Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-06-01 Thread Ricardo Filipe
I've been following the discussion of the block size limit and IMO it is clear that any constant block size limit is, as many have said before, just kicking the can down the road. My problem with the dynamic lower limit solution based on past blocks is that it doesn't account for usage spikes. I

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Tier Nolan
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: IMO it's not even clear there needs to be a size limit at all. Currently the 32mb message cap imposes one anyway If the plan is a fix once and for all, then that should be changed too. It could be set so that it is at least

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Mike Hearn
By the time a hard fork can happen, I expect average block size will be above 500K. Yes, possibly. Would you support a rule that was larger of 1MB or 2x average size ? That is strictly better than the situation we're in today. It is, but only by a trivial amount - hitting the limit is

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Mike Hearn
If the plan is a fix once and for all, then that should be changed too. It could be set so that it is at least some multiple of the max block size allowed. Well, but RAM is not infinite :-) Effectively what these caps are doing is setting the minimum hardware requirements for running a

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Gavin Andresen
What do other people think? If we can't come to an agreement soon, then I'll ask for help reviewing/submitting patches to Mike's Bitcoin-Xt project that implement a big increase now that grows over time so we may never have to go through all this rancor and debate again. I'll then ask for help

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread insecurity
Are you really that pig headed that you are going to try and blow up the entire system just to get your way? A bunch of ignorant redditors do not make consensus, mercifully. On 2015-05-29 12:39, Gavin Andresen wrote: What do other people think? If we can't come to an agreement soon, then

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Braun Brelin
How is this being pigheaded? In my opinion, this is leadership. If *something* isn't implemented soon, the network is going to have some real problems, right at the time when adoption is starting to accelerate. I've been seeing nothing but navel-gazing and circlejerks on this issue for weeks

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Tier Nolan
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: But if there is still no consensus among developers but the bigger blocks now movement is successful, I'll ask for help getting big miners to do the same, and use the soft-fork block version voting mechanism to

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Admin Istrator
What about trying the dynamic scaling method within the 20MB range + 1 year with a 40% increase of that cap? Until a way to dynamically scale is found, the cap will only continue to be an issue. With 20 MB + 40% yoy, we're either imposing an arbitrary cap later, or achieving less than great DOS

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Aaron Voisine
miners would definitely be squeezing out transactions / putting pressure to increase transaction fees I'd just like to re-iterate that transactions getting squeezed out (failure after a lengthy period of uncertainty) is a radical change from the current behavior of the network. There are plenty

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Bryan Cheng
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 5:39 AM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: What do other people think? If we can't come to an agreement soon, then I'll ask for help reviewing/submitting patches to Mike's Bitcoin-Xt project that implement a big increase now that grows over time so we may

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Gavin Andresen
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Tier Nolan tier.no...@gmail.com wrote: How do you intend to measure exchange/merchant acceptance? Public statements saying we're running software that is ready for bigger blocks. And looking at the version (aka user-agent) strings of publicly reachable nodes

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Mike Hearn
The measure is miner consensus. How do you intend to measure exchange/merchant acceptance? Asking them. In fact, we already have. I have been talking to well known people and CEOs in the Bitcoin community for some time now. *All* of them support bigger blocks, this includes: - Every

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Tier Nolan
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 3:09 PM, Tier Nolan tier.no...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: But if there is still no consensus among developers but the bigger blocks now movement is successful, I'll ask for help getting big miners

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-29 Thread Mike Hearn
And looking at the version (aka user-agent) strings of publicly reachable nodes on the network. (e.g. see the count at https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/ ) Yeah, though FYI Luke informed me last week that I somehow managed to take out the change to the user-agent string in Bitcoin XT,

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-28 Thread Gavin Andresen
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: As noted, many miners just accept the defaults. With your proposed change their target would effectively *drop* from 1mb to 800kb today, which seems crazy. That's the exact opposite of what is needed right now. I am very

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-28 Thread Pieter Wuille
until we have size-independent new block propagation I don't really believe that is possible. I'll argue why below. To be clear, this is not an argument against increasing the block size, only against using the assumption of size-independent propagation. There are several significant

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-28 Thread Peter Todd
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 01:19:44PM -0400, Gavin Andresen wrote: As for whether there should be fee pressure now or not: I have no opinion, besides we should make block propagation faster so there is no technical reason for miners to produce tiny blocks. I don't think us developers should be

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-28 Thread Mike Hearn
Twenty is scary. To whom? The only justification for the max size is DoS attacks, right? Back when Bitcoin had an average block size of 10kb, the max block size was 100x the average. Things worked fine, nobody was scared. The max block size is really a limit set by hardware capability, which

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-28 Thread Gavin Andresen
Can we hold off on bike-shedding the particular choice of parameters until people have a chance to weigh in on whether or not there is SOME set of dynamic parameters they would support right now? -- -- Gavin Andresen --

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-28 Thread Steven Pine
My understanding, which is very likely wrong in one way or another, is transaction size and block size are two slightly different things but perhaps it's so negligible that block size is a fine stand-in for total transaction throughput. Potentially Doubling the block size everyday is frankly

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-19 Thread Tier Nolan
On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 2:42 AM, Rusty Russell ru...@rustcorp.com.au wrote: OK. Be nice if these were cleaned up, but I guess it's a sunk cost. Yeah. On the plus side, as people spend their money, old UTXOs would be used up and then they would be included in the cost function. It is only

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-18 Thread Rusty Russell
Tier Nolan tier.no...@gmail.com writes: On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 1:22 AM, Rusty Russell ru...@rustcorp.com.au wrote: 3) ... or maybe not, if any consumed UTXO was generated before the soft fork (reducing Tier's perverse incentive). The incentive problem can be fixed by excluding UTXOs from

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-16 Thread Tier Nolan
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 1:22 AM, Rusty Russell ru...@rustcorp.com.au wrote: Some tweaks: 1) Nomenclature: call tx_size tx_cost and real_size tx_bytes? Fair enough. 2) If we have a reasonable hard *byte* limit, I don't think that we need the MAX(). In fact, it's probably OK to go

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-15 Thread Rusty Russell
Tier Nolan tier.no...@gmail.com writes: On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 4:36 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: An example would be tx_size = MAX( real_size 1, real_size + 4*utxo_created_size - 3*utxo_consumed_size). This could be implemented as a soft fork too. * 1MB hard size limit

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-13 Thread Tier Nolan
On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 4:36 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: An example would be tx_size = MAX( real_size 1, real_size + 4*utxo_created_size - 3*utxo_consumed_size). This could be implemented as a soft fork too. * 1MB hard size limit * 900kB soft limit S = block size U =

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: a while I think any algorithm that ties difficulty to block size is just a complicated way of dictating minimum fees. Thats not the long term effect or the motivation-- what you're seeing is that the subsidy gets in

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Thomas Voegtlin
Le 11/05/2015 00:31, Mark Friedenbach a écrit : I'm on my phone today so I'm somewhat constrained in my reply, but the key takeaway is that the proposal is a mechanism for miners to trade subsidy for the increased fees of a larger block. Necessarily it only makes sense to do so when the

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Thomas Voegtlin
Le 08/05/2015 22:33, Mark Friedenbach a écrit : * For each block, the miner is allowed to select a different difficulty (nBits) within a certain range, e.g. +/- 25% of the expected difficulty, and this miner-selected difficulty is used for the proof of work check. In addition to adjusting

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Gavin Andresen
Let me make sure I understand this proposal: On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 11:36 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: (*) I believe my currently favored formulation of general dynamic control idea is that each miner expresses in their coinbase a preferred size between some minimum (e.g.

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Mark Friedenbach
I'm on my phone today so I'm somewhat constrained in my reply, but the key takeaway is that the proposal is a mechanism for miners to trade subsidy for the increased fees of a larger block. Necessarily it only makes sense to do so when the marginal fee per KB exceeds the subsidy fee per KB. It

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Rob Golding
How much will that cost me? The network is hashing at 310PetaHash/sec right now. Takes 600 seconds to find a block, so 186,000PH per block 186,000 * 0.00038 = 70 extra PH If it takes 186,000 PH to find a block, and a block is worth 25.13 BTC (reward plus fees), that 70 PH costs: (25.13

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Owen Gunden
On 05/08/2015 11:36 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Another related point which has been tendered before but seems to have been ignored is that changing how the size limit is computed can help better align incentives and thus reduce risk. E.g. a major cost to the network is the UTXO impact of

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-10 Thread Mark Friedenbach
Micropayment channels are not pie in the sky proposals. They work today on Bitcoin as it is deployed without any changes. People just need to start using them. On May 10, 2015 11:03, Owen Gunden ogun...@phauna.org wrote: On 05/08/2015 11:36 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Another related point

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-09 Thread Gavin Andresen
RE: fixing sigop counting, and building in UTXO cost: great idea! One of the problems with this debate is it is easy for great ideas get lost in all the noise. RE: a hard upper limit, with a dynamic limit under it: I like that idea. Can we drill down on the hard upper limit? There are lots of

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-09 Thread Tier Nolan
On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 12:58 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: RE: fixing sigop counting, and building in UTXO cost: great idea! One of the problems with this debate is it is easy for great ideas get lost in all the noise. If the UTXO set cost is built in, UTXO database

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-09 Thread Peter Todd
On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 01:36:56AM +0300, Joel Joonatan Kaartinen wrote: such a contract is a possibility, but why would big owners give an exclusive right to such pools? It seems to me it'd make sense to offer those for any miner as long as the get paid a little for it. Especially when it's

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Mike Hearn
There are certainly arguments to be made for and against all of these proposals. The fixed 20mb cap isn't actually my proposal at all, it is from Gavin. I am supporting it because anything is better than nothing. Gavin originally proposed the block size be a function of time. That got dropped, I

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Clément Elbaz
Matt : I think proposal #1 and #3 are a lot better than #2, and #1 is my favorite. I see two problems with proposal #2. The first problem with proposal #2 is that, as we see in democracies, there is often a mismatch between the people conscious vote and these same people behavior. Relying on an

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Steven Pine
Block size scaling should be as transparent and simple as possible, like pegging it to total transactions per difficulty change. -- One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Alex Mizrahi
Adaptive schedules, i.e. those where block size limit depends not only on block height, but on other parameters as well, are surely attractive in the sense that the system can adapt to the actual use, but they also open a possibility of a manipulation. E.g. one of mining companies might try to

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Bryan Bishop
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:20 AM, Matt Whitlock b...@mattwhitlock.name wrote: - Perhaps the hard block size limit should be a function of the actual block sizes over some trailing sampling period. For example, take the median block size among the most recent 2016 blocks and multiply it by

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Peter Todd
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 03:32:00PM +0300, Joel Joonatan Kaartinen wrote: Matt, It seems you missed my suggestion about basing the maximum block size on the bitcoin days destroyed in transactions that are included in the block. I think it has potential for both scaling as well as keeping up a

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Mark Friedenbach
It is my professional opinion that raising the block size by merely adjusting a constant without any sort of feedback mechanism would be a dangerous and foolhardy thing to do. We are custodians of a multi-billion dollar asset, and it falls upon us to weigh the consequences of our own actions

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Gavin Andresen
I like the bitcoin days destroyed idea. I like lots of the ideas that have been presented here, on the bitcointalk forums, etc etc etc. It is easy to make a proposal, it is hard to wade through all of the proposals. I'm going to balance that equation by completely ignoring any proposal that

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Matt Whitlock
On Friday, 8 May 2015, at 3:32 pm, Joel Joonatan Kaartinen wrote: It seems you missed my suggestion about basing the maximum block size on the bitcoin days destroyed in transactions that are included in the block. I think it has potential for both scaling as well as keeping up a constant fee

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Mark Friedenbach
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Aaron Voisine vois...@gmail.com wrote: This is a clever way to tie block size to fees. I would just like to point out though that it still fundamentally is using hard block size limits to enforce scarcity. Transactions with below market fees will hang in limbo

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Joel Joonatan Kaartinen
such a contract is a possibility, but why would big owners give an exclusive right to such pools? It seems to me it'd make sense to offer those for any miner as long as the get paid a little for it. Especially when it's as simple as offering an incomplete transaction with the appropriate SIGHASH

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Aaron Voisine
This is a clever way to tie block size to fees. I would just like to point out though that it still fundamentally is using hard block size limits to enforce scarcity. Transactions with below market fees will hang in limbo for days and fail, instead of failing immediately by not propagating, or

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Aaron Voisine
That's fair, and we've implemented child-pays-for-parent for spending unconfirmed inputs in breadwallet. But what should the behavior be when those options aren't understood/implemented/used? My argument is that the less risky, more conservative default fallback behavior should be either

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Joel Joonatan Kaartinen
Matt, It seems you missed my suggestion about basing the maximum block size on the bitcoin days destroyed in transactions that are included in the block. I think it has potential for both scaling as well as keeping up a constant fee pressure. If tuned properly, it should both stop spamming and

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:33 PM, Mark Friedenbach m...@friedenbach.org wrote: These rules create an incentive environment where raising the block size has a real cost associated with it: a more difficult hashcash target for the same subsidy reward. For rational miners that cost must be

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Raystonn
It seems to me all this would do is encourage 0-transaction blocks, crippling the network. Individual blocks don't have a maximum block size, they have an actual block size. Rational miners would pick blocks to minimize difficulty, lowering the effective maximum block size as defined by the

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function

2015-05-08 Thread Mark Friedenbach
In a fee-dominated future, replace-by-fee is not an opt-in feature. When you create a transaction, the wallet presents a range of fees that it expects you might pay. It then signs copies of the transaction with spaced fees from this interval and broadcasts the lowest fee first. In the user