD8R0X9UeBd9YXLZNy33 Ow9JjwRjKHhsuyrlMP8pRDKlGPoa/U+2aW4FwiysMLa0Gu6dbFjTrp3bHw4Fccpi X0E/aDN68U4FV+lZ4NzkMsBK9VARzmC8KI0DQ540pqfkcnyoYf0VERl/gslPWhfq t6Rqa7vHHMqFe82lgCd3ji8Qhsz8oBrDS4u4jqwATvgihgImOB6K85JoKmf3y2JS jByjMGd4Ep0F80Z2MRhi6HuEoRU69uY2u6l9bZxMjzvLX8sG6QTNk3uLMS3ARXcY JBjZ/g13DXgcRj01fq05CHbCTJYZgTA9pRZTY+ZKH4r0mu86b9ua7hjvyKHS6q54 uaFmRkNcnKlpCY+fvH/JUdvvmwrA0ETUdHhRyk8vzWIMi+aH4//GwrCmBNRrugzv 9JtQ1BC+tQqtSX2VkFEhAVISitgkBqurVVlGk18FvVKPFO8cnFS/6NWoPE0WLLzW 2pTuhEPjdz9UAHD3RW601rb4C0LbuwVlGO4tYBjyqCmk/vBlES2XIjQKctXZLBEy eLgn3gMwEXUTU6UdGyvb =RPhK -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 12:53 PM, Justus Ranvier justusranv...@riseup.net wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/09/2015 02:02 PM, Andrew wrote: The nice thing about 1 MB is that you can store ALL bitcoin transactions relevant to your lifetime (~100 years) on one 5 TB hard drive (1*6*24*365*100=5256000). Any regular person can run a full node and store this 5 TB hard drive easily at their home. With 10 MB blocks you need a 50 TB drive just for your bitcoin transactions! This is not doable for most regular people due to space and monetary constraints. Being able to review all transactions relevant to your lifetime is one of the key important properties of Bitcoin. How else can people audit the financial transactions of companies and governments that are using the Bitcoin blockchain? How else can we achieve this level of transparency that is essential to keeping corrupt governments/companies in check? How else can we keep track of our own personal transactions without relying on others to keep track of them for us? As time passes, storage technology may increase, but so may human life expectancy. So yes, in this sense, 1 MB just may be the magic number. How many individuals and companies do you propose will ever use Bitcoin (order of magnitude estimates are fine) Whatever number you select above, please describe approximately how many lifetime Bitcoin transactions each individual and company will be capable of performing with a 1 MB block size limit. I would expect at least 10 billion people (directly or indirectly) to be using it at once for at least 100 years. But I think it's pointless to guess how many will use it, but rather make the system ready for 10 billion people. The point is that for small transactions, they will be done off-chain. The actual Bitcoin blockchain will only show very large transactions (such as a military purchasing a new space shuttle) or aggregate transactions (i.e. a transaction consisting of multiple smaller transactions done off-chain). There can also be multiple layers of chains creating a tree-like structure. Each chain above will validate the aggregate transactions of the chain below. You can think of the Bitcoin blockchain as the hypervisor that manages all the other chains. While your coffee purchase 4 days ago may not be directly visible within the Bitcoin blockchain (the main chain), you can trace it down the sequence of chains until you find it. Same with that fancy dinner your government MP paid for using public funds. You don't have to store a copy of all transactions that occurred for each chain in existence, but rather just the transactions for the chains that you use or are relevant to you. As you see, this kind of system is totally transparent to all users and totally flexible (you can choose your sub chains). The flexibility also allows you to have arbitrarily fast transactions (choose a chain or lightning channel attached to that chain that supports it), and you can enjoy a wide variety of features from other chains, like using one chain that is known to have good anonymity properties. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVTgNcAAoJECpf2nDq2eYjM8AP/2kwSF+HMPR1KdaZsATL4rog xSS97Q5iEX8StA61jUqHQmpXL5pG6z5DeeKT/liwcMnYnVqOEOLvoVctr3gXfgRz 9GJeTOlmN5l9xBeX/nWa0A2ql0kWZpYolBS1FwYadWReAD8R0X9UeBd9YXLZNy33 Ow9JjwRjKHhsuyrlMP8pRDKlGPoa/U+2aW4FwiysMLa0Gu6dbFjTrp3bHw4Fccpi X0E/aDN68U4FV+lZ4NzkMsBK9VARzmC8KI0DQ540pqfkcnyoYf0VERl/gslPWhfq t6Rqa7vHHMqFe82lgCd3ji8Qhsz8oBrDS4u4jqwATvgihgImOB6K85JoKmf3y2JS jByjMGd4Ep0F80Z2MRhi6HuEoRU69uY2u6l9bZxMjzvLX8sG6QTNk3uLMS3ARXcY JBjZ/g13DXgcRj01fq05CHbCTJYZgTA9pRZTY+ZKH4r0mu86b9ua7hjvyKHS6q54 uaFmRkNcnKlpCY+fvH/JUdvvmwrA0ETUdHhRyk8vzWIMi+aH4//GwrCmBNRrugzv 9JtQ1BC+tQqtSX2VkFEhAVISitgkBqurVVlGk18FvVKPFO8cnFS/6NWoPE0WLLzW 2pTuhEPjdz9UAHD3RW601rb4C0LbuwVlGO4tYBjyqCmk/vBlES2XIjQKctXZLBEy eLgn3gMwEXUTU6UdGyvb =RPhK -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- PGP: B6AC 822C 451D 6304 6A28 49E9 7DB7 011C D53B 5647 -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight.
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
--[remove this line and above]-- On Thu, 7 May 2015, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Date: Thu, 7 May 2015 00:37:54 + From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com To: Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me Cc: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Thanks Matt; I was actually really confused by this sudden push with not a word here or on Github--so much so that I responded on Reddit to people pointing to commits in Gavin's personal repository saying they were reading too much into it. I saw this. I was also pointing this out to the people who were asking me. A commit to a personal repository does not at first seem more than experimental. sipa commits weird/neat things to private branches all the time, after all. to share behavior. In the case of mining, we're trying to optimize the social good of POW security. (But the analogy applies in other ways too: About the only argument IMO in favour of block size increases is to assume that making more room in a block will make it attractive to use for more people at some point in the future: increasing transaction velocity, increasing economy size, increasing value overall. increases to the chain side are largely an externality; miners enjoy the benefits, everyone else takes the costs--either in reduced security or higher node operating else.) Who else but miners and pool operators will run full nodes when full nodes are being shut down because they are too large and unwieldy to maintain? It is already so that casual users refuse to run full nodes. This fact is indisputable. The only question remaining is, Do we care? Arguments against users who feel that the dataset is too large to run a full node, full-time, start from a premise that these users are a static and irrelevant fraction. Is this even true? Do we care? I do. I will shortly only be able to run half the nodes I currently do thanks to the growth of the blockchain at its current rate. One potential argument is that maybe miners would be _regulated_ to behave correctly. But this would require undermining the openness of the system--where anyone can mine anonymously--in order to enforce behavior, and that same enforcement mechanism would leave a political level to impose additional rules that violate the extra properties of the system. I would refuse to mine under such a regulated regime; moreover, I would enjoy forking away from this, and, I suspect, the only miners who remain would be those whose ultimate motivations do not coincide with the users. That is, the set of miners who are users, and the set of users who are miners, would be wholly non-intersecting. So far the mining ecosystem has become incredibly centralized over time. This is unfortunate but true. of the regular contributors to Bitcoin Core do. Many participants have never mined or only did back in 2010/2011... we've basically ignored the mining ecosystem, and this has had devastating effects, causing a latent undermining of the security model: hacking a dozen or so computers--operated under totally unknown and probably not strong security policies--could compromise the network at least at the tip... The explicit form of the block dictated by the reference client and agreed-to by the people who were sold on bitcoin near the beginning (myself included) was explicitly the notion that the rules were static; that the nature of transaction foundations and the subsidies would not be altered. Here we have a hardfork being contemplated which is not only controversial, but does not even address some of the highest-utility and most-requested features in peoples' hardfork wishlists. The fact that mining has effectively been centralized directly implies that destabilizing changes that some well-heeled (and thus theoretically capable, at least) people have explicitly begun plans to fork the blockchain about will have an unknown, and completely unforeseen combined effect. We can pretend that, If merchants and miners and exchanges go along, then who else matters, but the reality is that the value in bitcoin exists because *people* use it for real transactions: Not miners, whose profits are parasitically fractionally based on the quality and strength of the bitcoin economy as a whole; not exchanges who lubricate transactions in service to the economy; not even today's merchants whose primary means of accepting bitcoin seems to be to convert them instantly to fiat and not participate meaningfully in the economy at all; not enriched felons; but actual users themselves. Rightfully we should be regarding this an an emergency, and probably should have been have since 2011. There are two ways to look at it, assuming that the blocksize change increases bitcoin's value to people after all: mining centralization will be corrected; or, mining centralization will not be corrected. I would argue that rapidly increasing
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
* Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. With a 20mb cap, miners still have the option of the soft limit. I would actually be quite surprised if there were no point along the road from 1mb to 20mb where miners felt a need to throttle their block sizes artificially, for the exact reason you point out: propagation delays. But we don't *need* to have fancy protocol upgrades implemented right now. All we need is to demolish one bottleneck (the hard cap) so we can then move on and demolish the next one (whatever that is, probably faster propagation). Scaling is a series of walls we punch through as we encounter them. One down, onto the next. We don't have to tackle them all simultaneously. FWIW I don't think the GFW just triggers packet loss, these days. It's blocked port 8333 entirely. * I'd very much like to see someone working on better scaling technology ... I know StrawPay is working on development, So this request is already satisfied, isn't it? As you point out, expecting more at this stage in development is unreasonable, there's nothing for anyone to experiment with or commit to. They have code here, by the way: https://github.com/strawpay You can find their fork of MultiBit HD, their implementation library, etc. They've contributed patches and improvements to the payment channels code we wrote. * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. What are your thoughts on using assurance contracts to fund network security? I don't *know* if hashing assurance contracts (HACs) will work. But I don't know they won't work either. And right now I'm pretty sure that plain old fee pressure won't work. Demand doesn't outstrip supply forever - people find substitutes. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Alan argues that 7 tps is a couple orders of magnitude too low By the way, just to clear this up - the real limit at the moment is more like 3 tps, not 7. The 7 transactions/second figure comes from calculations I did years ago, in 2011. I did them a few months before the sendmany command was released, so back then almost all transactions were small. After sendmany and as people developed custom wallets, etc, the average transaction size went up. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
This isn't about everyone's coffee. This is about an absolute minimum amount of participation by people who wish to use the network. If our goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure. If even 5% of the world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above 100 tps. And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations) that want to use it. The goals of a global transaction network and everyone must be able to run a full node with their $200 dell laptop are not compatible. We need to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly audited by everyone and their mother. The important feature of the network is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it. But not everyone is required to. Trying to promote a system where the history can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach, even with our miniscule 7 tps. Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system On 05/07/2015 03:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com mailto:etothe...@gmail.com wrote: (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea. It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability). But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system. It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail. Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure). We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. [...] 1) Agree that 7 tps is too low 2) Where do you want to go? Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? This is hugely unrealistic. 700 tps is 100MB blocks, 14.4 GB/day -- just for a single feed. If you include relaying to multiple nodes, plus serving 500 million SPV clients en grosse, who has the capacity to run such a node? By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network node count is tiny and highly centralized. 3) In RE fee pressure -- Do you see the moral hazard to a software-run system? It is an intentional, human decision to flood the market with supply, thereby altering the economics, forcing fees to remain low in the hopes of achieving adoption. I'm pro-bitcoin and obviously want to see bitcoin adoption - but I don't want to sacrifice every decentralized principle and become a central banker in order to get there. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On 05/08/2015 01:13 AM, Tom Harding wrote: On 5/7/2015 7:09 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: G proposed 20MB blocks, AFAIK - 140 tps A proposed 100MB blocks - 700 tps For ref, Paypal is around 115 tps VISA is around 2000 tps (perhaps 4000 tps peak) For reference, I'm not proposing 100 MB blocks right now. I was simply suggesting that if Bitcoin is to *ultimately* achieve the goal of being a globally useful payment rails, 7tps is embarrassingly small. Even with off-chain transactions. It should be a no-brainer that block size has to go up. My goal was to bring some long-term perspective into the discussion. I don't know if 100 MB blocks will *actually* be necessary for Bitcoin in 20 years, but it's feasible that it will be. It's an open, global payments system. Therefore, we shouldn't be arguing about whether 1 MB blocks is sufficient--it's very clearly not. And admitting this as a valid point is also an admission that not everyone in the world will be able to run a full node in 20 years. I don't think there's a solution that can accommodate all future scenarios, nor that we can even find a solution right now that avoids more hard forks in the future. But the goal of everyone should be able to download and verify the world's global transactions on a smartphone is a non-starter and should not drive decisions. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: This isn't about everyone's coffee. This is about an absolute minimum amount of participation by people who wish to use the network. If our goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure. If even 5% of the world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above 100 tps. And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations) that want to use it. The goals of a global transaction network and everyone must be able to run a full node with their $200 dell laptop are not compatible. We need to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly audited by everyone and their mother. The important feature of the network is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it. But not everyone is required to. Trying to promote a system wher000e the history can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach, even with our miniscule 7 tps. Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system These are good points and got me thinking (but I think you're wrong). If we really want each of the 10 billion people soon using bitcoin once per month, that will require 500MB blocks. That's about 2 TB per month. And if you relay it to 4 peers, it's 10 TB per month. Which I suppose is doable for a home desktop, so you can just run a pruned full node with all transactions from the past month. But how do you sync all those transactions if you've never done this before or it's been a while since you did? I think it currently takes at least 3 hours to fully sync 30 GB of transactions. So 2 TB will take 8 days, then you take a bit more time to sync the days that passed while you were syncing. So that's doable, but at a certain point, like 10 TB per month (still only 5 transactions per month per person), you will need 41 days to sync that month, so you will never catch up. So I think in order to keep the very important property of anyone being able to start clean and verify the thing, then we need to think of bitcoin as a system that does transactions for a large number of users at once in one transaction, and not a system where each person will make a ~monthly transaction on. We need to therefore rely on sidechains, treechains, lightning channels, etc... I'm not a bitcoin wizard and this is just my second post on this mailing list, so I may be missing something. So please someone, correct me if I'm wrong. On 05/07/2015 03:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea. It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability). But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system. It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail. Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure). We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. [...] 1) Agree that 7 tps is too low 2) Where do you want to go? Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? This is hugely unrealistic. 700 tps is 100MB blocks, 14.4 GB/day -- just for a single feed. If you include relaying to multiple nodes, plus serving 500 million SPV clients en grosse, who has the capacity to run such a node? By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network node count is tiny and highly centralized. 3) In RE fee pressure -- Do you see the moral hazard to a software-run system? It is an intentional, human decision to flood the market with supply, thereby altering the economics, forcing fees to remain low in the hopes of achieving adoption. I'm pro-bitcoin and obviously want to see bitcoin adoption - but I don't want to sacrifice every decentralized principle and become a central banker in order to get there. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: This isn't about everyone's coffee. This is about an absolute minimum amount of participation by people who wish to use the network. If our goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure. If even 5% of the world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above 100 tps. And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations) that want to use it. The goals of a global transaction network and everyone must be able to run a full node with their $200 dell laptop are not compatible. We need to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly audited by everyone and their mother. The important feature of the network is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it. But not everyone is required to. Trying to promote a system where the history can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach, even with our miniscule 7 tps. Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system To repeat, the very first point in my email reply was: Agree that 7 tps is too low Never was it said that bit Therefore a reply arguing against the low end is nonsense, and the relevant question remains on the table. How high do you want to go - and can Layer 1 bitcoin really scale to get there? It is highly disappointing to see people endorse moar bitcoin volume! with zero thinking behind that besides adoption! Need to actually project what bitcoin looks like at the desired levels, what network resources are required to get to those levels -- including traffic to serve those SPV clients via P2P -- and then work backwards from that to see who can support it, and then work backwards to discern a maximum tps. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 12:03:04PM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote: * Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. With a 20mb cap, miners still have the option of the soft limit. The soft-limit is there miners themselves produce smaller blocks; the soft-limit does not prevent other miners from producing larger blocks. As we're talking about ways that other miners can use 20MB blocks to harm the competition, talking about the soft-limit is irrelevant. Similarly, as security engineers we must plan for the worst case; as we've seen before by your campaigns to raise the soft-limit(1) even at a time when the vast majority of transaction volume was from one user (SatoshiDice) soft-limits are an extremely weak form of control. For the proposes of discussing blocksize increase requirements we can stop talking about the soft-limit. 1) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.0 -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 09344ba165781ee352f93d657c8b098c8e518e6011753e59 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:37 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: The soft-limit is there miners themselves produce smaller blocks; the soft-limit does not prevent other miners from producing larger blocks. I wonder if having a miner flag would be good for the network. Clients for general users and merchants would have a less strict rule than the rule for miners. Miners who don't set their miners flag might get orphaned off the chain. For example, the limits could be setup as follows. Clients: 20MB Miners: 4MB When in miner mode, the client would reject 4MB blocks and wouldn't build on them. The reference client might even track the miner and the non-miner chain tip. Miners would refuse to build on 5MB blocks, but merchants and general users would accept them. This allows the miners to soft fork the limit at some point in the future. If 75% of miners decided to up the limit to 8MB, then all merchants and the general users would accept the new blocks. It could follow the standard soft fork rules. This is a more general version of the system where miners are allowed to vote on the block size (subject to a higher limit). A similar system is where clients track all header trees. Your wallet could warn you that there is an invalid tree that has 75% of the hashing power and you might want to upgrade. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Actually I believe that side chains and off-main-chain transactions will be a critical part for the overall scalability of the network. I was actually trying to make the point that (insert some huge block size here) will be needed to even accommodate the reduced traffic. I believe that it is definitely over 20MB. If it was determined to be 100 MB ten years from now, that wouldn't surprise me. Sent from my overpriced smartphone On May 8, 2015 1:17 PM, Andrew onelinepr...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: This isn't about everyone's coffee. This is about an absolute minimum amount of participation by people who wish to use the network. If our goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure. If even 5% of the world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above 100 tps. And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations) that want to use it. The goals of a global transaction network and everyone must be able to run a full node with their $200 dell laptop are not compatible. We need to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly audited by everyone and their mother. The important feature of the network is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it. But not everyone is required to. Trying to promote a system wher000e the history can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach, even with our miniscule 7 tps. Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system These are good points and got me thinking (but I think you're wrong). If we really want each of the 10 billion people soon using bitcoin once per month, that will require 500MB blocks. That's about 2 TB per month. And if you relay it to 4 peers, it's 10 TB per month. Which I suppose is doable for a home desktop, so you can just run a pruned full node with all transactions from the past month. But how do you sync all those transactions if you've never done this before or it's been a while since you did? I think it currently takes at least 3 hours to fully sync 30 GB of transactions. So 2 TB will take 8 days, then you take a bit more time to sync the days that passed while you were syncing. So that's doable, but at a certain point, like 10 TB per month (still only 5 transactions per month per person), you will need 41 days to sync that month, so you will never catch up. So I think in order to keep the very important property of anyone being able to start clean and verify the thing, then we need to think of bitcoin as a system that does transactions for a large number of users at once in one transaction, and not a system where each person will make a ~monthly transaction on. We need to therefore rely on sidechains, treechains, lightning channels, etc... I'm not a bitcoin wizard and this is just my second post on this mailing list, so I may be missing something. So please someone, correct me if I'm wrong. On 05/07/2015 03:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea. It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability). But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system. It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail. Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure). We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. [...] 1) Agree that 7 tps is too low 2) Where do you want to go? Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? This is hugely unrealistic. 700 tps is 100MB blocks, 14.4 GB/day -- just for a single feed. If you include relaying to multiple nodes, plus serving 500 million SPV clients en grosse, who has the capacity to run such a node? By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network node count is tiny and highly centralized. 3) In RE fee pressure -- Do you see the moral hazard to a software-run system? It is an intentional, human decision to flood the market with supply, thereby altering the economics, forcing fees to remain low in the hopes of achieving adoption. I'm pro-bitcoin and obviously want to see bitcoin adoption - but I don't want to sacrifice every decentralized principle and become a central
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Replace by fee is what I was referencing. End-users interpret the old transaction as expired. Hence the nomenclature. An alternative is a new feature that operates in the reverse of time lock, expiring a transaction after a specific time. But time is a bit unreliable in the blockchain -Raystonn On 8 May 2015 1:41 pm, Mark Friedenbach m...@friedenbach.org wrote: Transactions don't expire. But if the wallet is online, it can periodically choose to release an already created transaction with a higher fee. This requires replace-by-fee to be sufficiently deployed, however. On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Raystonn . rayst...@hotmail.com wrote: I have a proposal for wallets such as yours. How about creating all transactions with an expiration time starting with a low fee, then replacing with new transactions that have a higher fee as time passes. Users can pick the fee curve they desire based on the transaction priority they want to advertise to the network. Users set the priority in the wallet, and the wallet software translates it to a specific fee curve used in the series of expiring transactions. In this manner, transactions are never left hanging for days, and probably not even for hours. -Raystonn On 8 May 2015 1:17 pm, Aaron Voisine vois...@gmail.com wrote: As the author of a popular SPV wallet, I wanted to weigh in, in support of the Gavin's 20Mb block proposal. The best argument I've heard against raising the limit is that we need fee pressure. I agree that fee pressure is the right way to economize on scarce resources. Placing hard limits on block size however is an incredibly disruptive way to go about this, and will severely negatively impact users' experience. When users pay too low a fee, they should: 1) See immediate failure as they do now with fees that fail to propagate. 2) If the fee lower than it should be but not terminal, they should see degraded performance, long delays in confirmation, but eventual success. This will encourage them to pay higher fees in future. The worst of all worlds would be to have transactions propagate, hang in limbo for days, and then fail. This is the most important scenario to avoid. Increasing the 1Mb block size limit I think is the simplest way to avoid this least desirable scenario for the immediate future. We can play around with improved transaction selection for blocks and encourage miners to adopt it to discourage low fees and create fee pressure. These could involve hybrid priority/fee selection so low fee transactions see degraded performance instead of failure. This would be the conservative low risk approach. Aaron Voisine co-founder and CEO breadwallet.com -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase (Raystonn)
Hello, I was reading some of the thread but can't say I read the entire thing. I think that it is realistic to cinsider a nlock sixe of 20MB for any block txn to occur. THis is an enormous amount of data (relatively for a netwkrk) in which the avergage rate of 10tps over 10 miniutes would allow for fewasible transformation of data at this curent point in time. Though I do not see what extra hash information would be stored in the overall ecosystem as we begin to describe what the scripts that are atacrhed tp the blockchain would carry, I'd therefore think that for the remainder of this year that it is possible to have a block chain within 200 - 300 bytes that is more charatereistic of some feasible attempts at attaching nuanced data in order to keep propliifc the blockchain but have these identifiers be integral OPSIg of the the entiore block. THe reasoning behind this has to do with encryption standards that can be added toe a chain such as th DH algoritnm keys that would allow for a higher integrity level withinin the system as it is. Cutrent;y tyh prootocl oomnly controls for the amount of transactions through if TxnOut script and the publin key coming form teh lcoation of the proof-of-work. Form this then I think that a rate of higher than then current standard of 92bytes allows for GPUS ie CUDA to perfirm its standard operations of 1216 flops in rde rto mechanize a new personal identity within the chain that also attaches an encrypted instance of a further categorical variable that we can prsribved to it. I think with the current BIP7 prootclol for transactions there is an area of vulnerability for man-in-the-middle attacks upon request of bitcin to any merchant as is. It would contraidct the security of the bitcoin if it was intereceptefd iand not allowed to reach tthe payment network or if the hash was reveresed in orfr to change the value it had. Therefore the current best fit block size today is between 200 - 300 bytws (depending on how exciteed we get) Thanks for letting me join the conversation I welcomes any vhalleneged and will reply with more research as i figure out what problems are revealed in my current formation of thoughts (sorry for the errors but i am just trying to move forward --- THE DELRERT KEY LITERALLY PREVENTS IT ) _Damian -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Transactions don't expire. But if the wallet is online, it can periodically choose to release an already created transaction with a higher fee. This requires replace-by-fee to be sufficiently deployed, however. On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Raystonn . rayst...@hotmail.com wrote: I have a proposal for wallets such as yours. How about creating all transactions with an expiration time starting with a low fee, then replacing with new transactions that have a higher fee as time passes. Users can pick the fee curve they desire based on the transaction priority they want to advertise to the network. Users set the priority in the wallet, and the wallet software translates it to a specific fee curve used in the series of expiring transactions. In this manner, transactions are never left hanging for days, and probably not even for hours. -Raystonn On 8 May 2015 1:17 pm, Aaron Voisine vois...@gmail.com wrote: As the author of a popular SPV wallet, I wanted to weigh in, in support of the Gavin's 20Mb block proposal. The best argument I've heard against raising the limit is that we need fee pressure. I agree that fee pressure is the right way to economize on scarce resources. Placing hard limits on block size however is an incredibly disruptive way to go about this, and will severely negatively impact users' experience. When users pay too low a fee, they should: 1) See immediate failure as they do now with fees that fail to propagate. 2) If the fee lower than it should be but not terminal, they should see degraded performance, long delays in confirmation, but eventual success. This will encourage them to pay higher fees in future. The worst of all worlds would be to have transactions propagate, hang in limbo for days, and then fail. This is the most important scenario to avoid. Increasing the 1Mb block size limit I think is the simplest way to avoid this least desirable scenario for the immediate future. We can play around with improved transaction selection for blocks and encourage miners to adopt it to discourage low fees and create fee pressure. These could involve hybrid priority/fee selection so low fee transactions see degraded performance instead of failure. This would be the conservative low risk approach. Aaron Voisine co-founder and CEO breadwallet.com -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Replace by fee is the better approach. It will ultimately replace zombie transactions (due to insufficient fee) with potentially much higher fees as the feature takes hold in wallets throughout the network, and fee competition increases. However, this does not fix the problem of low tps. In fact, as blocks fill it could make the problem worse. This feature means more transactions after all. So I would expect huge fee spikes, or a return to zombie transactions if fee caps are implemented by wallets. -Raystonn On 8 May 2015 1:55 pm, Mark Friedenbach m...@friedenbach.org wrote:The problems with that are larger than time being unreliable. It is no longer reorg-safe as transactions can expire in the course of a reorg and any transaction built on the now expired transaction is invalidated.On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Raystonn raystonn@hotmail.com wrote:Replace by fee is what I was referencing. End-users interpret the old transaction as expired. Hence the nomenclature. An alternative is a new feature that operates in the reverse of time lock, expiring a transaction after a specific time. But time is a bit unreliable in the blockchain -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:52PM +0100, Tier Nolan wrote: On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:37 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: The soft-limit is there miners themselves produce smaller blocks; the soft-limit does not prevent other miners from producing larger blocks. I wonder if having a miner flag would be good for the network. Makes it trivial to find miners and DoS attack them - a huge risk to the network as a whole, as well as the miners. Right now pools already get DoSed all the time through their work submission systems; getting DoS attacked via their nodes as well would be a disaster. When in miner mode, the client would reject 4MB blocks and wouldn't build on them. The reference client might even track the miner and the non-miner chain tip. Miners would refuse to build on 5MB blocks, but merchants and general users would accept them. That'd be an excellent way to double-spend merchants, significantly increasing the chance that the double-spend would succeed as you only have to get sufficient hashing power to get the lucky blocks; you don't need enough hashing power to *also* ensure those blocks don't become the longest chain, removing the need to sybil attack your target. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 04bd67400df7577a30e6f509b6bd82633efeabe6395eb65a signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Wednesday 6. May 2015 21.49.52 Peter Todd wrote: I'm not sure if you've seen this, but a good paper on this topic was published recently: The Economics of Bitcoin Transaction Fees The obvious flaw in this paper is that it talks about a block size in todays (trivial) data-flow economy and compares it with the zero-reward situation decades from now. Its comparing two things that will never exist at the same time (unless Bitcoin fails). -- Thomas Zander -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I have a proposal for wallets such as yours. How about creating all transactions with an expiration time starting with a low fee, then replacing with new transactions that have a higher fee as time passes. Users can pick the fee curve they desire based on the transaction priority they want to advertise to the network. Users set the priority in the wallet, and the wallet software translates it to a specific fee curve used in the series of expiring transactions. In this manner, transactions are never left hanging for days, and probably not even for hours. -Raystonn On 8 May 2015 1:17 pm, Aaron Voisine vois...@gmail.com wrote:As the author of a popular SPV wallet, I wanted to weigh in, in support of the Gavins 20Mb block proposal.The best argument Ive heard against raising the limit is that we need fee pressure. I agree that fee pressure is the right way to economize on scarce resources. Placing hard limits on block size however is an incredibly disruptive way to go about this, and will severely negatively impact users experience.When users pay too low a fee, they should:1) See immediate failure as they do now with fees that fail to propagate.2) If the fee lower than it should be but not terminal, they should see degraded performance, long delays in confirmation, but eventual success. This will encourage them to pay higher fees in future.The worst of all worlds would be to have transactions propagate, hang in limbo for days, and then fail. This is the most important scenario to avoid. Increasing the 1Mb block size limit I think is the simplest way to avoid this least desirable scenario for the immediate future.We can play around with improved transaction selection for blocks and encourage miners to adopt it to discourage low fees and create fee pressure. These could involve hybrid priority/fee selection so low fee transactions see degraded performance instead of failure. This would be the conservative low risk approach.Aaron Voisineco-founder and CEObreadwallet.com -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
The problems with that are larger than time being unreliable. It is no longer reorg-safe as transactions can expire in the course of a reorg and any transaction built on the now expired transaction is invalidated. On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Raystonn rayst...@hotmail.com wrote: Replace by fee is what I was referencing. End-users interpret the old transaction as expired. Hence the nomenclature. An alternative is a new feature that operates in the reverse of time lock, expiring a transaction after a specific time. But time is a bit unreliable in the blockchain -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Hey Matt, OK, let's get started However, there hasnt been any discussion on this mailing list in several years as far as I can tell. Probably because this list is not a good place for making progress or reaching decisions. Those are triggered by pull requests (sometimes). If you're wondering why now, that's probably my fault. A few days ago Wladimir posted a release timeline. I observed to Wladimir and Gavin in private that this timeline meant a change to the block size was unlikely to get into 0.11, leaving only 0.12, which would give everyone only a few months to upgrade in order to fork the chain by the end of the winter growth season. That seemed tight. Wladimir did not reply to this email, unfortunately. Perhaps he would like the issue to go away. It won't - if Bitcoin continues on its current growth trends it *will* run out of capacity, almost certainly by some time next year. What we need to see right now is leadership and a plan, that fits in the available time window. Certainly a consensus in this kind of technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious commitment to blocksize increase. I'm afraid I have come to disagree. I no longer believe this community can reach consensus on anything protocol related. Some of these arguments have dragged on for years. Consensus isn't even well defined - consensus of who? Anyone who shows up? And what happens when, inevitably, no consensus is reached? Stasis forever? Long-term incentive compatibility requires that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively consistently full or very nearly full. I disagree. When the money supply eventually dwindles I doubt it will be fee pressure that funds mining, but as that's a long time in the future, it's very hard to predict what might happen. What we see today are transactions enjoying next-block confirmations with nearly zero pressure to include any fee at all (though many do because it makes wallet code simpler). Many do because free transactions are broken - the relay limiter means whether a free transaction actually makes it across the network or not is basically pot luck and there's no way for a wallet to know, short of either trying it or actually receiving every single transaction and repeating the calculations. If free transactions weren't broken for all non-full nodes they'd probably be used a lot more. This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while pretending these systems scale. I have two huge problems with this line of thinking. Firstly, no, the Bitcoin ecosystem is not well funded. Blockstream might be, but significant numbers of users are running programs developed by tiny startups, or volunteers who don't have millions in venture capital to play with. Arm-twisting the ecosystem into developing complicated Rube Goldberg machines in double quick time, just to keep the Bitcoin show on the road, is in fact the opposite of decentralisation - it will effectively exclude anyone who isn't able to raise large amounts of corporate funding from writing code that uses the Bitcoin network. Decentralisation benefits from simplicity, and bigger blocks are (in Gavin's words) the simplest thing that will work. My second problem is the claim that everyone is playing pretend about Bitcoin, except you guys. I would put it another way - I would say those people are building products and getting users, by making reasonable engineering tradeoffs and using systems that work. Yes, one day those systems might have to change. That's the nature of scaling. It's the nature of progress. But not today. Probably not tomorrow either. What I would like to see from Blockstream is a counter-proposal. So far you have made lots of vague comments that we all agree with - yes, decentralisation is good, yes some block size limit must exist, if only because computers are finite machines. What I don't see from you yet is a *specific and credible plan* that fits within the next 12 months and which allows Bitcoin to keep growing. Not some vague handwave like let's all use the Lightning network (which does not exist), or let's do more research (Gavin has done plenty of research), or but what about the risks (Bitcoin is full of risks). A plan, with dates attached, and a strong chance of actually being deployed in time. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 12:59:13PM -0400, Gavin Andresen wrote: Fee dynamics seems to come up over and over again in these discussions, with lots of talk and theorizing. I hope some data on what is happening with fees right now might help, so I wrote another blog post (with graphs, which can't be done in a mailing list post): http://gavinandresen.ninja/the-myth-of-not-full-blocks We don’t need 100% full one megabyte blocks to start to learn about what is likely to happen as transaction volume rises and/or the one megabyte block size limit is raised. Sounds like you're saying we are bumping up against a 1MB limit. However other than the occasional user who has sent a transaction with an extremely low/no fee, what evidence do we have that this is or is not actually impacting meaningful usage form the user's point of view? Do we have evidence as to how users are coping? e.g. do they send time sensitive transactiosn with higher fees? Are people conciously moving low value transactions off the blockchain? Equally, what about the story with companies? You of course are an advisor to Coinbase, and could give us some insight into the type of planning payment processors/wallets are doing. For instance, does Coinbase have any plans to work with other wallet providers/payment processors to aggregate fund transfers between wallet providers - an obvious payment channel application. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0232164c96eaa6bf7cbc3dc61ea055840715b5a81ee8f6be signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
The only answer to this that anyone with a clue should give is it will very, very likely be able to support at least 1MB blocks roughly every 10 minutes on average for the next eleven years, and it seems likely that a block size increase of some form will happen at some point in the next eleven years, anything else is dishonest. Matt, you know better than that. Gavin neither lacks clue nor is he dishonest. He has been working on the assumption that other developers are reasonable, and some kind of compromise solution can be found that everyone can live with. Hence trying to find a middle ground, hence considering and writing articles in response to every single objection raised. Hence asking for suggestions on what to change about the plan, to make it more acceptable. What more do you want, exactly? And I'll ask again. Do you have a *specific, credible alternative*? Because so far I'm not seeing one. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: (1) Blocks are essentially nearing full now. And by full he means that the reliability of the network (from the average user perspective) is about to be impacted in a very negative way Er, to be economically precise, full just means fees are no longer zero. Bitcoin behaves as it always has. It is no longer basically free to dump spam into the blockchain, as it is today. In the short term, blocks are bursty, with some on 1 minute intervals, some with 60 minute intervals. This does not change with larger blocks. (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea. It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability). But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system. It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail. Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure). We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. [...] 1) Agree that 7 tps is too low 2) Where do you want to go? Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? This is hugely unrealistic. 700 tps is 100MB blocks, 14.4 GB/day -- just for a single feed. If you include relaying to multiple nodes, plus serving 500 million SPV clients en grosse, who has the capacity to run such a node? By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network node count is tiny and highly centralized. 3) In RE fee pressure -- Do you see the moral hazard to a software-run system? It is an intentional, human decision to flood the market with supply, thereby altering the economics, forcing fees to remain low in the hopes of achieving adoption. I'm pro-bitcoin and obviously want to see bitcoin adoption - but I don't want to sacrifice every decentralized principle and become a central banker in order to get there. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Instead of raising the block size to another static number like 20MB, can we raise it dynamically? Make the max block size something like: pow(2, nHeight/10) * 1MB; //double every ~2 years -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Just to add to the noise, did you consider linear growth? Unlike exponential growth, it approximates diminishing returns (i.e. tech advances become slower with time). And unlike single step, it will give people time to adapt to new realities. E.g. 2 MB in 2016, 3 MB in 2017 and so on. So in 20 years we'll get to 20 MB which ought to be enough for anybody. But if miners will find 20 MB blocks too overwhelming, they can limit it through soft work, based on actual data. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: More generally, consider the situation we're in now. Gavin is going off pitching this idea to the general public (which, I agree, is an important step in pulling off a hardfork) while people who actually study the issues are left wondering why they're being ignored (ie why is there no consensus-building happening on this list?). This sub-thread threatens to veer off into he-said-she-said. If, instead, there had been an intro on the list as I think we should do the blocksize increase soon, what do people think?, the response could likely have focused much more around creating a specific list of things we should do before we (the technical community) think we are prepared for a blocksize increase. Agreed, but that is water under the bridge at this point. You - rightly - opened the topic here and now we're discussing it. Mike and Gavin are due the benefit of doubt because making a change to a leaderless automaton powered by leaderless open source software is breaking new ground. I don't focus so much on how we got to this point, but rather, where we go from here. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On 05/07/15 11:29, Mike Hearn wrote: Can you please elaborate on what terrible things will happen if we don't increase the block size by winter this year? I was referring to winter next year. 0.12 isn't scheduled until the end of the year, according to Wladimir. I explained where this figure comes from in this article: On a related note, I'd like to agree strongly with Peter Todd that we should get away from doing forks-only-in-releases. We can add code to do a fork and then enable it in 0.11.1 or 0.11.11 if Gavin prefers more 11s. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Any proposal to switch to a new hardcorded value so we have time to *really* figure out later what's next and all implications, is a road to a gigantic issue later when we want to switch to that next. Sure we would have more time to think about, research all implications, simulate, discuss, etc. But the ability then to agree enough on a change to roll it out successfully will be much smaller, because of the economy being built on top of Bitcoin being much larger and the technical specifications of Bitcoin being closer to a complete freeze. What I'm trying to say is that we should look at long term lasting solutions even if it takes more effort and time right now and puts the network into some troubles for a while, because they're short term troubles. (You define troubles, depending on which side you stand at the moment...). I personally believe in adaptive block size mechanisms, because: (i) common sense tells me harcoding is never a solution for a system whose usage is for many aspects unpredictable (ii) we can't rely on human consensus to adapt it (seeing the mess it is already this time). It would have the advantage to place this block size issue entirely as part of the algorithmic contract you agree on when you use Bitcoin, similar to the difficulty adapation or the block reward. Jérémie 2015-05-07 21:37 GMT+02:00 Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net: These statements may even be true, but they're no logical conclusions even if they seem obvious to you. I don't think those claims are strictly true, specially because they involve predictions about what people will do. But if they're true they require some proof or at least some explanation. Thank you for your patience, Jorge. I have written up an explanation of what I think will happen if we run out of capacity: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32 Now I'm going to go eat some dinner :) -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
It seems to me like some (maybe most) of the pressure is actually external from companies that might release something that dramatically increases adoption transaction rates (and that the data on historic rate of adoption slumps is somewhat disconnected from their interests in a quick roll-out)? It seems like the question actually becomes what is our maximum acceptable cost (hardware capex bandwidth power opex) associated with running a full node without hardware acceleration and with hardware acceleration (something which presumably doesn't exist yet)? Are we making the assumption that hardware acceleration for confirmation will become broadly available and that the primary limiter will become anonymous bandwidth? Excuse my ignorance, but I imagine somebody must have already looked at confirmation times vs. block size for various existing hardware platforms (like at least 3 or 4? maybe a minnowboard, old laptop, and modern desktop at least?)? Is there an easy way to setup bitcoind or some other script to test this? (happy to help) Re Moore's law: yeah, some say stuff like 5nm may never happen. We're already using EUV with plasma emitters, immersed reflective optics, and double-patterning... and in storage land switching to helium. Things may slow A LOT over the next couple decades and I'd guess that a quadratic increase (both in storage compute) probably isn't a safe assumption. On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Btc Drak btcd...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Gavin Costin slashdevn...@hotmail.com wrote: Can anyone opposed to this proposal articulate in plain english the worst case scenario(s) if it goes ahead? Some people in the conversation appear to be uncomfortable, perturbed, defensive etc about the proposal …. But I am not seeing specifics on why it is not a feasible plan. See this response: http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg07462.html -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Can anyone opposed to this proposal articulate in plain english the worst case scenario(s) if it goes ahead? Some people in the conversation appear to be uncomfortable, perturbed, defensive etc about the proposal . But I am not seeing specifics on why it is not a feasible plan. From: Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net Date: Friday, 8 May, 2015 2:06 am To: Btc Drak btcd...@gmail.com Cc: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase I think you are rubbing against your own presupposition that people must find and alternative right now. Quite a lot here do not believe there is any urgency, nor that there is an immanent problem that has to be solved before the sky falls in. I have explained why I believe there is some urgency, whereby some urgency I mean, assuming it takes months to implement, merge, test, release and for people to upgrade. But if it makes you happy, imagine that this discussion happens all over again next year and I ask the same question. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y_ __ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/07/2015 09:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network node count is tiny and highly centralized. Again, this assertion requires proof. Simply saying things is not the same as them being true. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVS8QWAAoJECpf2nDq2eYj+/4P/2JXxo2RDAg0ptd9aUYVvzp9 KhL33cdmK8kbKBFOVcOuIrlQRzZn9iydIPC165Y40Y6Wrtgw2PoXctuqdQdXaSZI M3bHuM7mweHyb3xBHNaNHIxfwrMjQQAdOTGO7PZusghDYz2QEj44dhIcNOzO7uTD fXkhzgJfwu0l0Wqn3v/R9amRUWLE5nlM566xJ2sVtlfBMEyzR5L1GwX1lKNhxeO8 qvkgegsF2Usjz9pIUMSGFxSWZQuTSjHbhbh28JaT/wi6DI3pcTV0FPw95IPImqUh rbIqcPh43omXrHKEHV/FB+XMItD3VvR9dxogYaFZLv1EU2gnF2IM0cw5a/oyHr+L C920uEbXrvrMEJw1ftvxQyu6NY5c3/5iVMqz773oQSjOihkZ8P1JvxQnldU6mcoU RaKM13cxgjSkCqJ5R1iIldFQPCLLWUKJDkPEnGlwdLPF/vwhnCt1PZJTB5hqoCgC ab5yBVLpLgo7sbizOeX/R3WGp3NjGXDQC93Af/Vr37uiu1ZT+1P1Ow86hsZTRx6b 4d25tSGg7Tw3Bs/YOhJ9AKtlN092Y8/WBMscQu6MaFt6I/1OMX9OVH+veEj/VjwB L/dxWTRdC0HEKiYv+EuESIRoyTLlCHKBUDBgKbYSMjetg6WW64hYrpxNX7TH20o6 00bWPVV2PcEWuCc230UF =1bK6 -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I have written up an explanation of what I think will happen if we run out of capacity: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32 Looks like a solid description of what would happen. I fail to see how this description wouldn't be applicable also to a 20MB-network in some time in the future, say ~3 years from now, if Bitcoin keeps taking off. If you agree that it will be harder in the future to change the block limit again, and we switch to hardcoded 20MB, then aren't we just going from an immediate relief to a future larger blockage? Now I'm going to go eat some dinner :) -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:43 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: And I'll ask again. Do you have a *specific, credible alternative*? Because so far I'm not seeing one. I think you are rubbing against your own presupposition that people must find and alternative right now. Quite a lot here do not believe there is any urgency, nor that there is an immanent problem that has to be solved before the sky falls in. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I'm presuming that schedule is just an example, as you'd end up with insanely large block sizes in a few years. Absolutely, yes, an increase schedule is an option if people agree on it, and I think the better option, as the current limit too low, but jumping straight to a value big enough for indefinitely is a huge jump. Gave some thought to scaling block size based on transaction fees, but suspect it would end up with miners sending huge fees to themselves with transactions that aren't relayed (so they only are actioned if they make it into a block that miner mines) to make the network allow bigger blocks. Ross On 07/05/2015 19:38, Chris Wardell wrote: Instead of raising the block size to another static number like 20MB, can we raise it dynamically? Make the max block size something like: pow(2, nHeight/10) * 1MB; //double every ~2 years -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
This *is* urgent and needs to be handled right now, and I believe Gavin has the best approach to this. I have heard Gavin's talks on increasing the block size, and the two most persuasive points to me were: (1) Blocks are essentially nearing full now. And by full he means that the reliability of the network (from the average user perspective) is about to be impacted in a very negative way (I believe it was due to the inconsistent time between blocks). I think Gavin said that his simulations showed 400 kB - 600 kB worth of transactions per 10 min (approx 3-4 tps) is where things start to behave poorly for certain classes of transactions. In other words, we're very close to the effective limit in terms of maintaining the current standard of living, and with a year needed to raise the block time this actually is urgent. (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea. It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability). But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system. It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail. Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure). We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. You can argue that side chains and payment channels could alleviate this. But how far off are they? We're going to hit effective 1MB limits long before we can leverage those in a meaningful way. Even if everyone used them, getting a billion people onto the system just can't happen even at 1 transaction per year per person to get into a payment channel or move money between side chains. We get asked all the time by corporate clients about scalability. A limit of 7 tps makes them uncomfortable that they are going to invest all this time into a system that has no chance of handling the economic activity that they expect it handle. We always assure them that 7 tps is not the final answer. Satoshi didn't believe 1 MB blocks were the correct answer. I personally think this is critical to Bitcoin's long term future. And I'm not sure what else Gavin could've done to push this along in a meaninful way. -Alan On 05/07/2015 02:06 PM, Mike Hearn wrote: I think you are rubbing against your own presupposition that people must find and alternative right now. Quite a lot here do not believe there is any urgency, nor that there is an immanent problem that has to be solved before the sky falls in. I have explained why I believe there is some urgency, whereby some urgency I mean, assuming it takes months to implement, merge, test, release and for people to upgrade. But if it makes you happy, imagine that this discussion happens all over again next year and I ask the same question. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:59 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: Fee dynamics seems to come up over and over again in these discussions, with lots of talk and theorizing. I hope some data on what is happening with fees right now might help, so I wrote another blog post (with graphs, which can't be done in a mailing list post): http://gavinandresen.ninja/the-myth-of-not-full-blocks We don’t need 100% full one megabyte blocks to start to learn about what is likely to happen as transaction volume rises and/or the one megabyte block size limit is raised. Ok, the fact that the fee increases the probability of getting included faster already is a good thing, the graphs with the probability of getting included in the next block were less important to me. Although scarce space (beyond what miners chose to limit by themselves) would increase the fee competition, I didn't knew that there is actually some competition happening already. So I guess this diminishes the argument for maintaining the limits longer to observe the results of more scarce space. Still, I think maintaining a lower policy limit it's a good idea, even if we decide not to use it to observe that soon. For example, say we chose the 20 MB consensus limit, we can maintain the policy limit at 1 MB or move it to 2 MB, and slowly moving it up later as needed without requiring everyone to upgrade. Of course, not all miners have to follow the standard policy, but at least it's something. So please take this as a suggestion to improve your proposal. You can argue it like this if we want to maintain the limits after the hardfork or increase them slowly, for observing fee dynamics with more scarce space or for any other reason, those limits can be partially enforced by the standard policy. I mean, I think that could be a reasonable compromise for that concrete line of arguments. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I think you are rubbing against your own presupposition that people must find and alternative right now. Quite a lot here do not believe there is any urgency, nor that there is an immanent problem that has to be solved before the sky falls in. I have explained why I believe there is some urgency, whereby some urgency I mean, assuming it takes months to implement, merge, test, release and for people to upgrade. But if it makes you happy, imagine that this discussion happens all over again next year and I ask the same question. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
These statements may even be true, but they're no logical conclusions even if they seem obvious to you. I don't think those claims are strictly true, specially because they involve predictions about what people will do. But if they're true they require some proof or at least some explanation. Thank you for your patience, Jorge. I have written up an explanation of what I think will happen if we run out of capacity: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32 Now I'm going to go eat some dinner :) -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Can I just add my own support for this - as has been stated elsewhere in this discussion, hard forks are difficult, and risky. The earlier we have a decision, and the earlier the change goes into the code, the easier that is. Even if the decision was the actual block size change is fine to leave until 2020, I'd like to see the code committed ASAP so that every new install, and every upgrade from there on gets the new version. My personal opinion only is that 7 transactions a second is insanely limited even if the main chain does nothing but act as a backbone between other chains and transaction networks. I don't think that's overly controversial. I think 2016 is too early for a 20mb block size, though. I'm inclined to suggest a schedule of expansion, say to 2mb in 2016, 4mb in 2018, 8mb in 2020 and 20mb in 2022 where it stops. The intent would be to provide enough size pressure to motivate scaling work, while not limiting Bitcoin overly. Further, I think this highlights that we need more work on fees. Right now fees and transactions included are fairly naive, but I'd like to see the absolute block size limit as a hard upper bound, with miners imposing soft limits based on a balance cost of storage, number of outputs vs inputs (and therefore impact on the UTXOs), and risk of orphan blocks to determine which transactions are actually worth including in each block. If anyone has numbers on block size vs orphan rate that would be really useful, BTW. Ross On 07/05/2015 19:06, Mike Hearn wrote: I think you are rubbing against your own presupposition that people must find and alternative right now. Quite a lot here do not believe there is any urgency, nor that there is an immanent problem that has to be solved before the sky falls in. I have explained why I believe there is some urgency, whereby some urgency I mean, assuming it takes months to implement, merge, test, release and for people to upgrade. But if it makes you happy, imagine that this discussion happens all over again next year and I ask the same question. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Gavin Costin slashdevn...@hotmail.com wrote: Can anyone opposed to this proposal articulate in plain english the worst case scenario(s) if it goes ahead? Some people in the conversation appear to be uncomfortable, perturbed, defensive etc about the proposal …. But I am not seeing specifics on why it is not a feasible plan. See this response: http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg07462.html -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
The appropriate method of doing any fork, that we seem to have been following for a long time, is to get consensus here and on IRC and on github and *then* go pitch to the general public So your concern is just about the ordering and process of things, and not about the change itself? I have witnessed many arguments in IRC about block sizes over the years. There was another one just a few weeks ago. Pieter left the channel for his own sanity. IRC is not a good medium for arriving at decisions on things - many people can't afford to sit on IRC all day and conversations can be hard to follow. Additionally, they tend to go circular. That said, I don't know if you can draw a line between the ins and outs like that. The general public is watching, commenting and deciding no matter what. Might as well deal with that and debate in a format more accessible to all. If, instead, there had been an intro on the list as I think we should do the blocksize increase soon, what do people think? There have been many such discussions over time. On bitcointalk. On reddit. On IRC. At developer conferences. Gavin already knew what many of the objections would be, which is why he started answering them. But alright. Let's say he should have started a thread. Thanks for starting it for him. Now, can we get this specific list of things we should do before we're prepared? A specific credible alternative to what? Committing to blocksize increases tomorrow? Yes, doing more research into this and developing software around supporting larger block sizes so people feel comfortable doing it in six months. Do you have a specific research suggestion? Gavin has run simulations across the internet with modified full nodes that use 20mb blocks, using real data from the block chain. They seem to suggest it works OK. What software do you have in mind? -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 5:11 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Right now there is this nice warm fuzzy notion that decisions in Bitcoin Core are made by consensus. Controversial changes are avoided. I am trying to show you that this is just marketing. Consensus is arrived when the people who are most active at the time (active in contributing to discussions, code review, giving opinions etc.) agreed to ACK. There are a regular staple of active contributors. Bitcoin development is clearly a meritocracy. The more people participate and contribute the more weight their opinions hold. Nobody can define what these terms even mean. It would be more accurate to say decisions are vetoed by whoever shows up and complains enough, regardless of technical merit. After all, my own getutxo change was merged after a lot of technical debate (and trolling) . then unmerged a day later because it's a shitstorm. I am not sure that is fair, your PR was reverted because someone found a huge exploit in your PR enough to invalidate all your arguments used to get it merged in the first place. So if Gavin showed up and complained a lot about side chains or whatever, what you're saying is, oh that's different. We'd ignore him. But when someone else complains about a change they don't like, that's OK. Heck, I could easily come up with a dozen reasons to object to almost any change, if I felt like it. Would I then be considered not a part of the consensus because that'd be convenient? I don't think it's as simple as that. Objections for the sake of objections, or unsound technical objections are going to be seen for what they are. This is a project with of some of the brightest people in the world in this field. Sure people can be disruptive but their reputation stand the test of time. The consensus system might not be perfect, but it almost feels like you want to declare a state of emergency and suspend all the normal review process for this proposed hard fork. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
Hi Matt, I agree that starting discussion on how to approach this problem is necessary and it's difficult taking positions without details on what is being discussed. A simple hard 20-megabyte increase will likely create perverse incentives, perhaps a method can exist with some safe transition. I think ultimately, the underlying tension with this discussion is about the relative power of miners. Any transition of blocksize increase will increase the influence of miners, and it is about understanding the tradeoffs for each possible approach. On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:02:09PM +, Matt Corallo wrote: * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. If we're just building Bitcoin to work in five years, great, but if we want it all to keep working as subsidy drops significantly, I'd like a better answer than we'll deal with it when we get there or it will happen, all the predictions based on people's behavior today say so (which are hopefully invalid thanks to the previous point). Ideally, I'd love to see some real free pressure already on the network starting to develop when we commit to hardforking in a year. Not just full blocks with some fees because wallets are including far greater fees than they really need to, but software which properly handles fees across the ecosystem, smart fee increases when transactions arent confirming (eg replace-by-fee, which could be limited to increase-in-fees-only for those worried about double-spends). I think the long-term fee incentive structure needs to be significantly more granular. We've all seen miners and pools take the path of least resistance; often they just do whatever the community tells them to blindly. While this status quo can change in the future, I think designing sane defaults is a good path for any possible transition. It seems especially reasonable to maintain fee pressure for normal transactions during a hard-fork transition. It's possible to do so using some kind of soft-cap structure. Building in a default soft-cap of 1 megabyte for some far future scheduled fork would seem like a sane thing to do for bitcoin-core. It seems also viable to be far more aggressive. What's your (and the community's) opinion on some kind of coinbase voting protocol for soft-cap enforcement? It's possible to write in messages to the coinbase for a enforcible soft-cap that orphans out any transaction which violates these rules. It seems safest to have the transition has the first hardforked block be above 1MB, however, the next block default to an enforced 1MB block. If miners agree to go above this, they must vote in their coinbase to do so. There's a separate discussion about this starting on: cae-z3oxnjayluehbu0hdwu5pkrj6fpj7yptgbmq7hkxg3sj...@mail.gmail.com I think defaulting some kind of mechanism on reading the coinbase seems to be a good idea, I think left alone, miners may not do so. That way, it's possible to have your cake and eat it too, fee pressure will still exist, while block sizes can increase (provided it's in the miners' greater interests to do so). The Lightning Network's security model in the long-term may rely on a multi-tier soft-cap, but I'm not sure. If 2nd order systemic miner incentives were not a concern, a system which has an enforced soft-cap and permits breaching that soft-cap with some agreed upon much higher fee would work best. LN works without this, but it seems to be more secure if some kind of miner consensus rule is reached regarding prioritizing behavior of 2nd-layer consensus states. No matter how it's done, certain aspects of the security model of something like Lightning is reliant upon having block-space availability for transactions to enter into the blockchain in a timely manner (since deprecated channel states become valid again after some agreed upon block-time). I think pretty much everyone agrees that the 1MB block cap will eventually be a problem. While people may disagree with when that will be and how it'll play out, I think we're all in agreement that discussion about it is a good idea, especially when it comes to resolving blocking concerns. Starting a discussion on how a hypothetical blocksize increase will occur and the necessary blocking/want-to-have features/tradeoffs seems to be a great way to approach this problem. The needs for Lightning Network may be best optimized by being able to prioritizing a large mass of timeout transactions at once (when a well-connected node stops communicating). -- Joseph Poon -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On 5/7/2015 12:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: In the short term, blocks are bursty, with some on 1 minute intervals, some with 60 minute intervals. This does not change with larger blocks. I'm pretty sure Alan meant that blocks are already filling up after long inter-block intervals. 2) Where do you want to go? Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? Alan was very clear. Right now, he wants to go exactly where Gavin's concrete proposal suggests. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:02:09PM +, Matt Corallo wrote: OK, so lets do that. I've seen a lot of I'm not entirely comfortable with committing to this right now, but think we should eventually, but not much I'd be comfortable with committing to this when I see X. In the interest of ignoring debate and pushing people towards a consensus at all costs, ( ;) ) I'm gonna go ahead and suggest we talk about the second. Personally, there are several things that worry me significantly about committing to a blocksize increase, which I'd like to see resolved before I'd consider supporting a blocksize increase commitment. * Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. I'd expect to see these not only implemented but being used in production (though I dont particularly care about them being all that stable). I'd want to see measurements of how they perform both in production and in the face of high packet loss (eg across the GFW or in the case of small/moderate DoS). In addition, I'd expect to see analysis of how these systems perform in the worst-case, not just packet-loss-wise, but in the face of miners attempting to break the system. It's really important that we remember that we're building security software: it *must* hold up well even in the face of attack. That means we need to figure out how it can be attacked, what the cost/profits of such attacks are, and if the holes can be patched. Just testing the software with simulated loads is insufficient. Also, re: breaking, don't forget that this may not be a malicious act. For instance, someone can send contradictory transactions to different parts of the network simultaneously to prevent mempool consistency - there's no easy way to fix this. There are also cases where miners have different policy than others, e.g. version disagreements, commercial contracts for tx mining, etc. Finally, remember that it's not in miners' incentives in many situations for their blocks to propagate to more than ~30% of the hashing power.(1) Personally, I'm really skeptical that we'll ever find a block propagation latency reduction technique that sucesfully meets all the above criteria without changing the consensus algorithm itself. * How do we ensure miners don't cheat and stop validating blocks fully before building on them? This is a significant moral hazard with larger blocks if fees don't become significant, and can lead to dangerous forks. Also, think of the incentives: Why would a miner ever switch from the longest chain, even if they don't actually have the blocks to back it up? * We need a clear understanding of how we expect new full nodes, pruned or not, to sync up to the blockchain. Obviously 20MB blocks significantly increases the time and data required to sync. Are we planning on simply giving up on full validation and trusting others for copies of UTXO sets? Are we going to rely on UTXO commitments? What happens if the UTXO set size itself increases greatly? * I'd very much like to see someone working on better scaling technology, both in terms of development and in terms of getting traction in the marketplace. I know StrawPay is working on development, though its not obvious to me how far they are from their website, but I dont know of any commitments by large players (either SPV wallets, centralized wallet services, payment processors, or any others) to support such a system (to be fair, its probably too early for such players to commit to anything, since anything doesnt exist in public). A good start would be for those players to commit to the general principles of these systems; if they can't commit explain why. For instance I'd be very interested in knowing if services like Coinbase see legal issues with adopting technologies such as payment channels between hosted wallet providers, payment processors, etc. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they see doing anythign not on-blockchain as a source of legal uncertainty - based on discussions I've had with regulatory types in this space it sounds like there's a reasonable chance protocol details such as requiring that transactions happen on a public blockchain will be baked into regulatory requirements. * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. If we're just building Bitcoin to work in five years, great, but if we want it all to keep working as subsidy drops significantly, I'd like a better answer than we'll deal with it when we get there or it will happen, all the predictions based on people's behavior today say so (which are hopefully invalid thanks to the previous point). Ideally, I'd love to see some real free pressure already on the network starting to develop when we commit to hardforking in a year. Agreed. Not just full blocks with some fees because wallets are including far greater fees
[Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements
OK, so lets do that. I've seen a lot of I'm not entirely comfortable with committing to this right now, but think we should eventually, but not much I'd be comfortable with committing to this when I see X. In the interest of ignoring debate and pushing people towards a consensus at all costs, ( ;) ) I'm gonna go ahead and suggest we talk about the second. Personally, there are several things that worry me significantly about committing to a blocksize increase, which I'd like to see resolved before I'd consider supporting a blocksize increase commitment. * Though there are many proposals floating around which could significantly decrease block propagation latency, none of them are implemented today. I'd expect to see these not only implemented but being used in production (though I dont particularly care about them being all that stable). I'd want to see measurements of how they perform both in production and in the face of high packet loss (eg across the GFW or in the case of small/moderate DoS). In addition, I'd expect to see analysis of how these systems perform in the worst-case, not just packet-loss-wise, but in the face of miners attempting to break the system. * I'd very much like to see someone working on better scaling technology, both in terms of development and in terms of getting traction in the marketplace. I know StrawPay is working on development, though its not obvious to me how far they are from their website, but I dont know of any commitments by large players (either SPV wallets, centralized wallet services, payment processors, or any others) to support such a system (to be fair, its probably too early for such players to commit to anything, since anything doesnt exist in public). * I'd like to see some better conclusions to the discussion around long-term incentives within the system. If we're just building Bitcoin to work in five years, great, but if we want it all to keep working as subsidy drops significantly, I'd like a better answer than we'll deal with it when we get there or it will happen, all the predictions based on people's behavior today say so (which are hopefully invalid thanks to the previous point). Ideally, I'd love to see some real free pressure already on the network starting to develop when we commit to hardforking in a year. Not just full blocks with some fees because wallets are including far greater fees than they really need to, but software which properly handles fees across the ecosystem, smart fee increases when transactions arent confirming (eg replace-by-fee, which could be limited to increase-in-fees-only for those worried about double-spends). I probably forgot one or two and certainly dont want to back myself into a corner on committing to something here, but those are a few things I see today as big blockers on larger blocks. Luckily, people have been making progress on building the software needed in all of the above for a while now, but I think they're all very, very immature today. On 05/07/15 19:13, Jeff Garzik wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me mailto:bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: -snip- If, instead, there had been an intro on the list as I think we should do the blocksize increase soon, what do people think?, the response could likely have focused much more around creating a specific list of things we should do before we (the technical community) think we are prepared for a blocksize increase. Agreed, but that is water under the bridge at this point. You - rightly - opened the topic here and now we're discussing it. Mike and Gavin are due the benefit of doubt because making a change to a leaderless automaton powered by leaderless open source software is breaking new ground. I don't focus so much on how we got to this point, but rather, where we go from here. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I am more fazed by PR 5288 and PR 5925 not getting merged in, than by this thread. So, casting my ballot in favor of the block size increase. Clearly, we're still rehearsing proper discourse, and that ain't gonna get fixed here and now. On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:29 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: On 05/07/15 19:34, Mike Hearn wrote: The appropriate method of doing any fork, that we seem to have been following for a long time, is to get consensus here and on IRC and on github and *then* go pitch to the general public So your concern is just about the ordering and process of things, and not about the change itself? No, I'm very concerned about both. I have witnessed many arguments in IRC about block sizes over the years. There was another one just a few weeks ago. Pieter left the channel for his own sanity. IRC is not a good medium for arriving at decisions on things - many people can't afford to sit on IRC all day and conversations can be hard to follow. Additionally, they tend to go circular. I agree, thats why this mailing list was created in the first place (well, also because bitcointalk is too full of spam, but close enought :)) That said, I don't know if you can draw a line between the ins and outs like that. The general public is watching, commenting and deciding no matter what. Might as well deal with that and debate in a format more accessible to all. Its true, just like its true the general public can opt to run any version of software they want. That said, the greater software development community has to update /all/ the software across the entire ecosystem, and thus provide what amounts to a strong recommendation of which course to take. Additionally, though there are issues (eg if there was a push to remove the total coin limit) which are purely political, and thus which should be up to the greater public to decide, the blocksize increase is not that. It is intricately tied to Bitcoin's delicate incentive structure, which many of the development community are far more farmiliar with than the general Bitcoin public. If there were a listserv that was comprised primarily of people on #bitcoin-wizards, I might have suggested a discussion there, first, but there isnt (as far as I know?). If, instead, there had been an intro on the list as I think we should do the blocksize increase soon, what do people think? There have been many such discussions over time. On bitcointalk. On reddit. On IRC. At developer conferences. Gavin already knew what many of the objections would be, which is why he started answering them. But alright. Let's say he should have started a thread. Thanks for starting it for him. Now, can we get this specific list of things we should do before we're prepared? YesI'm gonna split the topic since this is already far off course for that :). A specific credible alternative to what? Committing to blocksize increases tomorrow? Yes, doing more research into this and developing software around supporting larger block sizes so people feel comfortable doing it in six months. Do you have a specific research suggestion? Gavin has run simulations across the internet with modified full nodes that use 20mb blocks, using real data from the block chain. They seem to suggest it works OK. What software do you have in mind? Let me answer that in a new thread :). -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Having observed the customer support nightmare it tends to cause for a small exchange service when 100% full blocks happen, I've been thinking that the limit really should be dynamic and respond to demand and the amount of fees offered. It just doesn't feel right when it takes ages to burn through the backlog when 100% full is hit for a while. So, while pondering this, I got an idea that I think has a chance of working that I can't remember seeing suggested anywhere. How about basing the maximum valid size for a block on the total bitcoin days destroyed in that block? That should still stop transaction spam but naturally expand the block size when there's a backlog of real transactions. It'd also provide for an indirect mechanism for increasing the maximum block size based on fees if there's a lot of fees but little bitcoin days destroyed. In such a situation there'd be incentive to pay someone to spend an older txout to expand the maximum. I realize this is a rather half baked idea, but it seems worth considering. - Joel On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:31 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: This *is* urgent and needs to be handled right now, and I believe Gavin has the best approach to this. I have heard Gavin's talks on increasing the block size, and the two most persuasive points to me were: (1) Blocks are essentially nearing full now. And by full he means that the reliability of the network (from the average user perspective) is about to be impacted in a very negative way (I believe it was due to the inconsistent time between blocks). I think Gavin said that his simulations showed 400 kB - 600 kB worth of transactions per 10 min (approx 3-4 tps) is where things start to behave poorly for certain classes of transactions. In other words, we're very close to the effective limit in terms of maintaining the current standard of living, and with a year needed to raise the block time this actually is urgent. (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea. It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability). But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system. It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur. If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail. Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure). We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. You can argue that side chains and payment channels could alleviate this. But how far off are they? We're going to hit effective 1MB limits long before we can leverage those in a meaningful way. Even if everyone used them, getting a billion people onto the system just can't happen even at 1 transaction per year per person to get into a payment channel or move money between side chains. We get asked all the time by corporate clients about scalability. A limit of 7 tps makes them uncomfortable that they are going to invest all this time into a system that has no chance of handling the economic activity that they expect it handle. We always assure them that 7 tps is not the final answer. Satoshi didn't believe 1 MB blocks were the correct answer. I personally think this is critical to Bitcoin's long term future. And I'm not sure what else Gavin could've done to push this along in a meaninful way. -Alan On 05/07/2015 02:06 PM, Mike Hearn wrote: I think you are rubbing against your own presupposition that people must find and alternative right now. Quite a lot here do not believe there is any urgency, nor that there is an immanent problem that has to be solved before the sky falls in. I have explained why I believe there is some urgency, whereby some urgency I mean, assuming it takes months to implement, merge, test, release and for people to upgrade. But if it makes you happy, imagine that this discussion happens all over again next year and I ask the same question. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight.http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing listBitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.nethttps://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Can you please elaborate on what terrible things will happen if we don't increase the block size by winter this year? I was referring to winter next year. 0.12 isn't scheduled until the end of the year, according to Wladimir. I explained where this figure comes from in this article: https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-disorder-35733bab760d It's a fairly simple estimate based on previous growth patterns. Because I love wild guesses and mine is that full 1 MB blocks will not happen until June 2017. OK, it could be. But do you think this debate will play out significantly differently if you are right, I am wrong, and we have this discussion next summer instead? Because in several years of watching these debates, I haven't seen much change in them. We've successfully reached consensus for several softfork proposals already. Are you sure about that? What if Gavin popped up right now and said he disagreed with every current proposal, he disagreed with side chains too, and there would be no consensus on any of them until the block size limit was raised. Would you say, oh, OK, guess that's it then. There's no consensus so might as well scrap all those proposals, as they'll never happen anyway. Bye bye side chains whitepaper. I just hope that by What we need to see right now is leadership you don't mean something like when Gaving and Mike agree it's enough to deploy a hardfork when you go from vague to concrete. No. What I meant is that someone (theoretically Wladimir) needs to make a clear decision. If that decision is Bitcoin Core will wait and watch the fireworks when blocks get full, that would be showing leadership . albeit I believe in the wrong direction. It would, however, let people know what's what and let them start to make longer term plans. This dillydallying around is an issue - people just make vague points that can't really be disagreed with (more nodes would be nice, smaller pools would also be nice etc), and nothing gets done. no bitcoin long term it's broken long term but that's far away in the future so let's just worry about the present. I never said Bitcoin is broken in the long term. Far from it - I laid out my ideas for what will happen when the block subsidy dwindles years ago. But yes, it's hard for me to care overly much about what happens 30 years from now, for the same reason you probably care more about what happens tomorrow than what happens after you are dead. The further into the future you try and plan, the less likely your plans are to survive unscathed. What you want to avoid at all cost (the block size actually being used), I see as the best opportunity we have to look into the future. I think I see one of the causes of disagreement now. I will write more on the topic of what will happen if we hit the block size limit soon, maybe this evening. I have some other tasks to do first. Regardless, I don't believe we will get any useful data out of such an event. I've seen distributed systems run out of capacity before. What will happen instead is technological failure followed by rapid user abandonment that pushes traffic back below the pressure threshold and those users will most likely not come back any time soon. Ok, this is my plan: we wait 12 months, hope that your estimations are correct (in case that my guess was better than yours, we keep waiting until June 2017) and start having full blocks and people having to wait 2 blocks for their transactions to be confirmed some times. I disagree that'd be the outcome, but good, this is progress. Now we need to hear something like that from Wladimir, or whoever has the final say around here. With respect to the fee market: I think it's fairer to say Gavin wants a market to exist, and he also wants supply to be plentiful. 20mb limit doesn't actually mean every block will be 20mb the day after, no more than they're all 1mb today. Miners may discover that if they go beyond 5mb they have too many orphans and then propagation speed will have to be optimised to break through the next bottleneck. Scaling is always about finding the next bottleneck and removing it, ideally, before you hit it. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:29 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: I was referring to winter next year. 0.12 isn't scheduled until the end of the year, according to Wladimir. I explained where this figure comes from in this article: https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-disorder-35733bab760d It's a fairly simple estimate based on previous growth patterns. Ok, thanks. We've successfully reached consensus for several softfork proposals already. Are you sure about that? Yes, Peter Todd gave more details. What if Gavin popped up right now and said he disagreed with every current proposal, he disagreed with side chains too, and there would be no consensus on any of them until the block size limit was raised. Would you say, oh, OK, guess that's it then. There's no consensus so might as well scrap all those proposals, as they'll never happen anyway. Bye bye side chains whitepaper. Well, yes, it is true that universally uncontroversial (which is what I think the requirement should be for hard forks) is a vague qualifier that's not formally defined anywhere. I guess we should only consider rational arguments. You cannot just nack something without further explanation. If his explanation was I will change my mind after we increase block size, I guess the community should say then we will just ignore your nack because it makes no sense. In the same way, when people use fallacies (purposely or not) we must expose that and say this fallacy doesn't count as an argument. But yeah, it would probably be good to define better what constitutes a sensible objection or something. That doesn't seem simple though. I just hope that by What we need to see right now is leadership you don't mean something like when Gaving and Mike agree it's enough to deploy a hardfork when you go from vague to concrete. No. What I meant is that someone (theoretically Wladimir) needs to make a clear decision. If that decision is Bitcoin Core will wait and watch the fireworks when blocks get full, that would be showing leadership . albeit I believe in the wrong direction. It would, however, let people know what's what and let them start to make longer term plans. This dillydallying around is an issue - people just make vague points that can't really be disagreed with (more nodes would be nice, smaller pools would also be nice etc), and nothing gets done. Well, there's two different things here. One thing is the Bitcoin core project where you could argue that the 5 committers decide (I don't know why Wladimir would have any more authority than the others). But what the bitcoin network itself does it's very different because unlike the bitcoin core software project, the Bitcoin network is decentralized. If the people with commit access go nuts and decide something that's clearly stupid or evil, people can just fork the project because it is free software. You cannot be forced to use specific features of free software, you can always remove them and recompile, that's the whole point. So, no, there's no authority to decide on hardforks and that's why I think that only clearly uncontroversial things can get through as hardforks. What you want to avoid at all cost (the block size actually being used), I see as the best opportunity we have to look into the future. I think I see one of the causes of disagreement now. I will write more on the topic of what will happen if we hit the block size limit soon, maybe this evening. I have some other tasks to do first. Regardless, I don't believe we will get any useful data out of such an event. I've seen distributed systems run out of capacity before. What will happen instead is technological failure followed by rapid user abandonment that pushes traffic back below the pressure threshold and those users will most likely not come back any time soon. Ok, so in simple terms, you expect people to have to pay enormous fees and/or wait thousands of blocks for their transactions to get included in the chain. Is that correct? Ok, this is my plan: we wait 12 months, hope that your estimations are correct (in case that my guess was better than yours, we keep waiting until June 2017) and start having full blocks and people having to wait 2 blocks for their transactions to be confirmed some times. I disagree that'd be the outcome, but good, this is progress. Now we need to hear something like that from Wladimir, or whoever has the final say around here. As said above there's no authority to decide on what Bitcoin the p2p network does. Again, that's the whole point. But, yes, I agree that both sides understanding each other better is progress. With respect to the fee market: I think it's fairer to say Gavin wants a market to exist, and he also wants supply to be plentiful. 20mb limit doesn't actually mean every block will be 20mb the day after, no more than they're all 1mb today. Miners may discover that if they go beyond 5mb
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 11:25:04AM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote: Certainly a consensus in this kind of technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious commitment to blocksize increase. I'm afraid I have come to disagree. I no longer believe this community can reach consensus on anything protocol related. Some of these arguments have dragged on for years. Consensus isn't even well defined - consensus of who? Anyone who shows up? And what happens when, inevitably, no consensus is reached? Stasis forever? Care to be specific? We've made lots of protocol related changes, as well as non-consensus policy changes, often in quite short timeframes, and with little drama. For instance BIP66 adopting is progressing smoothly, and itself was very quickly developed as part of a broader response to a serious OpenSSL flaw. My own BIP65 is getting wide consensus with little drama and good peer review, and that's happening even without as much attention paid to it from myself as I should have been giving it. The BIP62 malleability softfork is going more slowly, but that's because peer review is finding issues and fixing them - something to be expected in an environment where we simply must be cautious. As for the v0.11 release, it will have pruning, perhaps the biggest change to the way Bitcoin Core works that we've ever made. Equally it's notable how many people collaborated on the implementation of pruning, again with little drama. Sure, some stuff has been hard to get consensus on. But those things carry high risks, and involve code and practices known to be dangerous. In most cases we've found out the lack of consensus was spot on, and controversial changes turn out later to have severe security vulnerabilities. I read that as a sign that the peer review and consensus building process works just fine. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0af0c4ba9d91c00d48c4493899d7235fd819ac76f16d148d signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I'm mainly just an observer on this. I mostly agree with Pieter. Also, I think the main reason why people like Gavin and Mike Hearn are trying to rush this through is because they have some kind of apps that depend on zero conf instant transactions, so this would of course require more traffic on the blockchain. I think people like Gavin or Mike should state clearly what kind of (rigorous) system for instant transactions is satisfactory for use in their applications. Be it lightning or something similar, what is good enough? And no zero conf is not a real secure system. Then once we know what is good enough for them (and everyone else), we can implement it as a soft fork into the protocol, and it's a win win situation for both sides (we can also benefit from all the new users people like Mike are trying bring in). On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Jorge Timón jti...@jtimon.cc wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: I observed to Wladimir and Gavin in private that this timeline meant a change to the block size was unlikely to get into 0.11, leaving only 0.12, which would give everyone only a few months to upgrade in order to fork the chain by the end of the winter growth season. That seemed tight. Can you please elaborate on what terrible things will happen if we don't increase the block size by winter this year? I assume that you are expecting full blocks by then, have you used any statistical technique to come up with that date or is it just your guess? Because I love wild guesses and mine is that full 1 MB blocks will not happen until June 2017. What we need to see right now is leadership and a plan, that fits in the available time window. Certainly a consensus in this kind of technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious commitment to blocksize increase. I'm afraid I have come to disagree. I no longer believe this community can reach consensus on anything protocol related. Some of these arguments have dragged on for years. Consensus isn't even well defined - consensus of who? Anyone who shows up? And what happens when, inevitably, no consensus is reached? Stasis forever? We've successfully reached consensus for several softfork proposals already. I agree with others that hardfork need to be uncontroversial and there should be consensus about them. If you have other ideas for the criteria for hardfork deployment all I'm ears. I just hope that by What we need to see right now is leadership you don't mean something like when Gaving and Mike agree it's enough to deploy a hardfork when you go from vague to concrete. Long-term incentive compatibility requires that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively consistently full or very nearly full. I disagree. When the money supply eventually dwindles I doubt it will be fee pressure that funds mining, but as that's a long time in the future, it's very hard to predict what might happen. Oh, so your answer to bitcoin will eventually need to live on fees and we would like to know more about how it will look like then it's no bitcoin long term it's broken long term but that's far away in the future so let's just worry about the present. I agree that it's hard to predict that future, but having some competition for block space would actually help us get more data on a similar situation to be able to predict that future better. What you want to avoid at all cost (the block size actually being used), I see as the best opportunity we have to look into the future. What we see today are transactions enjoying next-block confirmations with nearly zero pressure to include any fee at all (though many do because it makes wallet code simpler). Many do because free transactions are broken - the relay limiter means whether a free transaction actually makes it across the network or not is basically pot luck and there's no way for a wallet to know, short of either trying it or actually receiving every single transaction and repeating the calculations. If free transactions weren't broken for all non-full nodes they'd probably be used a lot more. Free transactions are a gift from miners that run an altruistic policy. That's great but we shouldn't rely on them for the future. They will likely disappear at some point and that's ok. In any case, he's not complaining about the lack of free transactions, more like the opposite. He is saying that's very easy to get free transactions in the next block and blocks aren't full so there's no incentive to include fees to compete for the space. We can talk a lot about a fee market and build a theoretically perfect fee estimator but we won't actually have a fee market until there's some competition for space. Nobody will pay for space that's abundant just like people don't pay for the air they breath. What I don't see from you yet is a specific and
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On 5/7/2015 7:09 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: G proposed 20MB blocks, AFAIK - 140 tps A proposed 100MB blocks - 700 tps For ref, Paypal is around 115 tps VISA is around 2000 tps (perhaps 4000 tps peak) I ask again: where do we want to go? This is the existential question behind block size. Are we trying to build a system that can handle Paypal volumes? VISA volumes? It's not a snarky or sarcastic question: Are we building a system to handle all the world's coffees? Is bitcoin's main chain and network - Layer 1 - going to receive direct connections from 500m mobile phones, broadcasting transactions? We must answer these questions to inform the change being discussed today, in order to decide what makes the most sense as a new limit. Any responsible project of this magnitude must have a better story than zomg 1MB, therefore I picked 20MB out of a hat Must be able to answer /why/ the new limit was picked. As G notes, changing the block size is simply kicking the can down the road: http://gavinandresen.ninja/it-must-be-done-but-is-not-a-panacea Necessarily one must ask, today, what happens when we get to the end of that newly paved road. Accepting that outcomes are less knowable further into the future is not the same as failing to consider the future at all. A responsible project can't have a movie-plot roadmap. It needs to give weight to multiple possible future outcomes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree One way or another, the challenge is to decide what to do next. Beyond that, it's future decisions all the way down. Alan argues that 7 tps is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur, and too low to be the final solution, even with higher layers. I agree. I also agree with you, that we don't really know how to accomplish 700tps right now. What we do know is if we want to bump the limit in the short term, we ought to start now, and until there's a better alternative root to the decision tree, it just might be time to get moving. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:40 PM, Tom Harding t...@thinlink.com wrote: On 5/7/2015 12:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: 2) Where do you want to go? Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? Alan was very clear. Right now, he wants to go exactly where Gavin's concrete proposal suggests. G proposed 20MB blocks, AFAIK - 140 tps A proposed 100MB blocks - 700 tps For ref, Paypal is around 115 tps VISA is around 2000 tps (perhaps 4000 tps peak) I ask again: where do we want to go? This is the existential question behind block size. Are we trying to build a system that can handle Paypal volumes? VISA volumes? It's not a snarky or sarcastic question: Are we building a system to handle all the world's coffees? Is bitcoin's main chain and network - Layer 1 - going to receive direct connections from 500m mobile phones, broadcasting transactions? We must answer these questions to inform the change being discussed today, in order to decide what makes the most sense as a new limit. Any responsible project of this magnitude must have a better story than zomg 1MB, therefore I picked 20MB out of a hat Must be able to answer /why/ the new limit was picked. As G notes, changing the block size is simply kicking the can down the road: http://gavinandresen.ninja/it-must-be-done-but-is-not-a-panacea Necessarily one must ask, today, what happens when we get to the end of that newly paved road. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 03:31:46PM -0400, Alan Reiner wrote: We get asked all the time by corporate clients about scalability. A limit of 7 tps makes them uncomfortable that they are going to invest all this time into a system that has no chance of handling the economic activity that they expect it handle. We always assure them that 7 tps is not the final answer. Your corporate clients, *why* do they want to use Bitcoin and what for exactly? -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 054c9d9ae1099ef8bc0bc9b76fef5e03f7edaff66fd817d8 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On 5/7/2015 6:40 AM, Jorge Timón wrote: Known: There's a major problem looming for miners at the next block reward halving. Many are already in a bad place and without meaningful fees then sans a 2x increase in the USD:BTC ratio then many will simply have to leave the network, increasing centralisation risks. There seems to be a fairly pervasive assumption that the 300-ish MW of power that they currently use is going to pay for itself (ignoring capital and other operating costs). I take this as an argument for increasing fee competition and thus, against increasing the block size. That doesn't follow. Supposing average fees per transaction decrease with block size, total fees / block reach an optimum somewhere. While the optimum might be at infinity, it's certainly not at zero, and it's not at all obvious that the optimum is at a block size lower than 1MB. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
I have a lot more written down, a WIP; here are the highlights. - The 1MB limit is an ancient anti-spam limit, and needs to go. - The 1MB limit is economically entrenched at this point, and cannot be removed at a whim. - This is a major change to the economics of a $3.2B system. This change picks winners and losers. There is attendant moral hazard. - The core dev team is not and should not be an FOMC. - The bar for major economic change to a $3.2B system should necessarily be high. In the more boring world of investments, this would accompanied by Due Diligence including but not limited to projections for success, failure scenarios, upside risks and downside risks. Projections and fact-based simulations. - There are significant disruption risks on the pro (change it) and con (keep 1MB) sides of the debate. - People are privately lobbying Gavin for this. That is the wrong way to go. I have pushed for a more public debate, and public endorsements (or condemnations) from major miners, merchants, payment processors, stackholders, ... It is unfair to criticize Gavin to doing this. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Maybe you dislike that idea. It's so centralised. So let's say Gavin commits his patch, because his authority is equal to all other committers. Someone else rolls it back. Gavin sets up a cron job to keep committing the patch. Game over. You cannot have committers fighting over what goes in and what doesn't. That's madness. There must be a single decision maker for any given codebase. Hmm, git repositories don't quite work like that. Instead, you should imagine everyone having a local copy of the git repository. Each developer synchronizes their git repository with other developers. They merge changes from specific remote branches that they have received. Each developer has their own branch and each developer is the single decision maker for the artifact that they compile. - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507 -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 04:05:41PM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote: Peter: your hypocrisy really is bottomless, isn't it? You constantly claim to be a Righteous Defender of Privacy, but don't even hesitate before publishing hacked private emails when it suits you. Satoshi's hacker had no illusions about your horrible personality, which is why he forwarded that email to you specifically. He knew you'd use it. You should reflect on that fact. It says nothing good about you at all. As you know I was forwarded that email first, and because I *do* respect your privacy I consulting with you via private IRC chat first, and as you wished I didn't publish it. The hacker presumably gave up waiting for me to do so and published it themselves seven months ago; to make that clear I linked the source(1) of the email in my message. Those emails simply are no longer private. Frankly personal attacks like this - your hypocrisy really is bottomless, isn't it?, Satoshi's hacker had no illusions about your horrible personality - simply don't belong on this mailing list and I think we would all appreciate an apology. 1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2g9c0j/satoshi_email_leak/ -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 12a3e40d5ee5c7fc2fb8367b720a9d499468ceb25366c1f3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Dave Hudson d...@hashingit.com wrote: Known: There has been a steady trend towards the mean block size getting larger. See https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=allshowDataPoints=falsedaysAverageString=7show_header=truescale=0address= Looking at this graph and in retrospective, we shouldn't have removed the standard policy limit without observing the supposedly disastrous effects of hitting the limit first. Removing the standard limit would have been trivial (bdb issues aside) at any point after seeing the effects. Known: If we reach the point where all blocks are 1M bytes then there's a major problem in terms of transaction confirmation. I published an analysis of the impact of different mean block sizes against confirmation times: http://hashingit.com/analysis/34-bitcoin-traffic-bulletin. The current 35% to 45% mean block size doesn't have a huge impact on transaction confirmations (assuming equal fees for all) but once we're up at 80% then things start to get unpleasant. Instead of 50% of first confirmations taking about 7 minutes they instead take nearer to 19 minutes. Well, this is only for first confirmations of free transaction. A higher fee should increase your probabilities, but if you're sending free transactions you may not care about them taking longer to be included. Known: There are currently a reasonably large number of zero-fee transactions getting relayed and mined. If things start to slow down then there will be a huge incentive to delay them (or drop them altogether). Well, maybe instant and free it's not a honest form of bitcoin marketing and it just has to disappear. Maybe we just need to start being more honest about pow being good for processing micro-transactions: it is not. Hopefully lightning will be good for that. Free and fast in-chain transactions is something temporary that we know will eventually disappear. If people think it would be a adoption disaster that it happens soon, then they could also detail an alternative plan to roll that out instead of letting it happen. But if the plan is to delay it forever...then I'm absolutely against. Known: There's a major problem looming for miners at the next block reward halving. Many are already in a bad place and without meaningful fees then sans a 2x increase in the USD:BTC ratio then many will simply have to leave the network, increasing centralisation risks. There seems to be a fairly pervasive assumption that the 300-ish MW of power that they currently use is going to pay for itself (ignoring capital and other operating costs). I take this as an argument for increasing fee competition and thus, against increasing the block size. Known: the orphan rate is still pretty-high even with everyone's fast connections. If we assume that 20M byte blocks become possible then that's likely to increase. Unknown: What are the security implications for larger blocks (this one (at least) can be simulated though)? For example, could large blocks with huge numbers of trivial transactions be used to put other validators at a disadvantage in a variant of a selfish mining attack? I've seen objections that such bad actors could be blacklisted in the future but it's not clear to me how. A private mining pool can trivially be made to appear like 100 pools of 1% of the size without significantly affecting the economics of running that private mine. No blacklisting, please, that's centralized. In any case, a related known: bigger blocks give competitive advantage to bigger miners. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
If his explanation was I will change my mind after we increase block size, I guess the community should say then we will just ignore your nack because it makes no sense. Oh good! We can just kick anyone out of the consensus process if we think they make no sense. I guess that means me and Gavin can remove everyone else from the developer consensus, because we think trying to stop Bitcoin growing makes no sense. Do you see the problem with this whole notion? It cannot possibly work. Whenever you try and make the idea of developer consensus work, what you end up with is I believe in consensus as long as it goes my way. Which is worthless. One thing is the Bitcoin core project where you could argue that the 5 committers decide (I don't know why Wladimir would have any more authority than the others). Because he is formally the maintainer. Maybe you dislike that idea. It's so centralised. So let's say Gavin commits his patch, because his authority is equal to all other committers. Someone else rolls it back. Gavin sets up a cron job to keep committing the patch. Game over. You cannot have committers fighting over what goes in and what doesn't. That's madness. There must be a single decision maker for any given codebase. Ok, so in simple terms, you expect people to have to pay enormous fees and/or wait thousands of blocks for their transactions to get included in the chain. Is that correct? No. I'll write an article like the others, it's better than email for more complicated discourse. As others have said, if the answer is forever, adoption is always the most important thing then we will end up with an improved version of Visa. This appears to be another one of those fundamental areas of disagreement. I believe there is no chance of Bitcoin ending up like Visa, even if it is wildly successful. I did the calculations years ago that show that won't happen: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability Decentralisation is a spectrum and Bitcoin will move around on that spectrum over time. But claiming we have to pick between 1mb blocks and Bitcoin = VISA is silly. Peter: your hypocrisy really is bottomless, isn't it? You constantly claim to be a Righteous Defender of Privacy, but don't even hesitate before publishing hacked private emails when it suits you. Satoshi's hacker had no illusions about your horrible personality, which is why he forwarded that email to you specifically. He knew you'd use it. You should reflect on that fact. It says nothing good about you at all. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On 05/07/15 19:34, Mike Hearn wrote: The appropriate method of doing any fork, that we seem to have been following for a long time, is to get consensus here and on IRC and on github and *then* go pitch to the general public So your concern is just about the ordering and process of things, and not about the change itself? No, I'm very concerned about both. I have witnessed many arguments in IRC about block sizes over the years. There was another one just a few weeks ago. Pieter left the channel for his own sanity. IRC is not a good medium for arriving at decisions on things - many people can't afford to sit on IRC all day and conversations can be hard to follow. Additionally, they tend to go circular. I agree, thats why this mailing list was created in the first place (well, also because bitcointalk is too full of spam, but close enought :)) That said, I don't know if you can draw a line between the ins and outs like that. The general public is watching, commenting and deciding no matter what. Might as well deal with that and debate in a format more accessible to all. Its true, just like its true the general public can opt to run any version of software they want. That said, the greater software development community has to update /all/ the software across the entire ecosystem, and thus provide what amounts to a strong recommendation of which course to take. Additionally, though there are issues (eg if there was a push to remove the total coin limit) which are purely political, and thus which should be up to the greater public to decide, the blocksize increase is not that. It is intricately tied to Bitcoin's delicate incentive structure, which many of the development community are far more farmiliar with than the general Bitcoin public. If there were a listserv that was comprised primarily of people on #bitcoin-wizards, I might have suggested a discussion there, first, but there isnt (as far as I know?). If, instead, there had been an intro on the list as I think we should do the blocksize increase soon, what do people think? There have been many such discussions over time. On bitcointalk. On reddit. On IRC. At developer conferences. Gavin already knew what many of the objections would be, which is why he started answering them. But alright. Let's say he should have started a thread. Thanks for starting it for him. Now, can we get this specific list of things we should do before we're prepared? YesI'm gonna split the topic since this is already far off course for that :). A specific credible alternative to what? Committing to blocksize increases tomorrow? Yes, doing more research into this and developing software around supporting larger block sizes so people feel comfortable doing it in six months. Do you have a specific research suggestion? Gavin has run simulations across the internet with modified full nodes that use 20mb blocks, using real data from the block chain. They seem to suggest it works OK. What software do you have in mind? Let me answer that in a new thread :). -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
That strikes me as a dangerous path forward. I don't actually think there is anything wrong with this: everybody eventually gets tired of arguing angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, and we're left with the status quo What gives Bitcoin value aren't its technical merits but the fact that people believe in it. The biggest risk here isn't that 20MB blocks will be bad or that 1MB blocks will be bad, but that by forcing a hard fork that isn't nearly universally agreed upon, we will be damaging that belief. If I strongly believed some hard fork would be better for Bitcoin, say permanent inflation of 1% a year to fund mining, and I managed to convince 80% of users, miners, businesses and developers to go along with me, I would still vote against doing it. Because that's not nearly universal agreement, and it changes what people chose to believe in without their consent. Forks should be hard, very hard. And both sides should recognize that belief in the value of Bitcoin might be a fragile thing. I'd argue that if we didn't force through a 20MB fork now, and we ran into major network difficulties a year from now and had no other technical solutions, that maybe we would get nearly universal agreement, and the businesses and users that were driven away by the unusable system would be a short term loss in value considerably smaller than the impairment we risk by forcing a change. On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: For reference: the blog post that (re)-started this debate, and which links to individual issues, is here: http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks In it, I asked people to email me objections I might have missed. I would still appreciate it if people do that; it is impossible to keep up with this mailing list, /r/bitcoin posts and comments, and #bitcoin-wizards and also have time to respond thoughtfully to the objections raised. I would very much like to find some concrete course of action that we can come to consensus on. Some compromise so we can tell entrepreneurs THIS is how much transaction volume the main Bitcoin blockchain will be able to support over the next eleven years. I've been pretty clear on what I think is a reasonable compromise (a one-time increase scheduled for early next year), and I have tried to explain why I think it it is the right set of tradeoffs. There ARE tradeoffs here, and the hard question is what process do we use to decide those tradeoffs? How do we come to consensus? Is it worth my time to spend hours responding thoughtfully to every new objection raised here, or will the same thing happen that happened last year and the year before-- everybody eventually gets tired of arguing angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, and we're left with the status quo? I AM considering contributing some version of the bigger blocksize-limit hard-fork patch to the Bitcoin-Xt fork (probably target a hobbyist with a fast Internet connection, and assume Nelson's law to increase over time), and then encouraging merchants and exchanges and web wallets and individuals who think it strikes a reasonable balance to run it. And then, assuming it became a super-majority of nodes on the network, encourage miners to roll out a soft-fork to start producing bigger blocks and eventually trigger the hard fork. Because ultimately consensus comes down to what software people choose to run. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
What gives Bitcoin value aren't its technical merits but the fact that people believe in it. Much of the belief in Bitcoin is that it has a bright future. Certainly the huge price spikes we've seen were not triggered by equally large spikes in usage - it's speculation on that future. I quite agree that if people stop believing in Bitcoin, that will be bad. A fast way to bring that about will be to deliberately cripple the technology in order to force people onto something quite different (which probably won't be payment channel networks). I'd argue that if we didn't force through a 20MB fork now, and we ran into major network difficulties a year from now and had no other technical solutions, that maybe we would get nearly universal agreement I doubt it. The disagreement seems more philosophical than technical. If Bitcoin fell off a cliff then that'd just be taken as more evidence that block chains don't work and we should all use some network of payment hubs, or whatever the fashion of the day is. Or anyone who doesn't want to pay high fees is unimportant. See all the other justifications Gavin is working his way through on his blog. That's why I conclude the opposite - if there is no fork, then people's confidence in Bitcoin will be seriously damaged. If it's impossible to do something as trivial as removing a temporary hack Satoshi put in place, then what about bigger challenges? If the community is really willing to drive itself off a cliff due to political deadlock, then why bother building things that use Bitcoin at all? -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/07/2015 05:04 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: heh - I tend to think people here want bitcoin to succeed. My statement refers to picking winners and losers from within the existing bitcoin community stakeholders. Success is not a sufficiently precise term in this context. There is a large contingent of people for whom the definition of Bitcoin success means serving as a stable backend which can meet the needs of their non-Bitcoin platform - and nothing more. To be extremely specific: should Bitcoin development intenionally limit the network's capabilities to leave room for other projects, or should Bitcoin attempt to be the best system possible and let the other projects try to keep up as best they can? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVS4HiAAoJECpf2nDq2eYj23wP/j4ksm2dgzDkccMRbqFM8Pm8 oV6ImxM26bG3DJB+Rh6ttTY4DrUnZJmzQUUxfZUd3TmH/xOM4Lu35gKKhpvHTdR8 vMQz76CaTba6PzzFKC+GYyHueXLtwJxEHEZjR8m5ijPMfZoImfMbduggDaPLv/sz AUcTDtYWBoPZ9Matms4NZIOsH1S1pHw5YjcFYgxmY6ErHZPqZjoKzcc4wZnrOU+Q HCmiHOJ1U87jEge4QEJCXidCJFakyMTWt5P6hjdOFfky3VYmcoivYRA1ZemgyV2Y YyLtmHBcK7k67Tczep8rjggvK2C2oJArFGPLWHZH9bxXILaNXSpZX5G5rXZjp1vm 1voc6JDaK/slXIlfG+BZ56WyprKkiFbN6u4Wd8LG5W8gKiuCyLYr2IGKz9O3fvor NYtk6ELPfX1+0JBD0ureI7kV85D/ybNnnmMp/NyfmBKzzmqnANRrrqL5zgILuUP4 YaokcVdPpTqkN0vuAXchehEemF5MtJIYf9BayZ86ck68aMjvVJi0nX3n63f1MulP IbRbYY/8eu1891lNIPiSzbmT0zjjplo8jYEOTg32mIvEDZAy8sWwTPYS25tPd37l 3kxRCxqS1ALbAqLZprmxQ375PigE2esXZlpBHzyY4Kf+3UD/k/X8D92vdNiF7mkS HSA+TX4lf310Eq6Mb4LR =5vaU -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: That's why I conclude the opposite - if there is no fork, then people's confidence in Bitcoin will be seriously damaged. Yes, that is a possibility. If it's impossible to do something as trivial as removing a temporary hack Satoshi put in place, then what about bigger challenges? This is absolutely not a trivial change. It is a trivial *code* change. It is not a trivial change to the economics of a $3.2B system. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Justus Ranvier justusranv...@riseup.net wrote: To be extremely specific: should Bitcoin development intenionally limit the network's capabilities to leave room for other projects, or should Bitcoin attempt to be the best system possible and let the other projects try to keep up as best they can? Avoid such narrow, binary thinking. Referencing the problem described in http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size-is-urgent (not the solution - block size change - just the problem, tx/block Poisson mismatch) This problem - block creation is bursty - is fundamental to bitcoin. Raising block size does not fix this problem (as [1] notes), but merely kicks the can down the road a bit, by hiding it from users a bit longer. Bitcoin is a settlement system, at the most fundamental engineering level. It will never be an instant payment system for all the world's coffees (or all the world's stock trades). It is left to Layer 2 projects to engineer around bitcoin's gaps, to produce an instant, secure, trustless, egalitarian payment system using the bitcoin token. [1] also notes this. It is therefore not a binary decision of leaving room for other projects, or not. Layer-2 projects are critical to the success of bitcoin, and complement bitcoin. [1] http://gavinandresen.ninja/it-must-be-done-but-is-not-a-panacea Holistic thinking implies you build a full-stack system with bitcoin -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Dear list, Apparently my emails are being marked as spam, despite being sent from GMail's web interface. I've pinged our sysadmin. Thanks for letting me know. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Maybe you dislike that idea. It's so centralised. So let's say Gavin commits his patch, because his authority is equal to all other committers. Someone else rolls it back. Gavin sets up a cron job to keep committing the patch. Game over. You cannot have committers fighting over what goes in and what doesn't. That's madness. There must be a single decision maker for any given codebase. You are conflating consensus with commit access. People with commit access are maintainers who are *able to merge* pull requests. However, the rules for bitcoin development are that only patches with consensus get merged. If any of the maintainers just pushed a change without going through the whole code review and consensus process there would be uproar, plain and simple. Please don't conflate commit access with permission to merge because it's just not the case. No-one can sidestep the requirement to get consensus, not even the 5 maintainers. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Justus Ranvier justusranv...@riseup.net wrote: In summary, I asked a question neither you, nor Peter Todd, want to answer and want to actively discourage people from even asking at all. Incorrect; your question included built-in assumptions with which I disagree. Bitcoin needs to be the best it can be (Layer 1), but all solutions cannot and should not be implemented at Layer 1. We need to scale up both bitcoin (L1) and solutions built on top of bitcoin (L2). -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/07/2015 05:47 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: Bitcoin needs to be the best it can be (Layer 1), but all solutions cannot and should not be implemented at Layer 1. I can provisionally agree with that statement as long as all solutions cannot and should not be implemented at Layer 1 it taken to be a hypothesis to be tested in the context of each proposed solution rather than a law of nature. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVS4nOAAoJECpf2nDq2eYjZGEP/jvk+RNQO+Zoyp0jc6aup5Aa USUFk1TYBqbu47vvc3jFHc4V3/BjiwkUKp5bZ4iIxr3xWIA35CcjfpSJEIlEj0zM OHS2j+eS0WkNWCmWgj+3sJpQBNnqLmdBOG1q6z0aBLGwG7uabo+YAhJjlP8isfcn cBQPGjeTW82ZZLdkNaThbFr53oTYiVPNqMIIq6orUe5vetQS/zfTyowi7Y9+OT+b FMXOEmXQTzF415LImJNXOcGFx51YkLe3SuEPEqqIX/+gOcT4HMPuKbqyAu6xXRQK O7uI+6AjN1mX7Cvt19wYkUggJ7ddVKrHINSzOfsZ+pdF8mdY4TrdwJJhfN0+fnvo KYW+pmEAFRMveV8SVGJpHQ/pWECKbFiz1SRnDfjlbX/C5mHiHM4EmqCxC1pVDxOU uDukt+ZIIiP7GwPYxqSknR4lcuwsdFFJf9ldxD+ZRNsmz1l+PkaUUpdkCc9u9rUW 2IyfvPmeeVUPLP9N675kfiM3aKNO7LHN8GhSUe+1Nt/zcXg6xg0QWKdXjC8nykCa eH9gn0QoQZaZbfKnb8DLwLjCO5LiOzQTgqdo0ZSJtV/CipqyGcBJtFYW2olG/BvO Ns6qJKG6Ck76Tv31cu3YGpVbBjCxsIovchLh72KjQ9LscYg8y29evcFlnyagsewY 5CQJsAY8apmvNvmxAhRf =oRV/ -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
In my personal opinion, this does make some sense to me, assuming I understood Gavin. I suppose it could be done with a new flag (like the P2SH flag) which displays miner support for larger blocks. The new rules would apply when a large majority of miners support the new rules by counting the number of flagged blocks over a certain number of blocks on the network in a deterministic fashion. This way miners can continue to produce blocks which are supported by both old and new clients. When it appears most people have migrated to the new client, miners can start flagging support for the new rules, and when a large majority of miners agree, the new rules would kick in for all miners/clients running the new software. Miners could therefore glue together the network during the migration phase until enough people have updated to avoid severe fork scenarios. The only problem is ensuring that miners will continue to support both networks for long enough to enable successful migration. And if too many people disagree to make a clean hard fork (too many people stubbornly stick to the old rules), then it could be that the hard fork is aborted and everyone goes back to the old rules, or quite simply that the miners never give support for the new rules despite the mechanism being included in the new client. In those cases it would be as if nothing changed. This way the hard fork would be determined by user participation as judged by the miners. If it is done, I can't think of a fairer way. Matthew Mitchell On 07/05/15 15:52, Gavin Andresen wrote: For reference: the blog post that (re)-started this debate, and which links to individual issues, is here: http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks In it, I asked people to email me objections I might have missed. I would still appreciate it if people do that; it is impossible to keep up with this mailing list, /r/bitcoin posts and comments, and #bitcoin-wizards and also have time to respond thoughtfully to the objections raised. I would very much like to find some concrete course of action that we can come to consensus on. Some compromise so we can tell entrepreneurs THIS is how much transaction volume the main Bitcoin blockchain will be able to support over the next eleven years. I've been pretty clear on what I think is a reasonable compromise (a one-time increase scheduled for early next year), and I have tried to explain why I think it it is the right set of tradeoffs. There ARE tradeoffs here, and the hard question is what process do we use to decide those tradeoffs? How do we come to consensus? Is it worth my time to spend hours responding thoughtfully to every new objection raised here, or will the same thing happen that happened last year and the year before-- everybody eventually gets tired of arguing angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, and we're left with the status quo? I AM considering contributing some version of the bigger blocksize-limit hard-fork patch to the Bitcoin-Xt fork (probably target a hobbyist with a fast Internet connection, and assume Nelson's law to increase over time), and then encouraging merchants and exchanges and web wallets and individuals who think it strikes a reasonable balance to run it. And then, assuming it became a super-majority of nodes on the network, encourage miners to roll out a soft-fork to start producing bigger blocks and eventually trigger the hard fork. Because ultimately consensus comes down to what software people choose to run. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
It is an argument against my admittedly vague definition of non-controversial change. If it's an argument against something you said, it's not a straw man, right ;) Consensus has to be defined as agreement between a group of people. Who are those people? If you don't know, it's impossible to decide when there is consensus or not. Right now there is this nice warm fuzzy notion that decisions in Bitcoin Core are made by consensus. Controversial changes are avoided. I am trying to show you that this is just marketing. Nobody can define what these terms even mean. It would be more accurate to say decisions are vetoed by whoever shows up and complains enough, regardless of technical merit. After all, my own getutxo change was merged after a lot of technical debate (and trolling) . then unmerged a day later because it's a shitstorm. So if Gavin showed up and complained a lot about side chains or whatever, what you're saying is, oh that's different. We'd ignore him. But when someone else complains about a change they don't like, that's OK. Heck, I could easily come up with a dozen reasons to object to almost any change, if I felt like it. Would I then be considered not a part of the consensus because that'd be convenient? I'm sure that's not what the proponents of the size increase want, and I'm not defending 1 MB as a sacred limit or anything, but my question is where is the limit for them? 20mb is an arbitrary number, just like 1mb. It's good enough to keep the Bitcoin ecosystem operating as it presently does: gentle growth in usage with the technology that exists and is implemented. Gavin has discussed in his blog why he chose 20mb, I think. It's the result of some estimates based on average network/hardware capabilities. Perhaps one day 20mb will not be enough. Perhaps then the limit will be raised again, if there is sufficient demand. You are correct that no limit at all is a possible answer. More precisely, in that case miners would choose. Gavin's original proposal was 20mb+X where X is decided by some incrementing formula over time, chosen to approximate expected improvements in hardware and software. That was cool too. The 20mb figure and the formula were an attempt to address the concerns of people who are worried about the block size increase: a meet-in-the-middle compromise. Unfortunately it's hard to know what other kinds of meet-in-the-middle compromise could be made here. I'm sure Gavin would consider them if he knew. But the concerns provided are too vague to address. There are no numbers in them, for example: - We need more research - how much more? - I'm not against changing the size, just not now - then when? - I'm not wedded to 1mb, but not sure 20mb is right - then what? - Full node count is going down - then what size do you think would fix that? 100kb? - It will make mining more centralised - how do you measure that and how much centralisation would you accept? and so on. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
Dear list, Apparently my emails are being marked as spam, despite being sent from GMail's web interface. I've pinged our sysadmin. It's a problem with the mailing list software, not your setup. BitPay could disable the phishing protections but that seems like a poor solution. The only real fix is to send from a non @bitpay.com email address. Gmail or Hotmail will work, I think. Yahoo won't: they enforce the same strict policies than bitpay does. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/07/2015 03:35 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: Raising the block size limit then becomes a *human decision* to favor some users over others, a *human decision* to prevent an active and competitive free fee market developing at 1MB, a *human decision* to keep transaction fees low to incentivize bitcoin adoption, a *human decision* to value adoption over decentralization. At the moment none of the following assertions have been proven true, yet are constantly cited as if they have been: * A competitive fee market will develop when the transaction rate becomes constrained by the block size limit * More users of Bitcoin means less decentralization Furthermore, the term decentralization is frequently used without being precisely defined in a way that would allow for such proofs to be debated. If there's going to be a debate on those points, then the people presenting points on both sides should take the time to show their work and explain the methodology they used to reach their conclusions. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVS5BXAAoJECpf2nDq2eYjC3kQAKQ0Jj8r1gjwpl813NiuatjA nwXJ+Zn7E+cS8bYsXbaPK1uUgcSdpi/g2jgW+VuUPlqCaNo08Pbp/O7pG5ady9st o7xJnPxttg7NO3IB7GODCJKK85uBO3dOwPp+pfs8KYCAo5PFTflpeOi4Idbd4w/R +tvLynpSX9LIZTQaJH2KEbrYUibYHZrr8hj0net9lJP8KeqMnCuiesYzjJ4pUXyE zN0SQ1v9QnpltbTVxRu1TdRBMjAxEHTJPg1jsv0hhGqIOQGHdwNavGq7+LJBen4T CvT8ooTmuq0IdihOTttl9ody6Eh0tyGPlbVHiI3c2Emm0HTxz8hN9Rl4lvPgcGdi EUW12h8ailKLg5uJL53Zp1PO6fgl0Z/WCx/zqIKRPg4lJMf5Rk5Ow86xAeIZrsbr d/+cJZEhqzPnObxkxgTIzqtG8NHcg9dhKw1xkGAkVpMXMM7Bzdku8WCntIYU4+xI btQQZlbc5h/S+X9Vcu0rJWmmQp2Q8xeEVGRh4hhA8LZLc1P+1eyESjAMWvsuq+rk Wd1kPopekhOgK0zw2j55Ov+kJXVa2pDFA7TOpcqxbdLU4eauKC4D+YQlTM4qj285 vyRq+c/AwMCPiEhBeEbppgdgwrIQP9fJ7s+2TAHaWICYlTJWkLitUjN9EBwqv3Yp LRBrgV7giz8UIrJr3hQZ =+Qmg -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:52 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: I would very much like to find some concrete course of action that we can come to consensus on. Some compromise so we can tell entrepreneurs THIS is how much transaction volume the main Bitcoin blockchain will be able to support over the next eleven years. Mhmm, I hadn't thought about this. This makes sense and actually explains the urgency on taking a decision better than anything else I've heard. On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 5:29 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: If it's not raised, then ... well, then we're in new territory entirely. Businesses built on the assumption that Bitcoin could become popular will suddenly have their basic assumptions invalidated. Users will leave. The technical code change would be zero, but the economic change would be significant. This, on the other hand, is a non sequitur [1], another type of fallacy. Well, several of them, actually: - If it's not raised, then bitcoin cannot become popular - If it's not raised, then users will leave - Businesses built on the assumption that Bitcoin could become popular were also assuming that it's going to be risen. These statements may even be true, but they're no logical conclusions even if they seem obvious to you. I don't think those claims are strictly true, specially because they involve predictions about what people will do. But if they're true they require some proof or at least some explanation. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)#Affirming_the_consequent -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/07/2015 04:04 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: - This is a major change to the economics of a $3.2B system. This change picks winners and losers. There is attendant moral hazard. This is exactly true. There are a number of projects which aren't Bitcoin that benefit from filling in the gap left by Bitcoin's restricted transaction rate capability. If Bitcoin fills that gap, Bitcoin wins and those other projects lose. Should decisions about Bitcoin development take into account the desires of competing projects? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVS3jeAAoJECpf2nDq2eYj3hMP/0yk8HxypEfNa4vZo0IcKD+p bn2dftQsOEeOenBh8QT48vS3AhcjNkUsw722YwbKz6Znkyi2iU7njaUM9DV+QHwg Oytmh8XVZtviLgg3854ujdj4oAWyP4DpppVTRxTDyRdSpRj+D9y6+sGFls6z0q3/ XRcKOY23zx6/qN1k5fqUncpIpYEDhpmE7cGy26Yz0G4MtuYeceHT4LdJAHHr0iFL OY0WVM32b4F3HfkfJtt8rE0yeB7u5dbeu8KmLB0yqZQkY87sLxtT6qeoyHO6CG+N 8Iu9OWaRIZHfrZK2XlDzDKQIkTnlSxFtj4wY7/Yb4NIDO6mhMjYTSz8lWqN4ofKg 9fFHlwGS3QXXDTB+5d1IzZS5C0qF92n1NJiJjkLqhKqYuVn4U74oslZhVLxHBGHH ZAvW09obZXi5DVzhuxPzlFkpYaB+XLdmBUPEr5hx5K4I2qiL/Nvu0h031UDcMeLm x9mEHO5ZODlF9tWAVnM/b0VtwT9h6Q88NWe/OUQQZKp6D/Etcd3JE55GBNtNPDnE 2UubyHkNO4mbrEMluh24TvhZK3BB/lieq+kkHZCP7eC58eRY078lSF8R36XGdbn4 Pili15bYSrRrfmjDz24zhJX8759LPt2Zsf/Irc8Za4SoaEaYAqQU4vAmYlZyCNxj EvxXAasffnjR2K3cnZxr =YkTz -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Justus Ranvier justusranv...@riseup.net wrote: On 05/07/2015 04:04 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: - This is a major change to the economics of a $3.2B system. This change picks winners and losers. There is attendant moral hazard. This is exactly true. There are a number of projects which aren't Bitcoin that benefit from filling in the gap left by Bitcoin's restricted transaction rate capability. If Bitcoin fills that gap, Bitcoin wins and those other projects lose. Should decisions about Bitcoin development take into account the desires of competing projects? heh - I tend to think people here want bitcoin to succeed. My statement refers to picking winners and losers from within the existing bitcoin community stakeholders. The existential question of the block size increase is larger - will failing to increase the 1MB limit permanently stunt bitcoin's growth? -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 05:13:34PM +0200, Justus Ranvier wrote: On 05/07/2015 04:49 PM, Peter Todd wrote: I think we'll find an basic assumption of civility to be more productive, until proven otherwise. (e.g. NSA ties) I'm not sure why you'd construe my post as having anything to do with accusations like NSA ties. I'm not. I'm saying dealing with someone with proven NSA ties is one of the few times when I think the assumption of honest intent should be ignored in this forum. Altcoins and non-Bitcoin-blockchain tx systems? Assuming anything other than honest intent isn't productive in this forum. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0622ff7c71c105480baf123fe74df549b5a42596fd8bfbcb signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
100% agree, RE hard forks should be hard. However, it is the paradox of growth, morale and adoption that bitcoin might never reach the point where it is saturated expensive to the point where larger blocks are demanded by 95%+... simply because people and companies chose not to adopt bitcoin in the first place due to an unmoving, [perceived | real] scalability roadblock. On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Alex Morcos mor...@gmail.com wrote: That strikes me as a dangerous path forward. I don't actually think there is anything wrong with this: everybody eventually gets tired of arguing angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, and we're left with the status quo What gives Bitcoin value aren't its technical merits but the fact that people believe in it. The biggest risk here isn't that 20MB blocks will be bad or that 1MB blocks will be bad, but that by forcing a hard fork that isn't nearly universally agreed upon, we will be damaging that belief. If I strongly believed some hard fork would be better for Bitcoin, say permanent inflation of 1% a year to fund mining, and I managed to convince 80% of users, miners, businesses and developers to go along with me, I would still vote against doing it. Because that's not nearly universal agreement, and it changes what people chose to believe in without their consent. Forks should be hard, very hard. And both sides should recognize that belief in the value of Bitcoin might be a fragile thing. I'd argue that if we didn't force through a 20MB fork now, and we ran into major network difficulties a year from now and had no other technical solutions, that maybe we would get nearly universal agreement, and the businesses and users that were driven away by the unusable system would be a short term loss in value considerably smaller than the impairment we risk by forcing a change. On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: For reference: the blog post that (re)-started this debate, and which links to individual issues, is here: http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks In it, I asked people to email me objections I might have missed. I would still appreciate it if people do that; it is impossible to keep up with this mailing list, /r/bitcoin posts and comments, and #bitcoin-wizards and also have time to respond thoughtfully to the objections raised. I would very much like to find some concrete course of action that we can come to consensus on. Some compromise so we can tell entrepreneurs THIS is how much transaction volume the main Bitcoin blockchain will be able to support over the next eleven years. I've been pretty clear on what I think is a reasonable compromise (a one-time increase scheduled for early next year), and I have tried to explain why I think it it is the right set of tradeoffs. There ARE tradeoffs here, and the hard question is what process do we use to decide those tradeoffs? How do we come to consensus? Is it worth my time to spend hours responding thoughtfully to every new objection raised here, or will the same thing happen that happened last year and the year before-- everybody eventually gets tired of arguing angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, and we're left with the status quo? I AM considering contributing some version of the bigger blocksize-limit hard-fork patch to the Bitcoin-Xt fork (probably target a hobbyist with a fast Internet connection, and assume Nelson's law to increase over time), and then encouraging merchants and exchanges and web wallets and individuals who think it strikes a reasonable balance to run it. And then, assuming it became a super-majority of nodes on the network, encourage miners to roll out a soft-fork to start producing bigger blocks and eventually trigger the hard fork. Because ultimately consensus comes down to what software people choose to run. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05/07/2015 04:49 PM, Peter Todd wrote: I think we'll find an basic assumption of civility to be more productive, until proven otherwise. (e.g. NSA ties) I'm not sure why you'd construe my post as having anything to do with accusations like NSA ties. By non-Bitcoin projects I mean any altcoin or off-chain processing solution. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJVS4EeAAoJECpf2nDq2eYj/vcQAIUrD+ejUKHQb0k/pcPyzmvy rl3spbbdLSFN9cBhBOgh5LaVFkCrv4/gW2X4Ih6GGYG3siXjZ2HPDXt+Zbs+bfQE nrw+IpGTYlbnJ26cFVhZWehr45qY1kMO+DVdnKufEgfVKUdYeq/d3bwL1uru4RU6 UfWihvgGGQkjEb/5ZIpRbWmb7XRP9piZCHi0pgFSa8tNDVjbb9ucKjIfrRuRe+DK GMhIAQLvIQK4M30SxOnMQLIe3upsQ6JzY+5M28HkcBNKgd0dpZbwByHIJh6/ELTO Iaf08S0mCySKoZAJFEkeQ3YOgdIlZvwYsflxiEs62Mz9Mz8uuxTo6E21XyFr6iN/ XndXCzlAZBIQuiayEUL4fUM2cmeHcvhHpGNyYjBuLibuiaIzKMBzFQqEZHGA0QzH QhptbHjTwXLxIEZy94ELH2FbQnTrnOBxOdYfmxGvlmJ0328hThW6N181L3fPHK0v 6zTChZziMhlIoZPX8AGNNsUYJFKBJs/khlbse/tQhXmm5zuIyq+Lt0nKjbhHkWJw n9y4PHxLVtmmOvptPMm00l5/w6yb8Qmxo81d6kq75ZEupjxupHH6YwjHWTehT/x2 Pt8iMX2NWVnVwVdsaqE/rH+JrgH1Pvl7TMqXMr8d7tuSWTeTBWlrcmZbS1rl0Z3T f8K2rBX6sBqmrD1xKDsn =5pB6 -END PGP SIGNATURE- 0xEAD9E623.asc Description: application/pgp-keys -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase
It is a trivial *code* change. It is not a trivial change to the economics of a $3.2B system. Hmm - again I'd argue the opposite. Up until now Bitcoin has been unconstrained by the hard block size limit. If we raise it, Bitcoin will continue to be unconstrained by it. That's the default continue as we are position. If it's not raised, then ... well, then we're in new territory entirely. Businesses built on the assumption that Bitcoin could become popular will suddenly have their basic assumptions invalidated. Users will leave. The technical code change would be zero, but the economic change would be significant. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
