Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On 2 June 2015 at 14:26, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: But the majority of the hashrate can now perform double spends on your chain! They can send bitcoins to exchanges, sell it, extract the money and build a new longer chain to get their bitcoins back. Obviously if the majority of the mining hash rate is doing double spending attacks on exchanges then the Bitcoin experiment is resolved as a failure and it will become abandoned. This has been known since day one: it's in the white paper. The basic assumption behind Bitcoin is that only a minority of actors are dishonest - if the majority are then Satoshi's scheme does not work. So you are not stating anything new here. It's both consistent and credible for an agent to commit to honesty on a chain that it openly supports and dishonesty on a chain that it openly opposes. (Moral? Legal? Perhaps not.) That said, majority hashpower doesn't need to be dishonest to stop a change to large blocks. It just needs to refuse to build on blocks that it doesn't like. The minority isn't going to mine blocks larger than 1MB if it knows they'll be orphaned. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
But the majority of the hashrate can now perform double spends on your chain! They can send bitcoins to exchanges, sell it, extract the money and build a new longer chain to get their bitcoins back. Obviously if the majority of the mining hash rate is doing double spending attacks on exchanges then the Bitcoin experiment is resolved as a failure and it will become abandoned. This has been known since day one: it's in the white paper. The basic assumption behind Bitcoin is that only a minority of actors are dishonest - if the majority are then Satoshi's scheme does not work. So you are not stating anything new here. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I think it would be helpful if we could all *chill* and focus on the solid engineering necessary to make Bitcoin succeed. p. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Two very valid and important points. Thank you for making these observations Peter. p. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:26 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 06:42:05PM +0800, Pindar Wong wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. I'd rather think of mining as a responsibility than a right per se, but you're right in so far as it's competitive and self-correcting. It's important to remember that the service Bitcoin miners are providing us is *not* transaction validation, but rather decentralization. Validation is something every full node does already; there's no shortage of it. What's tricky is designing a Bitcoin protocol that creates the appropriate incentives for mining to remain decentralized, so we get good value for the large amount of money being sent to miners. I've often likened this task to building a robot to go to the grocery store to buy milk for you. If that robot doesn't have a nose, before long store owners are going to realise it can't tell the difference between unspoilt and spoilt milk, and you're going to get ripped off paying for a bunch of spoiled milk. Designing a Bitcoin protocol where we expect competition to result in smaller miners in more geographically decentralized places to get outcompeted by larger miners who are more geographically centralized gets us bad value for our money. Sure it's self-correcting, but not in a way that we want. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Let's agree to disagree on this point. Note how that VPN, and likely VPS it's connected too, immediately adds another one or two points of failure to the whole system. Not only does this decrease reliability, it also decreases security by making attacks significantly easier - VPS security is orders of magnitude worse than the security of physical hardware. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0e187b95a9159d04a3586dd4cbc068be88a3eafcb5b885f9 -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
WOW Way to burn your biggest adopters who put your transactions into the chain...what a douche. From: Mike Hearnmailto:m...@plan99.net Sent: 1/06/2015 8:15 PM To: Alex Mizrahimailto:alex.mizr...@gmail.com Cc: Bitcoin Devmailto:bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I cannot believe why Gavin (who seems to have difficulty to spell my name correctly.) insists on his 20MB proposal regardless the community. BIP66 has been introduced for a long time and no one knows when the 95% goal can be met. This change to the block max size must take one year or more to be adopted. We should increase the limit and increase it now. 20MB is simply too big and too risky, sometimes we need compromise and push things forward. I agree with any solution lower than 10MB in its first two years. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Hi everyone, I'm a long-time lurker of this mailing list but it's the first time I post here, so first of all I'd like to thank all of the usual contributors for the great insights and technical discussions that can be found here. As this is such a momentous point in the history of Bitcoin, I'd just like to throw in my opinion too. First, I agree with Oliver Egginger's message that it's much more elegant to keep the numbers as powers of 2 rather than introducing somewhat arbitrary numbers like 20. This also makes it easier to count the level of support for what would be a clear spectrum of discrete levels (1, 2, 4, ... 32, 64, ..., infinite). If a temporary peace accord can be reached with a value like 8 or 16, this will buy us some time for both the user base to continue growing without hitting the limit and for newer technologies like the lightning network to be developed and tested. We will also see whether the relatively small increase causes any unexpected harm or whether (as I expect) everything continues to run smoothly. Personally, I'd like to see Bitcoin grow and become what I think most Bitcoin users like myself expect from it: that it should be a payment network directly accessible to people all over the world. In my opinion, it is the proposition of Bitcoin as a form of electronic money that additionally makes it a good store of value. I don't believe in the idea that it can exist as just some sort of digital gold for a geeky financial elite. And I haven't been persuaded by those who claim the scarcity of block space is an economic fundamental of Bitcoin either. It seems to me there's a lot of batty economic ideas being bandied about regarding the supposed long-term value of the cap without much justification. In this sense, my sympathies are with those who want to remove the maximum block size cap. This was after all the original idea, so it's not fair for the 1MB camp to claim that they're the ones preserving the essences of Bitcoin. But, anyway, I also think that a consensus at this point would be much better than a head-on confrontation between two incompatible pieces of software competing to gain the favour of a majority of exchanges and merchants. With this in mind, can't we accept the consensus that raising the hard-coded limit to a value like 8MB buys us a bit of time and should be at least palatable to everyone? This may not be what the staunch supporters of the 1MB limit want, but it's also not what I and others would want, so we're talking about finding some common ground here, and not about one side getting their way to the detriment or humiliation of the other. The problem with a compromise based on a one-off maximum-size increase, of course, is that we're just kicking the can down the road and the discussion will continue. It's not a solution I like, but how can we get people like say Greg Maxwell or Pieter Wuille to accept something more drastic? If they find a new maximum-size cap acceptable, then it could be a reasonable compromise. A new cap will let us test the situation and see how the Bitcoin environment reacts. The next time the discussion crops up (probably very soon, I know...), we may all have a better understanding of the implications. Ángel José Riesgo -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth is simply not true, but if you look at data points like http://www.netindex.com/upload/ which will show we are at least on the right track, but this is flawed still. The fact of the matter is these speed tests are done from local origin to local destination within the city, let alone the country ( see note about how these test are only conducted 300 miles within the server). and our current internet infrastructure is set up with CDNs for the web and media consumption. these data points can not and should not be used to model the connectivity of a peer to peer network. Uplink bandwidth is scarce is China and expensive, avg about $37 per 1mbps after 5, but this is not the real problem. the true issue lies in the ISP transparent proxy they run. this is not a problem isolated in just China, Thailand and various other countries in Asia like Lebanon. I have also heard in various IRCs that southern France also face this similar issue due to poor routing configurations they have that prevents connections to certain parts of the world, unsure if this is a mistake or a geopolitical by-product. As for your question earlier Gavin, from Dallas TX to a VPS in Shanghai on 上海电信/Shanghai telecom, which is capped at 5mbps the data results match my concerns, I've gotten low as 83 Kbits/sec and as high as 9.24 Mbits/sec. and other ranges in between, none are consistent. ping avg is about 250ms. The temporary solution I recommend again from earlier is MPTCP: http://www.multipath-tcp.org/ which allows you to multiple interfaces/networks for a single TCP connection, this is mainly developed for mobile3g/wifi transition but I found uses to improve bandwidth and connection stability on the go by combining a local wifi/ethernet connection with my 3g phone tether. this allows you to set up a middlebox somewhere, put shadowsocks server on it, and on your local machine you can route all TCP traffic over the shadow socks client and MPTCP will automatically pick the best path for upload and download. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: I cannot believe why Gavin (who seems to have difficulty to spell my name correctly.) insists on his 20MB proposal regardless the community. BIP66 has been introduced for a long time and no one knows when the 95% goal can be met. This change to the block max size must take one year or more to be adopted. We should increase the limit and increase it now. 20MB is simply too big and too risky, sometimes we need compromise and push things forward. I agree with any solution lower than 10MB in its first two years. Thanks, that's useful! What do other people think? Would starting at a max of 8 or 4 get consensus? Scaling up a little less than Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth predicts for the next 20 years? (I think predictability is REALLY important). I chose 20 because all of my testing shows it to be safe, and all of my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate the costs are reasonable. If consensus is 8 because more than order-of-magnitude increases are scary -- ok. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- *Yifu Guo* *Life is an everlasting self-improvement.* -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Alex Mizrahi alex.mizr...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.) You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage. And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist. Did you just lie to Chun? Chun said that if somebody produced a big block it would take them at least 6 seconds to process it. He also said he has nodes outside the great firewall (We also use Aliyun and Linode cloud services for block propagation.). So I assumed that he was talking about the what if somebody produces a block that takes a long time to process attack -- which doesn't work (the attacker just increases their own orphan rate). If the whole network is creating blocks that takes everybody (except the person creating the blocks) six seconds to broadcast+validate, then the increase in orphan rate is spread out over the whole network. The network-wide orphan rate goes up, everybody suffers a little (fewer blocks created over time) until the next difficulty adjustment, then the difficulty drops, then everybody is back in the same boat. If it takes six seconds to validate because of limited bandwidth, then he should connect via Matt's fast relay network, which optimize new block announcements so they take a couple orders of magnitude less bandwidth. If it takes six seconds because he's trying to validate on a raspberry pi then he should buy a better validating machine, and/or help test the current pending pull requests to make validation faster (e.g. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5835 or https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6077 ). If Chun had six seconds of latency, and he can't pay for a lower-latency connection (or it is insanely expensive), then there's nothing he can do, he'll have to live with a higher orphan rate no matter the block size. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. Then please enlighten me. You're unable to download block templates from a trusted node outside of the country because the bandwidth requirements are too high? Or due to some other problem? With respect to now it's your turn. Let's imagine the hard fork goes ahead. Let us assume that almost all exchanges, payment processors and other businesses go with larger blocks, but Chinese miners do not. Then you will mine coins that will not be recognised on trading platforms and cannot be sold. Your losses will be much larger than from orphans. This can happen *even* if Chinese miners who can't/won't scale up are 50% hashrate. SPV clients would need a forced checkpoint, which would be messy and undesirable, but it's technically feasible. The smaller side of the chain would cease to exist from the perspective of people actually trading coins. If your internet connectivity situation is really so poor that you cannot handle one or two megabits out of the country then you're hanging on by your fingernails anyway: your connection to the main internet could become completely unusable at any time. If that's really the case, it seems to me that Chinese Bitcoin is unsustainable and what you really need is a China-specific alt coin that can run entirely within the Chinese internet. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: I cannot believe why Gavin (who seems to have difficulty to spell my name correctly.) insists on his 20MB proposal regardless the community. BIP66 has been introduced for a long time and no one knows when the 95% goal can be met. This change to the block max size must take one year or more to be adopted. We should increase the limit and increase it now. 20MB is simply too big and too risky, sometimes we need compromise and push things forward. I agree with any solution lower than 10MB in its first two years. Thanks, that's useful! What do other people think? Would starting at a max of 8 or 4 get consensus? Scaling up a little less than Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth predicts for the next 20 years? (I think predictability is REALLY important). I chose 20 because all of my testing shows it to be safe, and all of my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate the costs are reasonable. If consensus is 8 because more than order-of-magnitude increases are scary -- ok. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I don't see this as an issue of sensitivity or not. Miners are businesses that sell a service to Bitcoin users - the service of ordering transactions chronologically. They aren't charities. If some miners can't provide the service Bitcoin users need any more, then OK, they should not/cannot mine. Lots of miners have come and gone since Bitcoin started as different technology generations came and went. That's just business. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
By reversing Mike's language to the reality of the situation I had hoped people would realize how abjectly ignorant and insensitive his statement was. I am sorry to those in the community if they misunderstood my post. I thought it was obvious that it was sarcasm where I do not seriously believe particular participants should be excluded. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Thy Shizzle thyshiz...@outlook.com wrote: Doesn't mean you should build something that says fuck you to the companies that have invested in farms of ASICS. To say Oh yea if they can't mine it how we want stuff 'em is naive. I get decentralisation, but don't dis incentivise mining. If miners are telling you that you're going to hurt them, esp. Miners that combined hold 50% hashing power, why would you say too bad so sad? Why not just start stripping bitcoin out of adopters wallets? Same thing. -- From: Warren Togami Jr. wtog...@gmail.com Sent: 1/06/2015 10:30 PM Cc: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements Whilst it would be nice if miners in *outside* China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in *outside* China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall *TO THE MAJORITY OF THE HASHRATE* and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 09:01:49PM +0100, Roy Badami wrote: What do other people think? Would starting at a max of 8 or 4 get consensus? Scaling up a little less than Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth predicts for the next 20 years? (I think predictability is REALLY important). TL;DR: Personally I'm in favour of doing something relatively uncontroversial (say, a simple increase in the block size to something in the 4-8GB range) with no further increases without a further hard fork. And the other bit I should have added to my TL;DR: If we end up spending a significant proportion of the next 20 years discussing the then _next_ hard fork, that's a *good* thing, not a *bad* thing. Hard forks need to become, if not entirely routine, then certainly less scary. A sequence of (relatively) uncontroversial hard forks over time is way more likely to gain consensus than a single hard fork that attempts to set a schedule for block size increases out to 2035. IMHO. I'm not sure how relevent Nielsen's Law really is. The only relevent data points Nielsen has really boil down to a law about how the speed of his cable modem connection has changed during the period 1998-2014. Interesting though that is, it's not hugely relevent to bandwidth-intensive operations like running a full node. The problem is he's only looking at the actual speed of his connection in Mbps, not the amount of data usage in GB/month that his provider permits - and there's no particular reason to expect that both of those two figures follow the same curve. In particular, we're more interested in the cost of backhaul and IP transit (which is what drives the GB/month figure) than we are in improvements in DOCSIS technology, which have little relevence to node operators even on cable modem, and none to any other kind of full node operator, be it on DSL or in a datacentre. More importantly, I also think a scheduled ramp up is an unnecessary complication. Why do we need to commit now to future block size increases perhaps years into the future? I'd rather schedule an uncontroversial hard fork now (if such thing is possible) even if there's a very real expectation - even an assumption - that by the time the fork has taken place, it's already time to start discussing the next one. Any curve or schedule of increases that stretches years into the future is inevitably going to be controversial - and more so the further into the future it stretches - simply because the uncertainties around the Bitcoin landscape are going to be greater the further ahead we look. If a simple increase from 1GB to 4GB or 8GB will solve the problem for now, why not do that? Yes, it's quite likely we'll have to do it again, but we'll be able to make that decision in the light of the 2016 or 2017 landscape and can again make a simple, hopefully uncontroversial, increase in the limit at that time. So, with the proviso that I think this is all bike shedding, if I had to pick my favourite colour for the bike shed, it would be to schedule a hard fork that increases the 1GB limit (to something in the 4-8GB range) but with no further increases without a further hard fork. Personally I think trying to pick the best value of the 2035 block size now is about as foolish as trying to understand now the economics of Bitcoin mining many halvings hence. NB: this is not saying that I think we shouldn't go above 8GB in the relatively foreseeable future; quite the contrary, I strongly expect that we will. I just don't see the need to pick the 2020 block size now when we can easily make a far better informed decision as to the 2020 block size in 2018 or even 2019. As to knowing what the block size is going to be for the next 20 years being REALLY important? 100% disagree. I also think it's impossible, because even if you manage to get consensus on a block size increase schedule that stretches out to 2035 (and my prediction is you won't) the reality is that that block size schedule will have been modified by a future hard fork long before we get to 2035. What I personally think is REALLY important is that the Bitcoin community demonstrates an ability to react appropriately to changing requirements and conditions - and we'll only be able to react to those conditions when we know what they are! My expectation is that there will be several (hopefully _relatively_ uncontroversial) scheduled hard forks between now and 2035, and each of those will be discussed in suitable detail before being agreed. And that's as it should be. roy -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I did wonder what the post actually meant, I recommend appending /s after sarcasm so it's clear. Lots gets lost in text. But I agree with you btw his response was not particularly tactful. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Warren Togami Jr. wtog...@gmail.com wrote: By reversing Mike's language to the reality of the situation I had hoped people would realize how abjectly ignorant and insensitive his statement was. I am sorry to those in the community if they misunderstood my post. I thought it was obvious that it was sarcasm where I do not seriously believe particular participants should be excluded. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Thy Shizzle thyshiz...@outlook.com wrote: Doesn't mean you should build something that says fuck you to the companies that have invested in farms of ASICS. To say Oh yea if they can't mine it how we want stuff 'em is naive. I get decentralisation, but don't dis incentivise mining. If miners are telling you that you're going to hurt them, esp. Miners that combined hold 50% hashing power, why would you say too bad so sad? Why not just start stripping bitcoin out of adopters wallets? Same thing. -- From: Warren Togami Jr. wtog...@gmail.com Sent: 1/06/2015 10:30 PM Cc: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements Whilst it would be nice if miners in *outside* China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in *outside* China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall *TO THE MAJORITY OF THE HASHRATE* and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
So lets rephrase that and say instead more correctly it is the job of miners (collectively) to be well connected globally - and indeed there are incentivised to be or they tend to receive blocks at higher latency and so are at increased risk of orphans. And miner groups with good block latency in-group and high hashrate are definitionally the well connected, so the cost of getting good connectivity to high hashrate groups is naturally borne by people outside of those groups. Or thats the incentive anyway. Adam On 1 June 2015 at 19:30, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: I don't see this as an issue of sensitivity or not. Miners are businesses that sell a service to Bitcoin users - the service of ordering transactions chronologically. They aren't charities. If some miners can't provide the service Bitcoin users need any more, then OK, they should not/cannot mine. Lots of miners have come and gone since Bitcoin started as different technology generations came and went. That's just business. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
He also said that the equation for miners has many variables, as it should. There is no disadvantage if the network speed is the same between the miners. If there is a difference in network speed, the miner is incentivized to invest in their network infrastructure. 2015-05-31 23:55 GMT+01:00 Alex Mizrahi alex.mizr...@gmail.com: Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.) You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage. And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist. Did you just lie to Chun? -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
2015-06-01 0:40 GMT+01:00 Pindar Wong pindar.w...@gmail.com: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Ricardo Filipe ricardojdfil...@gmail.com wrote: He also said that the equation for miners has many variables, as it should. There is no disadvantage if the network speed is the same between the miners. Hi, Is that an assumption? no, let me rephrase: The disadvantage alex refers to only exists if miners do not have the same network speed. If there is a difference in network speed, the miner is incentivized to invest in their network infrastructure. Perhaps it's best not to assume that investing in Internet network infrastructure's a free or open market everywhere. Just like easy ASIC access, low price electricity, etc are not a free and open market. p. 2015-05-31 23:55 GMT+01:00 Alex Mizrahi alex.mizr...@gmail.com: Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.) You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage. And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist. Did you just lie to Chun? -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Ricardo Filipe ricardojdfil...@gmail.com wrote: 2015-06-01 0:40 GMT+01:00 Pindar Wong pindar.w...@gmail.com: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Ricardo Filipe ricardojdfil...@gmail.com wrote: He also said that the equation for miners has many variables, as it should. There is no disadvantage if the network speed is the same between the miners. Hi, Is that an assumption? no, let me rephrase: The disadvantage alex refers to only exists if miners do not have the same network speed. If there is a difference in network speed, the miner is incentivized to invest in their network infrastructure. Perhaps it's best not to assume that investing in Internet network infrastructure's a free or open market everywhere. Just like easy ASIC access, low price electricity, etc are not a free and open market. -- point well made and taken. p. p. 2015-05-31 23:55 GMT+01:00 Alex Mizrahi alex.mizr...@gmail.com: Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.) You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage. And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist. Did you just lie to Chun? -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.) You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage. And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist. Did you just lie to Chun? -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: If someone propagate a 20MB block, it will take at best 6 seconds for us to receive to verify it at current configuration, result of one percent orphan rate increase. That orphan rate increase will go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks, NOT you. Or, we can mine the next block only on the previous block's header, in this case, the network would see many more transaction-less blocks. Are you sure that is the best strategy? If a big block is slow to propagate, I suspect it will be better to punish the miner that created it by refusing to build on it until it has been fully validated. I'll try to find time to run a couple of simulations. Our orphan rate is about 0.5% over the past few months. If the network floods 20MB blocks, it can be well above 2%. Besides bandwidth, A 20MB block could contain an average of 5 transactions, hundred of thousands of sigops, Do you have an estimate how long it takes on the submitblock rpccall? I can benchmark it. It should be pretty fast, and sipa has a couple of patches pending to make the UTXO cache much faster. It can be fast because the vast majority of the work of validating all those transactions can happen as they are received into the memory pool. For references, our 30Mbps bandwidth in Beijing costs us 1350 dollars per month. You should be able to handle 20MB blocks no problem; if I round up to 100MB per block that works out to 1.3Mbps. We also use Aliyun and Linode cloud services for block propagation. As of May 2015, the price is 0.13 U.S. dollars per GB for 100Mbps connectivity at Aliyun. That speed will handle 20MB blocks no problem. If each 20MB block is 100MB of data up/down the wire (I'm vastly over-estimating, after optimization it should be 40MB) then you'll be paying...uhhh: 0.1 GB / block-data-on-wire * 144 blocks/day * 30.5 days/month * 0.13 $ / GB = $57 Less than $2 per day in bandwidth. For a single cross-border TCP connection, it would be certainly far slower than 12.5 MB/s. That's OK, you'll 1.3Mbps or less. I think we can accept 5MB block at most. Are you worried about paying too much, or do 20MB blocks feel like too much ? -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
That orphan rate increase will go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks, NOT you. This depends on how miners are connected. E.g. suppose there are three miners, A and B have fast connectivity between then, and C has a slow network. Suppose that A miners a block and B receives it in 1 second. C receives it in 6 seconds. This means that blocks mined by C during these ~5 seconds will be orphaned because B gets A's block first. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On 31 May 2015, at 13:52, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com mailto:1240...@gmail.com wrote: If someone propagate a 20MB block, it will take at best 6 seconds for us to receive to verify it at current configuration, result of one percent orphan rate increase. That orphan rate increase will go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks, NOT you. There's an interesting incentives question if the mining fees ever become large enough to be interesting. Given two potential blocks on which to build then for the best interests of the system we'd want miners to select the block that confirmed the largest number of transactions since that puts less pressure on the network later. This is at odds with the incentives for our would-be block maker though because the incentive for mining would be to use whichever block left the largest potential fees available; that's generally going to be the smaller of the two. This, of course, only gets worse as the block reward reduces and fees become the dominant way for miners to be paid (and my hypothesis that eventually this could lead to miners trying to deliberately orphan earlier blocks to steal fees because the fixed block reward is no longer the dominant part of their income). When coupled with the block propagation delay problem increasing the risk of orphan races I'm pretty sure that this actually leads to miners having an incentive to continually mine smaller blocks, and that's aside from the question of whether smaller blocks will push up fees (which also benefits miners). Cheers, Dave -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I will abstain on this wrangle of when, Instead I'd like to address some of the network topology health issues that's been brought up in this debate. Due to how blocks are being broadcast by miners at the moment, it is not difficult to find the origin node of these blocks. These more influential origin nodes are a minority, about 100 out of ~6000, 2%. These data points are important to certain attack vectors. It is highly recommended that pools adopt broadcast logic that rotates broadcasting nodes and increase their node count.. Eloipool has this implanted for those seeking to adopt/see it in action in the wild. China is a particular worse-case due to the sporadic nature of their internet infrastructure, especially connecting from/to outside of gfw, on a average node-walk I can get up to a 10% difference while I know for a fact some of the nodes shown to be down are up. In F2Pool's case, I see 6 replay nodes, I don't know if that's enough or that's all the nodes F2Pool runs, but it may be beneficial to set up multi-homing with shadowsocks over mptcp to increase the stability. also see if you can get a CERNET connection to be part of your rotations since their backbone is quite good. comments, question and grievances welcome. On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 9:57 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: 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). If someone propagate a 20MB block, it will take at best 6 seconds for us to receive to verify it at current configuration, result of one percent orphan rate increase. Or, we can mine the next block only on the previous block's header, in this case, the network would see many more transaction-less blocks. Our orphan rate is about 0.5% over the past few months. If the network floods 20MB blocks, it can be well above 2%. Besides bandwidth, A 20MB block could contain an average of 5 transactions, hundred of thousands of sigops, Do you have an estimate how long it takes on the submitblock rpccall? For references, our 30Mbps bandwidth in Beijing costs us 1350 dollars per month. We also use Aliyun and Linode cloud services for block propagation. As of May 2015, the price is 0.13 U.S. dollars per GB for 100Mbps connectivity at Aliyun. For a single cross-border TCP connection, it would be certainly far slower than 12.5 MB/s. I think we can accept 5MB block at most. (sorry forgot to cc to the mailing list) -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- *Yifu Guo* *Life is an everlasting self-improvement.* -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Alex Mizrahi alex.mizr...@gmail.com wrote: That orphan rate increase will go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks, NOT you. This depends on how miners are connected. E.g. suppose there are three miners, A and B have fast connectivity between then, and C has a slow network. Suppose that A miners a block and B receives it in 1 second. C receives it in 6 seconds. This means that blocks mined by C during these ~5 seconds will be orphaned because B gets A's block first. Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? There are lots of equations that go into the is mining profitable equation: cost of power, Internet cost and connectivity, cost of capital, access to technology other miners don't have, inexpensive labor or rent, inexpensive cooling, ability to use waste heat... That's good. An equation with lots of variables has lots of different maximum solutions, and that means better decentralization -- there is less likely to be one perfect place or way to mine. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: I think this is a huge issue. You've been wandering around telling people that the blocksize will increase soon for months I think the strongest thing I've ever said is: There is consensus that the max block size much change sooner or later. There is not yet consensus on exactly how or when. I will be pushing to change it this year. This is what I will be pushing to change it this year looks like. -- -- 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
