Block Size Increase

Recently there has been a flurry of posts by Gavin at http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/ which advocate strongly for increasing the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.

Block size is a question to which there is no answer, but which certainly has a LOT of technical tradeoffs to consider. I know a lot of people here have varying levels of strong or very strong opinions about this, and the fact that it is not being discussed in a technical community publicly anywhere is rather disappointing.

So, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I'll provide a little bait to get some responses and hope the discussion opens up into an honest comparison of the tradeoffs here. Certainly a consensus in this kind of technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious commitment to blocksize increase.

Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively consistently full or very nearly full. 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).

This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].

Matt

[1] https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/595741967759335426

I don't have strong opinion @ block size topic.

But if there'll be a fork, PLEASE, include SIGHASH_WITHINPUTVALUE ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181734.0) or its alternative. All developers of lightweight (blockchain-less) clients will adore you!

slush

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me> wrote:

> Recently there has been a flurry of posts by Gavin at
> http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/ which advocate strongly for increasing
> the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this
> mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.
>
> Block size is a question to which there is no answer, but which
> certainly has a LOT of technical tradeoffs to consider. I know a lot of
> people here have varying levels of strong or very strong opinions about
> this, and the fact that it is not being discussed in a technical
> community publicly anywhere is rather disappointing.
>
> So, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I'll provide a little bait to
> get some responses and hope the discussion opens up into an honest
> comparison of the tradeoffs here. Certainly a consensus in this kind of
> technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious
> commitment to blocksize increase.
>
> Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
> increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires
> that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively
> consistently full or very nearly full. 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).
>
> This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building
> systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while
> pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies
> which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a
> blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a
> database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to
> focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to
> Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].
>
> Matt
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/595741967759335426
>
>
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On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:12 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me> wrote:

> Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
> increase in the near future.

Miners can already soft-fork to reduce the maximum block size. If 51% of miners agree to a 250kB block size, then that is the maximum block size.

The question being discussed is what is the maximum block size merchants and users will accept. This puts a reasonable limit on the maximum size miners can increase the block size to.

In effect, the block size is set by the minimum of the miner's and the merchants/user's size.min(miner, merchants/users).

> This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building
> systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while
> pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies
> which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a
> blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a
> database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to
> focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to
> Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].
>

Would you accept a rule that the maximum size is 20MB (doubling every 2 years), but that miners have an efficient method for choosing a lower size?

If miners could specify the maximum block size in their block headers, then they could coordinate to adjust the block size. If 75% vote to lower the size, then it is lowered and vice versa for raiding.

Every 2016 blocks, the votes are counter. If the 504th lowest of the 2016 blocks is higher than the previous size, then the size is set to that size. Similarly, if the 504th highest is lower than the previous size, it becomes the new size.

There could be 2 default trajectories. The reference client might always vote to double the size every 4 years.

To handle large blocks (>32MB) requires a change to the p2p protocol message size limits, or a way to split blocks over multiple messages.

It would be nice to add new features to any hard-fork.

I favour adding an auxiliary header. The Merkle root in the header could be replaced with hash(merkle_root | hash(aux_header)). This is a fairly simple change, but helps with things like commitments. One of the fields in the auxiliary header could be an extra nonce field. This would mean fast regeneration of the merkle root for ASIC miners. This is a pretty simple change.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on block size either…but if we’re going to do a hard fork, let’s use this as an opportunity to create a good process for hard forks (which we’ll inevitably need to do again in the future). The change in block size is a very simple change that still allows us to explore all the complexities involved with deployment of hard forks. Let’s not just do a one-off ad-hoc thing.

- Eric Lombrozo

> On May 6, 2015, at 3:30 PM, slush <slush@centrum•cz> wrote:
>
> I don't have strong opinion @ block size topic.
>
> But if there'll be a fork, PLEASE, include SIGHASH_WITHINPUTVALUE (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181734.0 <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181734.0>) or its alternative. All developers of lightweight (blockchain-less) clients will adore you!
>
> slush
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me <mailto:bitcoin-list@bluematt.me>> wrote:
> Recently there has been a flurry of posts by Gavin at
> http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/ <http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/> which advocate strongly for increasing
> the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this
> mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.
>
> Block size is a question to which there is no answer, but which
> certainly has a LOT of technical tradeoffs to consider. I know a lot of
> people here have varying levels of strong or very strong opinions about
> this, and the fact that it is not being discussed in a technical
> community publicly anywhere is rather disappointing.
>
> So, at the risk of starting a flamewar, I'll provide a little bait to
> get some responses and hope the discussion opens up into an honest
> comparison of the tradeoffs here. Certainly a consensus in this kind of
> technical community should be a basic requirement for any serious
> commitment to blocksize increase.
>
> Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
> increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires
> that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively
> consistently full or very nearly full. 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).
>
> This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building
> systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while
> pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies
> which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a
> blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a
> database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to
> focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to
> Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].
>
> Matt
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/595741967759335426 <https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/595741967759335426>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 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.
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> Bitcoin-development mailing list
> Bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net <mailto:Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 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
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I'm not so much opposed to a block size increase as I am opposed to a hard fork. My problem with a hard fork is that everyone and their brother wants to seize the opportunity of a hard fork to insert their own pet feature, and such a mad rush of lightly considered, obscure feature additions would be extremely risky for Bitcoin. If it could be guaranteed that raising the block size limit would be the only incompatible change introduced in the hard fork, then I would support it, but I strongly fear that the hard fork itself will become an excuse to change other aspects of the system in ways that will have unintended and possibly disastrous consequences.

Replies inline.

On 05/06/15 22:44, Tier Nolan wrote:

> On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:12 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me
> <mailto:bitcoin-list@bluematt.me>> wrote:
>     Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
>     increase in the near future.

-snip-

> The question being discussed is what is the maximum block size merchants
> and users will accept.  This puts a reasonable limit on the maximum size
> miners can increase the block size to.
>
> In effect, the block size is set by the minimum of the miner's and the
> merchants/user's size.min(miner, merchants/users).

Indeed, "the bitcoin community of users and miners can decide to do whatever they want", but this is univeral - "they" could decide whatever they want if "they" want to hardfork. That said, "we" should be having a rigorous technical discussion about whether it is sane to recommend a given course of action by releasing software which makes it happen.

>
>     This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building
>     systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while
>     pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies
>     which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a
>     blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a
>     database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to
>     focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to
>     Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].
>
>
> Would you accept a rule that the maximum size is 20MB (doubling every 2
> years), but that miners have an efficient method for choosing a lower size?
>
> If miners could specify the maximum block size in their block headers,
> then they could coordinate to adjust the block size.  If 75% vote to
> lower the size, then it is lowered and vice versa for raiding.
>
> Every 2016 blocks, the votes are counter.  If the 504th lowest of the
> 2016 blocks is higher than the previous size, then the size is set to
> that size.  Similarly, if the 504th highest is lower than the previous
> size, it becomes the new size.
>
> There could be 2 default trajectories.  The reference client might
> always vote to double the size every 4 years.
>
> To handle large blocks (>32MB) requires a change to the p2p protocol
> message size limits, or a way to split blocks over multiple messages.
>
> It would be nice to add new features to any hard-fork.
>
> I favour adding an auxiliary header.  The Merkle root in the header
> could be replaced with hash(merkle_root | hash(aux_header)).  This is a
> fairly simple change, but helps with things like commitments.  One of
> the fields in the auxiliary header could be an extra nonce field.  This
> would mean fast regeneration of the merkle root for ASIC miners.  This
> is a pretty simple change.

The point of the hard block size limit is exactly because giving miners free rule to do anything they like with their blocks would allow them to do any number of crazy attacks. The incentives for miners to pick block sizes are no where near compatible with what allows the network to continue to run in a decentralized manner.

For now, lets leave the discussion to JUST the block size increase. If it helps - everyone should assume that their pet feature is included in a hard fork or, if you prefer, that no other features are included in a hard fork.

On 05/06/15 23:11, Matt Whitlock wrote:

> I'm not so much opposed to a block size increase as I am opposed to a hard fork. My problem with a hard fork is that everyone and their brother wants to seize the opportunity of a hard fork to insert their own pet feature, and such a mad rush of lightly considered, obscure feature additions would be extremely risky for Bitcoin. If it could be guaranteed that raising the block size limit would be the only incompatible change introduced in the hard fork, then I would support it, but I strongly fear that the hard fork itself will become an excuse to change other aspects of the system in ways that will have unintended and possibly disastrous consequences.
>

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me> wrote:

> The point of the hard block size limit is exactly because giving miners
> free rule to do anything they like with their blocks would allow them to
> do any number of crazy attacks. The incentives for miners to pick block
> sizes are no where near compatible with what allows the network to
> continue to run in a decentralized manner.
>

Miners can always reduce the block size (if they coordinate). Increasing the maximum block size doesn't necessarily cause an increase. A majority of miners can soft-fork to set the limit lower than the hard limit.

Setting the hard-fork limit higher means that a soft fork can be used to adjust the limit in the future.

The reference client would accept blocks above the soft limit for wallet purposes, but not build on them. Blocks above the hard limit would be rejected completely.

On 05/06/15 23:33, Tier Nolan wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me
> <mailto:bitcoin-list@bluematt.me>> wrote:
>
>     The point of the hard block size limit is exactly because giving miners
>     free rule to do anything they like with their blocks would allow them to
>     do any number of crazy attacks. The incentives for miners to pick block
>     sizes are no where near compatible with what allows the network to
>     continue to run in a decentralized manner.
>
>
> Miners can always reduce the block size (if they coordinate).
> Increasing the maximum block size doesn't necessarily cause an
> increase.  A majority of miners can soft-fork to set the limit lower
> than the hard limit.

Sure, of course.

> Setting the hard-fork limit higher means that a soft fork can be used to
> adjust the limit in the future.
>
> The reference client would accept blocks above the soft limit for wallet
> purposes, but not build on them.  Blocks above the hard limit would be
> rejected completely.

Yes, but this does NOT make an actual policy. Note that the vast majority of miners already apply their own patches to Bitcoin Core, so applying one more is not all that hard. When blocks start to become limited (ie there is any fee left on the table by transactions not included in a block) there becomes incentive for miners to change that behavior pretty quick. Not just that, the vast majority of the hashpower is behind very large miners, who have little to no decentralization pressure. This results in very incompatible incentives, mainly that the incentive would be for the large miners to interconnect in a private network and generate only maximum-size blocks, creating a strong centralization pressure in the network.

On 5/6/2015 3:12 PM, Matt Corallo wrote:

> Long-term incentive compatibility requires
> that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively
> consistently full or very nearly full.

I think it's way too early to even consider a future era when the fiat value of the block reward is no longer the biggest-by-far mining incentive.

Creating fee pressure means driving some people to choose something else, not bitcoin. "Too many people using bitcoin" is nowhere on the list of problems today. It's reckless to tinker with adoption in hopes of spurring innovation on speculation, while a "can kick" is available.

Adoption is currently at miniscule, test-flight, relatively insignificant levels when compared to global commerce. As Gavin discussed in the article, under "Block size and miner fees… again," the best way to maximize miner incentives is to focus on doing things that are likely to increase adoption, which, in our fiat-dominated world, lead to a justifiably increased exchange rate.

Any innovation attractive enough to relieve the block size pressure will do so just as well without artificial stimulus.

Thanks for kicking off the discussion.

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 5:12 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me> wrote:

> the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this
> mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.

Well, there has been significant public discussion in #bitcoin-wizards on irc.freenode.net which is available in public logs, specifically about why increasing the max block size is kicking the can down the road while possibly compromising blockchain security. There were many excellent objections that were raised that, sadly, I see are not referenced at all in the recent media blitz. Frankly I can't help but feel that if contributions, like those from #bitcoin-wizards, have been ignored in lieu of technical analysis, and the absence of discussion on this mailing list, that I feel perhaps there are other subtle and extremely important technical details that are completely absent from this--and other-- proposals. I have some rather general thoughts to offer.

Secured decentralization is the most important and most interesting property of bitcoin. Everything else is rather trivial and could be achieved millions of times more efficiently with conventional technology. Our technical work should be informed by the technical nature of the system we have constructed.

I suspect that as bitcoin continues to grow in all dimensions and metrics, that we will see an unending wave of those who are excited by the idea of Something Different in the face of archaic, crumbling software and procedures in the rest of the financial world. Money has found its way into every aspect of human life. There's no doubt in my mind that bitcoin will always see the most extreme campaigns and the most extreme misunderstandings. Like moths to a flame or water in the desert, almost everyone is excited by ANY status quo change whatsoever. This is something that we have to be vigilante about, because their excitement is motivation to do excellent work, not simply any work. For some who are excited about general status quo changes that bitcoin represents, they may not mind if bitcoin decentralization disappears and is replaced with just a handful of centralized nodes. Whereas for development purposes we must hold ourselves to extremely high standards before proposing changes, especially to the public, that have the potential to be unsafe and economically unsafe. We have examples from NASA about how to engineer extremely fault tolerant systems, and we have examples from Linux about how to have high standards in open-source projects. Safety is absolutely critical, even in the face of seemingly irrational excuberance of others who want to scale to trillions of daily coffee transactions individually stored forever in the blockchain.

When designing bitcoin or even some other system, an important design target is what the system should be capable of. How many transactions should the system perform? What is the correct number of transactions for a healthy, modern civilization to perform every day? And how fast should that (not) grow? Should we allow for 2 billion trillion coffee transactions every day, or what about 100 trillion transactions per second? I suspect that these sorts of questions are entirely unanswerable and boring. So in the absence of technical targets to reach during the design phase, I suspect that Jeff Garzik was right when he pointed out a few months ago that bitcoin is good at settlement and clearing. There are many potential technical solutions for aggregating millions (trillions?) of transactions into tiny bundles. As a small proof-of-concept, imagine two parties sending transactions back and forth 100 million times. Instead of recording every transaction, you could record the start state and the end state, and end up with two transactions or less. That's a 100 million fold, without modifying max block size and without potentially compromising secured decentralization.

The MIT group should listen up and get to work figuring out how to measure decentralization and its security :-). Maybe we should be collectively pestering Andrew Miller to do this, too. No pressure, dude. Getting this measurement right would be really beneficial because we would have a more academic and technical understanding to work with. I would also characterize this as high priority next to the "formally verified correctness proofs for Script and libbitcoinconsensus".

Also, I think that getting this out in the open on this mailing list is an excellent step forward.

- Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 10:12 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me> wrote: > Recently there has been a flurry of posts by Gavin at > http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/ which advocate strongly for increasing > the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this > mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.

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.

So please forgive me for the more than typical disorganization in this message; I've been caught a bit flatfooted on this and I'm trying to catch up. I'm juggling a fair amount of sudden pressure in my mailbox, and trying to navigate complex discussions in about eight different forums concurrently.

There have been about a kazillion pages of discussion elsewhere (e.g. public IRC and Bitcointalk; private discussions in the past), not all of which is well known, and I can't hope to summarize even a tiny fraction of it in a single message-- but that's no reason to not start on it.

> Block size is a question to which there is no answer, but which >

certainly has a LOT of technical tradeoffs to consider.

There are several orthogonal angles from which block size is a concern (both increases and non-increases). Most of them have subtle implications and each are worth its own research paper or six, so it can be difficult to only touch them slightly without creating a gish gallop that is hard to respond to.

We're talking about tuning one of the fundamental scarcities of the Bitcoin Economy and cryptosystem--leaving the comfort of "rule by math" and venturing into the space of political decisions; elsewhere you'd expect to see really in-depth neutral analysis of the risks and tradeoffs, technically and economically. And make no mistake: there are real tradeoffs here, though we don't know their exact contours.

Fundamentally this question exposes ideological differences between people interested in Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin more of a digital gold or is it more of a competitor to Square? Is Bitcoin something that should improve personal and commercial autonomy from central banks? From commercial banks? Or from just the existing status-quo commercial banks? What are people's fundamental rights with Bitcoin? Do participants have a right to mine? How much control should third parties have over their transactions? How much security must be provided? Is there a deadline for world domination or bust? Is Bitcoin only for the developed world? Must it be totally limited by the most impoverished parts of the world?

Bitcoin exists at the intersection of many somewhat overlapping belief systems--and people of many views can find that Bitcoin meets their needs even when they don't completely agree politically. When Bitcoin is changed fundamentally, via a hard fork, to have different properties, the change can create winners or losers (if nothing else, then in terms of the kind of ideology supported by it).

There are non-trivial number of people who hold extremes on any of these general belief patterns; Even among the core developers there is not a consensus on Bitcoin's optimal role in society and the commercial marketplace.

To make it clear how broad the views go, even without getting into monetary policy... some people even argue that Bitcoin should act as censor-resistant storage system for outlawed content; -- I think this view is unsound, not achievable with the technology, and largely incompatible with Bitcoin's use as a money (because it potentially creates an externalized legal/harassment liability for node operators); but these are my personal value judgments; the view is earnestly held by more than a few; and that's a group that certainly wants the largest possible blocksizes (though even then that won't be enough).

The subject is complicated even more purely on the technical side by the fact that Bitcoin has a layered security model which is not completely defined or understood: Bitcoin is secure if a majority of hashrate is "honest" (where "honesty" is a technical term which means "follows the right rules" without fail, even at a loss), but why might it be honest? That sends us into complex economic and social arguments, and the security thresholds start becoming worse when we assume some miners are economically rational instead of "honest".

> increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires
> that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively >

consistently full or very nearly full. What we see today are

To elaborate, in my view there is a at least a two fold concern on this particular ("Long term Mining incentives") front:

One is that the long-held argument is that security of the Bitcoin system in the long term depends on fee income funding autonomous, anonymous, decentralized miners profitably applying enough hash-power to make reorganizations infeasible.

For fees to achieve this purpose, there seemingly must be an effective scarcity of capacity. The fact that verifying and transmitting transactions has a cost isn't enough, because all the funds go to pay that cost and none to the POW "artificial" cost; e.g., if verification costs 1 then the market price for fees should converge to 1, and POW cost will converge towards zero because they adapt to whatever is being applied. Moreover, the transmission and verification costs can be perfectly amortized by using large centralized pools (and efficient differential block transmission like the "O(1)" idea) as you can verify one time instead of N times, so to the extent that verification/bandwidth is a non-negligible cost to miners at all, it's a strong pressure to centralize. You can understand this intuitively: think for example of carbon credit cap-and-trade: the trade part doesn't work without an actual cap; if everyone was born with a 1000 petaton carbon balance, the market price for credits would be zero and the program couldn't hope 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: 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.)

This area has been subject to a small amount of academic research (e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519). But there is still much that is unclear.

The second is that when subsidy has fallen well below fees, the incentive to move the blockchain forward goes away. An optimal rational miner would be best off forking off the current best block in order to capture its fees, rather than moving the blockchain forward, until they hit the maximum. That's where the "backlog" comment comes from, since when there is a sufficient backlog it's better to go forward. I'm not aware of specific research into this subquestion; it's somewhat fuzzy because of uncertainty about the security model. If we try to say that Bitcoin should work even in the face of most miners being profit-maximizing instead of altruistically-honest, we must assume the chain will not more forward so long as a block isn't full. In reality there is more altruism than zero; there are public pressures; there is laziness, etc.

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.

So far the mining ecosystem has become incredibly centralized over time. I believe I am the only remaining committer who mines, and only a few 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... Rightfully we should be regarding this an an emergency, and probably should have been have since 2011. This doesn't bode well for our ability to respond if a larger blocksize goes poorly. In kicking the can with the trivial change to just bump the size, are we making an implicit decision to go down a path that has a conclusion we don't want?

(There are also shorter term mining incentives concerns; which Peter Todd has written more about, that I'll omit for now)

> pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies
> which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a

I made a few relevant points back in 2011 (https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=historysubmit&diff=14273&oldid=14112) after Dan Kaminsky argued that Bitcoin's decentralization was pretext: that it was patently centralized since scaling directly in the network would undermine decentralization, that the Bitcoin network necessarily makes particular tradeoffs which prevent it from concurrently being all things to all people. But tools like the Lightning network proposal could well allow us to hit a greater spectrum of demands at once--including secure zero-confirmation (something that larger blocksizes reduce if anything), which is important for many applications. With the right technology I believe we can have our cake and eat it too, but there needs to be a reason to build it; the security and decentralization level of Bitcoin imposes a _hard_ upper limit on anything that can be based on it.

Another key point here is that the small bumps in blocksize which wouldn't clearly knock the system into a largely centralized mode--small constants--are small enough that they don't quantitatively change the operation of the system; they don't open up new applications that aren't possible today. Deathandtaxes on the forum argued that Bitcoin needs a several hundred megabyte blocksize to directly meet the worldwide transaction needs _without retail_... Why without retail? Retail needs near instant soft security, which cannot be achieved directly with a global decentralized blockchain.

I don't think 1MB is magic; it always exists relative to widely-deployed technology, sociology, and economics. But these factors aren't a simple function; the procedure I'd prefer would be something like this: if there is a standing backlog, we-the-community of users look to indicators to gauge if the network is losing decentralization and then double the hard limit with proper controls to allow smooth adjustment without fees going to zero (see the past proposals for automatic block size controls that let miners increase up to a hard maximum over the median if they mine at quadratically harder difficulty), and we don't increase if it appears it would be at a substantial increase in centralization risk. Hardfork changes should only be made if they're almost completely uncontroversial--where virtually everyone can look at the available data and say "yea, that isn't undermining my property rights or future use of Bitcoin; it's no big deal". Unfortunately, every indicator I can think of except fee totals has been going in the wrong direction almost monotonically along with the blockchain size increase since 2012 when we started hitting full blocks and responded by increasing the default soft target. This is frustrating; from a clean slate analysis of network health I think my conclusion would be to _decrease_ the limit below the current 300k/txn/day level.

This is obviously not acceptable, so instead many people--myself included--have been working feverishly hard behind the scenes on Bitcoin Core to increase the scalability. This work isn't small-potatoes boring software engineering stuff; I mean even my personal contributions include things like inventing a wholly new generic algebraic optimization applicable to all EC signature schemes that increases performance by 4%, and that is before getting into the R&D stuff that hasn't really borne fruit yet, like fraud proofs. Today Bitcoin Core is easily >100 times faster to synchronize and relay than when I first got involved on the same hardware, but these improvements have been swallowed by the growth. The ironic thing is that our frantic efforts to keep ahead and not lose decentralization have both not been enough (by the best measures, full node usage is the lowest its been since 2011 even though the user base is huge now) and yet also so much that people could seriously talk about increasing the block size to something gigantic like 20MB. This sounds less reasonable when you realize that even at 1MB we'd likely have a smoking hole in the ground if not for existing enormous efforts to make scaling not come at a loss of decentralization.

I'm curious as to what discussions people have seen; e.g., are people even here aware of these concerns? Are you aware of things like the hashcash mediated dynamic blocksize limiting? About proposals like lightning network (instant transactions and massive scale, in exchange for some short term DOS risk if a counterparty opts out)? Do people (other than Mike Hearn; I guess) think a future where everyone depends on a small number of "Google scale" node operations for the system is actually okay? (I think not, and if so we're never going to agree--but it can be helpful to understand when a disagreement is ideological).

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 10:12:14PM +0000, Matt Corallo wrote:

> Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
> increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires
> that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively
> consistently full or very nearly full. 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).

Agreed.

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"

    Abstract
    --------

    We study the economics of Bitcoin transaction fees in a simple static
    partial equilibrium model with the specificity that the system security
    is directly linked to the total computational power of miners. We show
    that any situation with a fixed fee is equivalent to another situation
    with a limited block size. In both cases, we give the optimal value of
    the transaction fee or of the block size. We also show that making the
    block size a non binding constraint and, in the same time, letting the
    fee be fixed as the outcome of a decentralized competitive market cannot
    guarantee the very existence of Bitcoin in the long-term.

-http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519

In short, without either a fixed blocksize or fixed fee per transaction Bitcoin will will not survive as there is no viable way to pay for PoW security. The latter option - fixed fee per transaction - is non-trivial to implement in a way that's actually meaningful - it's easy to give miners "kickbacks" - leaving us with a fixed blocksize.

> This allows the well-funded Bitcoin ecosystem to continue building
> systems which rely on transactions moving quickly into blocks while
> pretending these systems scale. Thus, instead of working on technologies

I think this lack of understanding of the limitations of blockchain tech is very dangerous, never mind, downright misleading. I keep running into startups at conferences with completely unrealistic ideas about how large they'll be able to grow their on-blockchain businesses. For example, a few weeks ago at the Stanford blockchain conference I spoke to a company planning on using multisig escrow contracts to settle financial instruments, and expected to be doing about as many transactions/day on the blockchain for their business within a year or so as all other Bitcoin users currently do combined. These guys quite frankly had no understanding of the issues, and had apparently based their plans on the highly optimistic Bitcoin wiki page on scalability.(1) (I'd fix this now, but the wiki seems to not be allowing logins)

We'd do a lot of startups a lot of good to give them accurate, and honest, advice about the scalability of the system. The wiki definitely isn't that. Neither is the bitcoin.org developer documentation(2), which doesn't mention scalability at all.

> which bring Bitcoin's trustlessness to systems which scale beyond a
> blockchain's necessarily slow and (compared to updating numbers in a
> database) expensive settlement, the ecosystem as a whole continues to
> focus on building centralized platforms and advocate for changes to
> Bitcoin which allow them to maintain the status quo[1].

Even a relatively small increase to 20MB will greatly reduce the number of people who can participate fully in Bitcoin, creating an environment where the next increase requires the consent of an even smaller portion of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Where does that stop? What's the proposed mechanism that'll create an incentive and social consensus to not just 'kick the can down the road'(3) and further centralize but actually scale up Bitcoin the hard way? The only proposal that I've seen that attempts to do this is John Dillon's proof-of-stake blocksize vote(4), and that is far from getting consensus.

1) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
2) https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide
3) http://gavinandresen.ninja/it-must-be-done-but-is-not-a-panacea
4) http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02323.html

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 11:41:37PM +0000, Matt Corallo wrote:

> Yes, but this does NOT make an actual policy. Note that the vast
> majority of miners already apply their own patches to Bitcoin Core, so
> applying one more is not all that hard. When blocks start to become
> limited (ie there is any fee left on the table by transactions not
> included in a block) there becomes incentive for miners to change that
> behavior pretty quick. Not just that, the vast majority of the hashpower
> is behind very large miners, who have little to no decentralization
> pressure. This results in very incompatible incentives, mainly that the
> incentive would be for the large miners to interconnect in a private
> network and generate only maximum-size blocks, creating a strong
> centralization pressure in the network.

I'll also point out that miners with the goal of finding more blocks than their competition - a viable long-term strategy to increase market share and/or a short-term strategy to get more transaction fees - actually have a perverse incentive(1) to ensure their blocks do *not* get to more than ~30% of the hashing power. The main thing holding them back from doing that is that the inflation subsidy is still quite high - better to get the reward now than try to push your competition out of business.

It's plausible that with a limited blocksize there won't be an opportunity to delay propagation by broadcasting larger blocks - if blocks propagate in a matter of seconds worst case there's no opportunity for gaming the system. But it does strongly show that we must build systems where that worst case propagation time in all circumstances is very short relative to the block interval.

1) http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg03200.html

On 05/07/2015 03:49 AM, 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"

..for some very strange definitions of "good".

That paper may present valid game theory, yet game theory has a well-known limitation when it comes to predicting real world behavior in that the predictions are only as good as the simplified model those predictions are based on is accurate.

At the very least, we should wait to draw any conclusions from that paper until it has been sanity checked by a praxeological review.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@bluematt•me> wrote:

> Recently there has been a flurry of posts by Gavin at
> http://gavinandresen.svbtle.com/ which advocate strongly for increasing
> the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this
> mailing list in several years as far as I can tell.
>

Thanks for bringing this up. I'll try to keep my arguments brief, to avoid a long wall of text. I may be re-iterating some things that have been said before, though.

I am - in general - in favor of increasing the size blocks: as technology grows, there is no reason why the systems built on them can't scale proportionally. I have so far not commented much about this, in a hope to avoid getting into a public debate, but the way seems to be going now, worries me greatly.

* Controversial hard forks. I hope the mailing list here today already proves it is a controversial issue. Independent of personal opinions pro or against, I don't think we can do a hard fork that is controversial in nature. Either the result is effectively a fork, and pre-existing coins can be spent once on both sides (effectively failing Bitcoin's primary purpose), or the result is one side forced to upgrade to something they dislike - effectively giving a power to developers they should never have. Quoting someone: "I did not sign up to be part of a central banker's committee".

* The reason for increasing is "need". If "we need more space in blocks" is the reason to do an upgrade, it won't stop after 20 MB. There is nothing fundamental possible with 20 MB blocks that isn't with 1 MB blocks. Changetip does not put their microtransactions on the chain, not with 1 MB, and I doubt they would with 20 MB blocks. The reason for increase should be "because we choose to accept the trade-offs".

* Misrepresentation of the trade-offs. You can argue all you want that none of the effects of larger blocks are particularly damaging, so everything is fine. They will damage something (see below for details), and we should analyze these effects, and be honest about them, and present them as a trade-off made we choose to make to scale the system better. If you just ask people if they want more transactions, of course you'll hear yes. If you ask people if they want to pay less taxes, I'm sure the vast majority will agree as well.

* Miner centralization. There is currently, as far as I know, no technology that can relay and validate 20 MB blocks across the planet, in a manner fast enough to avoid very significant costs to mining. There is work in progress on this (including Gavin's IBLT-based relay, or Greg's block network coding), but I don't think we should be basing the future of the economics of the system on undemonstrated ideas. Without those (or even with), the result may be that miners self-limit the size of their blocks to propagate faster, but if this happens, larger, better-connected, and more centrally-located groups of miners gain a competitive advantage by being able to produce larger blocks. I would like to point out that there is nothing evil about this - a simple feedback to determine an optimal block size for an individual miner will result in larger blocks for better connected hash power. If we do not want miners to have this ability, "we" (as in: those using full nodes) should demand limitations that prevent it. One such limitation is a block size limit (whatever it is).

* Ability to use a full node. I very much dislike the trend of people saying "we need to encourage people to run full nodes, in order to make the network more decentralized". Running 1000 nodes which are otherwise unused only gives some better ability for full nodes to download the block chain, or for SPV nodes to learn about transactions (or be Sybil-attacked...). However, *using* a full node for validating your business (or personal!) transactions empowers you to using a financial system that requires less trust in *anyone* (not even in a decentralized group of peers) than anything else. Moreover, using a full node is what given you power of the systems' rules, as anyone who wants to change it now needs to convince you to upgrade. And yes, 20 MB blocks will change people's ability to use full nodes, even if the costs are small.

* Skewed incentives for improvements. I think I can personally say that I'm responsible for most of the past years' performance improvements in Bitcoin Core. And there is a lot of room for improvement left there - things like silly waiting loops, single-threaded network processing, huge memory sinks, lock contention, ... which in my opinion don't nearly get the attention they deserve. This is in addition to more pervasive changes like optimizing the block transfer protocol, support for orthogonal systems with a different security/scalability trade-off like Lightning, making full validation optional, ... Call me cynical, but without actual pressure to work on these, I doubt much will change. Increasing the size of blocks now will simply make it cheap enough to continue business as usual for a while - while forcing a massive cost increase (and not just a monetary one) on the entire ecosystem.

* Fees and long-term incentives. I put this last, not because I don't think it is not serious, but because I don't understand nearly enough about it. I'll let others comment.

I don't think 1 MB is optimal. Block size is a compromise between scalability of transactions and verifiability of the system. A system with 10 transactions per day that is verifiable by a pocket calculator is not useful, as it would only serve a few large bank's settlements. A system which can deal with every coffee bought on the planet, but requires a Google-scale data center to verify is also not useful, as it would be trivially out-competed by a VISA-like design. The usefulness needs in a balance, and there is no optimal choice for everyone. We can choose where that balance lies, but we must accept that this is done as a trade-off, and that that trade-off will have costs such as hardware costs, decreasing anonymity, less independence, smaller target audience for people able to fully validate, ...

Choose wisely.

Thanks for reading this,

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.

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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:25 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

> 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.
>

Would you please explain where this 12 months timeframe comes from?

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@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 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.

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. That would be the beginning of a true "fee market", something that Gavin used to say was his #1 priority not so long ago (which seems contradictory with his current efforts to avoid that from happening). Having a true fee market seems clearly an advantage. What are supposedly disastrous negative parts of this plan that make an alternative plan (ie: increasing the block size) so necessary and obvious. I think the advocates of the size increase are failing to explain the disadvantages of maintaining the current size. It feels like the explanation are missing because it should be somehow obvious how the sky will burn if we don't increase the block size soon. But, well, it is not obvious to me, so please elaborate on why having a fee market (instead of just an price estimator for a market that doesn't even really exist) would be a disaster.

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 <jtimon@jtimon•cc> wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@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 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.
>
> 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.
> That would be the beginning of a true "fee market", something that
> Gavin used to say was his #1 priority not so long ago (which seems
> contradictory with his current efforts to avoid that from happening).
> Having a true fee market seems clearly an advantage.
> What are supposedly disastrous negative parts of this plan that make
> an alternative plan (ie: increasing the block size) so necessary and
> obvious.
> I think the advocates of the size increase are failing to explain the
> disadvantages of maintaining the current size. It feels like the
> explanation are missing because it should be somehow obvious how the
> sky will burn if we don't increase the block size soon.
> But, well, it is not obvious to me, so please elaborate on why having
> a fee market (instead of just an price estimator for a market that
> doesn't even really exist) would be a disaster.
>
>
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On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 10:12:14PM +0000, Matt Corallo wrote:

> Personally, I'm rather strongly against any commitment to a block size
> increase in the near future. Long-term incentive compatibility requires
> that there be some fee pressure, and that blocks be relatively
> consistently full or very nearly full. 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).

I'm weakly against a block size increase in the near future. Some arguments follow. For sake of brevity, this ignores the inherent practical and political issues in scheduling a hardfork.

Against:

1. The everyone-verifies-everything approach inherently doesn't scale well. Yes, it is possible to increase the capacity, within limits, without completely destroying the system, but if scaling turns out to be a success, even a 20-fold increase is just a drop in the bucket (this will not make a decentralized Changetip possible). The gain will always be linear, at a total cost that scales in the number of (full node) users times the block size. The whole idea of everyone verifying the whole world's bus tickets and coffee purchases seems ludicrous to me. For true scaling, as well as decentralized microtransactions, the community needs to work on non-centralized 'level 2' protocols for transactions, for example the Lightning network.

  I prefer not to rely on faith that 'Moore's law' - which isn't a physical law but a trend - will save us. And it doesn't so much apply to communication bandwidth as its techniques are more diverse. E.g. for Bitsat, 20MB blocks will push the limit.

2a. Pushing up bandwidth and CPU usage will, inevitably, push people at the lower end away from running their own full nodes. Mind you, the sheer number of full nodes is not the issue, but Bitcoin's security model is based on being able to verify the shared consensus on one's own. A lot of recent development effort went into making the node software less heavy. Yes, one could switch to SPV, but that is a serious privacy compromise. In the worst case people will feel forced to move to webwallets.

  That was about sustained bandwidth - syncing a new node from scratch through the internet will become unwieldy sooner - this can be worked around with UTXO snapshots, but doing this in a way that doesn't completely pull the rug under the security model needs research (I'm aware that this could be construed the other way, that such a solution will be needed eventually and fast block chain growth just accelerates it).

2b. The bandwidth bound for just downloading blocks is ~4GB per month now, it will be ~52GB per month. Behind Tor and other anonimity networks, nodes will reveal themselves by the sheer volume of data transferred even to only download the block chain. This may already be the case, but will become worse. It may even become harmful to Tor itself.

3a. The costs are effectively externalized to users. I, hence, don't like calling the costs "trivial". I don't like making this decision for others, I'm not convinced that they are trivial for everyone. Besides, this will increase supply of block chain space, and thus push down transaction fees, but at cost to *all users*, even users that hardly do any transactions. Hence it favors those that generate lots of transactions (is that a perverse incentive? not sure, but it needs to be weighted in any decision).

3b. A mounting fee pressure, resulting in a true fee market where transactions compete to get into blocks, results in urgency to develop decentralized off-chain solutions. I'm afraid increasing the block size will kick this can down the road and let people (and the large Bitcoin companies) relax, until it's again time for a block chain increase, and then they'll rally Gavin again, never resulting in a smart, sustainable solution but eternal awkward discussions like this.

4. We haven't solved the problem of arbitrary data storage, and increasing the block size would compound that problem. More data storage more storage available for the same price - and up to 20x faster growth of the UTXO set, which is permanent (more externalization). More opportunity for pedonazis to insert double-plus ungood data, exposing users to possible legal ramifications.

For:

1. First, the obvious: It gives some breathing room in a year (or whenever the hard fork is planned). If necessary, it will allow more transactions to be on-chain for a while longer while other solutions are being implemented.

2. *Allowing* 20MB blocks does not mean miners will immediately start making them. Many of them aren't even filling up to the 1MB limit right now, probably due to latency/stale block issues. This makes objection 2 milder, which is about *worst case* bandwidth, as well as 4, as the end result may not be 20MB blocks filled with arbitrary "junk".

3. Investment in off-chain solutions is guided by not only fee pressure, but also other reasons such as speed of confirmation, which is unreliable on-chain. This eases objection 3b.

Whew, this grew longer than I expected. To conclude, I understand the advantages of scaling, I do not doubt a block size increase will *work* Although there may be unforseen issues, I'm confident they'll be resolved. However, it may well make Bitcoin less useful for what sets it apart from other systems in the first place: the possibility for people to run their own own "bank" without special investment in connectivity and computing hardware. Also the politics aspect (at some point it becomes a question of who decides for who? who is excluded? all those human decisions...) of this I don't like in the least. Possibly unavoidable at some point, but that's something *I*'d like to kick down the road.

Wladimir

>
> 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.

> On May 7, 2015, at 4:20 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan <laanwj@gmail•com> wrote:
>
> For sake of brevity, this ignores the inherent practical and political issues in scheduling a hardfork.

IMHO, these issues are the elephant in the room and the talk of block size increases is just a distraction.

- Eric Lombrozo

> On 7 May 2015, at 11:52, Jorge Timón <jtimon@jtimon•cc> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@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.

I've been looking at this problem for quite a while (Gavin cited some of my work a few days ago) so thought I'd chime in with a few thoughts (some of which I've not published). I believe the major problem here is that this isn't just an engineering decision; the reaction of the miners will actually determine the success or failure of any course of action. In fact any decision forced upon them may backfire if they collectively take exception to it. It's worth bearing in mind that most of the hash rate is now under the control of relatively large companies, many of whom have investors who are expecting to see returns; it probably isn't sufficient to just expect them to "do the right thing".

We're seeing plenty of full 1M byte blocks already and have been for months. Typically whenever we have one of the large inter-block gaps then these are often followed by one (and sometimes several) completely full blocks (full by the definition of whatever the miner wanted to use as a size limit).

The problem with this particular discussion is that there are quite a few "knowns" but an equally large number of "unknowns". Let's look at them:

Known: There has been a steady trend towards the mean block size getting larger. See https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address= <https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address=>

Known: Now the trend was definitely increasing quite quickly last year but for the last few months has been slowing down, however we did see pretty much a 2x increase in mean block sizes in 2014.

Known: For most of 2015 we've actually been seeing that rate slow quite dramatically, but the total numbers of transactions are still rising so we're seeing mean transaction sizes have been reducing, and that tallies with seeing more transactions per block: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address= <https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address=>

Unknown: Why are seeing more smaller transactions? Are we simply seeing more efficient use of blockchain resources or have some large consumers of block space going away? How much more block space compression might be possible in, say, the next 12 months?

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 <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.

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).

Unknown: If block space starts to get more scarce then how will this affect the use of the blockchain? Do the zero-fee TXs move to some batched transfer solution via third party? Do people start to get smarter about how TXs are encoded? Do some TXs go away completely (there are a lot of long-chain transactions that may simply be "noise" creating an artificially inflated view of transaction volumes)?

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).

Unknown: If the block size is increased and yet more negligible fee transactions are dumped onto the network then that might well motivate some large fraction of miners to start to clamp block sizes or reject transactions below a certain fee threshold; they can easily create their own artificial scarcity if enough of them feel it is in their interest (it's not the most tricky setting to change). One can well imagine VC investors in mining groups asking why they're essentially subsidising all of the other VC-funded Bitcoin startups.

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.

Cheers, Dave

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:29 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@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 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.

I'm sure he wants a fee market to eventually exist as well. But it seems that some people would like to see that happening before the subsidies are low (not necessarily null), while other people are fine waiting for that but don't want to ever be close to the scale limits anytime soon. I would also like to know for how long we need to prioritize short term adoption in this way. 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. But yeah, this is progress, I'll wait for your more detailed description of the tragedies that will follow hitting the block limits, assuming for now that it will happen in 12 months. My previous answer to the nervous "we will hit the block limits in 12 months if we don't do anything" was "not sure about 12 months, but whatever, great, I'm waiting for that to observe how fees get affected". But it should have been a question "what's wrong with hitting the block limits in 12 months?"

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 01:29:44PM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote:

> 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.

If Gavin had good points to make, he'd probably eventually change everyone's mind.

But if he fails to do that at some point he'll just get ignored and for all practical purposes won't be considered part of the consensus. Not unlike how if someone suggested we power the blockchain via perpetual motion machines they'd be ignored. Bitcoin is after all a decentralized system so all power over the development process is held only by social consent and respect.

At that point I'd suggest Gavin fork the project and go to the next level of consensus gathering, the community at large; I'm noticing this is exactly what you and Gavin are doing.

Speaking of, are you and Gavin still thinking about forking Bitcoin Core? If so I wish you the best of luck.

Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 at 2:42 PM From: "Mike Hearn" <mike@plan99•net> To: "Satoshi Nakamoto" <satoshin@gmx•com> Subject: Thinking about a fork I don't expect a reply, just getting some thoughts off my chest. Writing them down helps.

Forking Bitcoin-Qt/Core has been coming up more and more often lately in conversation (up from zero not that long ago). Gavin even suggested me and him fork it ... I pointed out that maintainers don't normally fork their own software :)

The problem is that the current community of developers has largely lost interest in supporting SPV wallets. Indeed any protocol change that might mean any risk at all, for anyone, is now being bogged down in endless circular arguments that never end. The Bitcoin developers have effectively become the new financial regulators: restricting options within their jurisdiction with "someone might do something risky" being used as the justification.

If alternative low-risk protocols were always easily available this would be no problem, but often they require enormous coding and deployment effort or just don't exist at all. Yet, wallets must move forward. If we carry on as now there simply won't be any usable decentralised wallets left and Bitcoin will have become an energy-wasting backbone for a bunch of banks and payment processors. That's so far from your original vision, it's sad.

I know you won't return and that's wise, but sometimes I wish you'd left a clearer design manifesto before handing the reigns over to Gavin, who is increasingly burned out due to all the arguments (as am I).

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2g9c0j/satoshi_email_leak/

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Dave Hudson <dave@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=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

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.

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.

>
> 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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@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

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/

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:04:21AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> 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.

The hard part here will be including the players who aren't individually "major", but are collectively important; who is the community?

How do you give the small merchants a voice in this discussion? The small time traders? The small time miners? The people in repressive countries who are trying to transact on thier own terms?

Legality? Should people involved in 3rd world remittances be included? Even if what they're doing is technically illegal? What about dark markets? If DPR voiced his opinion, should we ignore it?

Personally, I'm dubious about trying to make ecosystem-wide decisions like this without cryptographic consensus; fuzzy human social consensus is easy to manipulate.

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?

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 04:05:41PM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote:

> > 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.

I quite liked Wladimir's description of what someone with the ability to merge pull requests into Bitcoin Core is:

    @orionwl github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin repository admin, or maybe just "janitor"

-https://twitter.com/orionwl/status/563688293737697281

In any case, we can't force people to run Bitcoin Core - an unpopular patch that fails to reach consensus is a strong sign that it may not get user acceptance either - so we might as well accept that centralized authority over the development process isn't going to fly and deal with the sometimes messy consequences.

Like I said, you're welcome to fork the project and try to get user acceptance for the fork.

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 04:38:22PM +0200, Justus Ranvier 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?

Well, basically you're asking if we shouldn't assume the people in this discussion have honest intentions. If you want to go down that path, keep in mind where it leads.

I think we'll find an basic assumption of civility to be more productive, until proven otherwise. (e.g. NSA ties)

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.

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:52:54AM -0400, Gavin Andresen wrote:

> 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.

Would you please explain what you mean by "a soft-fork to start producing bigger blocks"

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 <gavinandresen@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
>
>

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Justus Ranvier <justusranvier@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?

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 <morcos@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 <gavinandresen@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
>
>

>
> 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?

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.

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?

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@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.

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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Justus Ranvier <justusranvier@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

>
> 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.

On 05/07/2015 03:27 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Justus Ranvier
> <justusranvier@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.

On 05/07/2015 03:25 PM, Peter Todd wrote:

> Altcoins and non-Bitcoin-blockchain tx systems? Assuming anything
> other than honest intent isn't productive in this forum.
>

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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:05 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

>> 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.

That is not what I said. Then you demonstrated that it was absurd. That's called a straw man argument and it's a well known fallacy, it is precisely the example of arguments that can be safely ignored. It is an argument against my admittedly vague definition of "non-controversial change". More importantly, I never said anything about "removing anyone", I was always talking about arguments and not people. One person could use fallacious arguments to attack or defend a given proposal and use perfectly valid ones in another, a person can even mix valid and invalid arguments in the same mail.

>> 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.

Yes, the maintainer of the Bitcoin core free software project (I cannot stressed this enough, that can be forked by anyone), not the president of Bitcoin the p2p network.

> 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.

I'm sure that if they become that stupid, developers would move to a fork of the project in no time.

>> 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.

Ok, thanks in advance.

>> 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.

Again, I didn't say any of that. My point is that a network that becomes too "centralized" (like visa, that is centralized vs p2p, not vs distributed) doesn't offer any security or decentralization advantage over current networks (and of course I meant that could happen with larger blocks, not 1 MB blocks). 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?" Even a limitless block size would technically work because miners would limit it to limit the orphan rate. So "no hardcoded consensus limit on transaction volume/block size" could be a valid answer to the question "what is the right consensus limit to block size?" for which there's no real right answer because there is a tradeoff between transaction volume and centralization.

Should we maintain 1 MB forever? Probably not. Is 20 MB a bad size? I honestly don't know. Is this urgent? I don't think so. Should we rush things when we don't have clear answers to many related questions? I don't think so.

You think that it is too soon to start restricting transaction volume in any way. You will answer why in your post. When is the right time and what is the right limitation then?

I want to have fee competition as soon as possible, at least temporarily. But you say that it can wait for later. Ok, when do you think we should make that happen then? When 20 MB are full, will that be the right time to let the fee market develop then or will it be urgent to increase the block size again? Should we directly remove the limit then and let miners handle it as they want? If so, why not now? Maybe we can increase to 2 MB, then wait for fee competition, then wait for 2 more subsidy halvings and then increase to 11 or 20 MB? There's so many possibilities that I don't understand how can be surprising that "20 MB, as soon as possible" is not the obvious answer to everyone...

Yes - but you must recognize that is precisely 50% of the picture.

Others have made different assumptions - taking the [1MB-constrained] market *as it exists today*, rather than in some projected future.

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.

These statements are not value judgements - not saying you are wrong - these are observations of some rather huge, relevant blind spots in this debate.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

> 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.
>

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Justus Ranvier <justusranvier@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).

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.

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.

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
>

>
> 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.

>
> 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.

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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:52 PM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@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 <mike@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 thing to add is that perhaps in a future version of Bitcoin Core, there could be an option for users to continue using the old consensus rules, or an option to support the new rules (an option when they update and an ability to change in the settings). Both types of user can benefit from the software updates and choose with a single piece of software what they support. Information for whether or not a user is supporting the changes could be included in the version message. Possibly this information could be incorporated into transactions also.

If they wish to support the new rules, then their client would support larger blocks when there is majority miner consensus, otherwise their clients will always only support the old rules.

This way the decision is not being forced upon the user in any way.

Just an idea.

On 07/05/15 16:58, Matthew Mitchell wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
>

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:11 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

>> 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
> ;)

Yes, but it was an argument against something I didn't said ;)

> 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.

Yes, that's why I drafted a definition for "uncontroversial change" rather than "change accepted by consensus". It will still be vague and hard to define, but consensus seems much harder. And, yes, you're right, it is more like giving power to anyone with valid arguments to veto hardfork changes. But as you say, that could lead to make hardforks actually impossible, so we should limit what constitutes a valid argument. I later listed some examples of invalid arguments: logical fallacies, unrelated arguments, outright lies. Certainly I don't think technical merits should count here or that we could veto a particular person from vetoing. We should filter the arguments, not require an identity layer to blacklist individuals. We should even accept arguments from anonymous people in the internet (you know, it wouldn't be the first time).

> 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?

Some research at all about fee market dynamics with limited size that hasn't happened at all. If we're increasing the consensus max size maybe we could at least maintain the 1MB limit as a standard policy limit, so that we can study it a little bit (like we could have done instead of removing the initial policy limit).

> I'm not against changing the size, just not now -> then when?

I don't know yet, but I understand now that having a clearer roadmap is what's actually urgent, not the change itself.

> I'm not wedded to 1mb, but not sure 20mb is right -> then what?

What about 2 MB consensus limit and 1 MB policy limit for now? I know that's arbitrary too.

> Full node count is going down -> then what size do you think would fix that?
> 100kb?

As others have explained, the number of full nodes is not the improtant part, but how easy it is to run one. I think a modest laptop with the average internet connection of say, India or Brazil, should be able to run a full node. I haven't made those numbers myself but I'm sure that's possible with 1 MB blocks today, and probably with 2 MB blocks too.

> It will make mining more centralised -> how do you measure that and how much
> centralisation would you accept?

This is an excellent question for both sides. Unfortunately I don't know the answer to this. Do you?

If the worry about raising the block size will increase centralization, could not one could imagine an application which rewarded decentralized storage of block data? It could even be build aside or on top of the existing bitcoin protocol.

See the Permacoin paper by Andrew Miller: http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf

Regards

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.

On 05/07/15 14:52, 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.

People have been sharing the same objections as on this list for months, I'm not sure what is new here.

> 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 think this is a huge issue. You've been wandering around telling people that the blocksize will increase soon for months, when there is very clearly no consensus that it should in the short-term future. 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.

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 06:21:50PM +0200, Jorge Timón wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:52 PM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@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.

I've spent a lot of time talking to companies about this, and the problem is telling them that isn't actually very useful; knowing the supply side of the equation isn't all that useful if you don't know the demand side. Problem is we don't really have a good handle on what Bitcoin will be used for in the future, or even for that matter, what it's actually being used for right now.

As we saw with Satoshidice before and quite possibly will see with smart contracts (escrows, futures, etc) it's easy for a relatively small number of use cases to drive a significant amount of transaction volume. Yet, as Wladimir and others point out, the fundemental underlying architecture of the blockchain has inherently poor O(n^2) scaling, so there's always some level of demand where it breaks, and/or incentivizes actors in the space to push up against "safety stops" like soft blocksize limits and get them removed.

Note how the response previously to bumping up against soft policy limits was highly public calls(1) at the first hint of touble: "Mike Hearn: Soft block size limit reached, action required by YOU"

1) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.0

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@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.

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.

> 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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:43 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:59 PM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@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.

>
> 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.

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.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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/100000) * 1MB; //double every ~2 years

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 Š. But I am not seeing specifics on why it is not a feasible plan.

From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> Date: Friday, 8 May, 2015 2:06 am To: Btc Drak <btcdrak@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

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Gavin Costin <slashdevnull@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

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.

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/100000) * 1MB;  //double every ~2 years
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
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Replies inline.

On 05/07/15 17:43, Mike Hearn wrote:

>     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.

No, I dont think Gavin is being deliberately dishonest, and I'm rather confident he phrased everything in a way that is technically true (ie the quote in his response). However, others have definitely not taken away the correct interpretation of what he said, and this is a serious problem. Setting expectations correctly as this is a very contentious issue and one that does not appear to be reaching consensus quickly in the technical community is important. 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?).

> 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?

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 (either directly or by releasing software) that they should upgrade. I admit that hardforks are a bit different in that the level of software upgrade required means additional lead time, but I'm not sure that means starting the public-pitching phase before there is any kind of consensus forming (actually, I'd point out that to me there seems to be rahter clear consensus outside of you and Gavin that we should delay increasing block size). As far as I can tell, there has been no discussion of block sizes on this list since 2013, and while I know Gavin has had many private conversations with people in this community about the block size, very little if any of it has happened in public. 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.

> And I'll ask again. Do you have a *specific, credible alternative*?
> Because so far I'm not seeing one.

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. I acknowledge that Gavin has been putting a lot of effort into this front, but, judging by this thread, I am far from the only one who thinks much more needs done.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list@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.

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.

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.
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development

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 <btcdrak@gmail•com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Gavin Costin <slashdevnull@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.
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> _______________________________________________
> Bitcoin-development mailing list
> Bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge•net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
>
>

>
> 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?

> 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 :)

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 <mike@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 :)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 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.
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On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@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.

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 5:11 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@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.

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.

> 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 :)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>

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?

Yes....I'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 :).

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-list@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?
>
> Yes....I'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 :).
>
>
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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.

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 <etotheipi@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.
>
>
>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:40 PM, Tom Harding <tomh@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.

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?

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.

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.

>
> 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.

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).

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 <etotheipi@gmail•com
> <mailto:etotheipi@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.
>

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.

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@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.

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@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 <etotheipi@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
>
>

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" <onelineproof@gmail•com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@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 <etotheipi@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
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> PGP: B6AC 822C 451D 6304 6A28  49E9 7DB7 011C D53B 5647
>

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

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 <voisine@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

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 . <raystonn@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 <voisine@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
>
>

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 <mark@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 . <raystonn@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 <voisine@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
>>
>

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
>

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 <mark@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

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 <gubatron@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 <etotheipi@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" <onelineproof@gmail•com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@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 <etotheipi@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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> 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.
>> 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
>>
>>
>

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.

On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 12:53 PM, Justus Ranvier <justusranvier@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.

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>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications
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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

> 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 <bitcoin@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
>