8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners.
I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?), but I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work.
I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs.
Edit: If you're not familiar with lightning, you should read up on it. The gist of it (my understanding, I am not exactly a bitcoin expert) is that if I trust someone, there is no need to announce to the whole world that I just gave my kids ice cream money, it's between me and them. And it's instant. The blockchain is used only as last resort, when one of the parties does not cooperate as as agreed.
I always thought that was a weak argument. There are currently 8403 nodes online if I believe https://bitnodes.21.co/, that's not exactly impressive. If a big miner wanted to take over the majority of the nodes they could probably afford to just spawn spawn 10 thousand nodes.
Not that it will do them a lot of good, what matters most is what the exchanges and other important economic entities handling bitcoins consider "the real bitcoin", having a majority of nodes won't do much.
There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet.
Furthermore ~400GB per year is not particularly insane, you can get a 6TB drive for less than $200 and that'll be enough to store more than 15 years worth of blockchain.
As for bandwidth it amounts to less than 14kB/s on average.
>there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs
Maybe, but I'm a bit surprised that so many people believe that LN will be successful when we have so little data on how it'll actually work. But I'm going to repeat myself, I already explained my concerns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965 (with some insightful replies).
In particular I can't really imagine how LN could reach a Visa-level number of transactions without having a few mega "nexus nodes" concentrating most of the open LN channels. That would give those nodes some power as they could decide who they pair with (which channels they open) which would be a big blow to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.
The idea that every bitcoin user would each end up having a handful of channels open and we'd keep routing around the graph (with all the balancing issues it involves) to pay everything seems rather optimistic and aligns poorly with real-world incentives.
"8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain"
No. You provide no stats, no costs, to justify why 8MB is prohibitive while 1MB is fine. In reality 8MB blocks remain easily affordable. The limit where it starts being quite costly for an individual to run a full node is around 100MB:
> I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?)
It should mean lower transaction fees for users, but more transactions are possible so the miners make it up on volume. Win-win.
> I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs.
If you trust your counterparty you wouldn't be using bitcoin in the first place. SegWit/lightning seems to undermine most of the point of bitcoin; certainly moving to transactions happening off-chain would be a radical change and it's not clear it would preserve bitcoin's positives (e.g. decentralization). Whereas increasing the block size is a simple, well-understood change.
> This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners.
Isn't this inevitable? Once demand of anything increases beyond a certain threshold, individuals can no longer supply enough of that thing to satisfy that demand, because they are overwhelmed by the costs of logistics, storage, maintenance and so on.
In the case of bitcoin, I imagine that soon you'll need to have dedicated machines for this task. Not a lot of people can afford to have one - or several, for redundancy - machines to do it.
Hence, the "power" - like in anything else - is in the hands of those that are willing to make a significant investment to keep things running. The payoff for them is that they can profit from providing this service. If I understand correctly, this comes in the form of transaction fees.
Or did you think that bitcoin could rise to the level of, say, Visa or Paypal on the backs of volunteers? Bitcoin isn't even "mainstream" yet, and the network is already buckling.
> I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work.
Let's talk about the realities of Lightning for a minute. Lightning is an interesting technology solution to scaling transactions and settling on the blockchain. But realize that there are significant drawbacks.
In order to spend anything on the lightning network, you need to have funds locked in a channel with a hub. And you can only spend the maximum that is in your hub. Likewise, you can only receive up to the maximum that the hub has put in the channel. In other words, your net credit or debit balance can't exceed the maximum put in by the other side.
There are some significant user experience drawbacks to this approach. I want to send someone $100, but I only have $50 in my channel. So now I need send $50 more of bitcoin and wait 20 minutes for confirmations. Then I can send the $100. It is even worse if I want to receive $100. Now the hub (bank?) has to approve my request to "receive" $100 because it costs them fees and capital to fund the channel. Make no mistake, the hubs will pass these fees on to you, the consumer.
Suddenly this starts to look a little more like Paypal then we want. Granted it is a better version of Paypal - there can be multiple, interoperable hubs - but with small blocks, funding transactions will not be cheap.
In a small block world, Lightning network fees will likely be more than you think. It could easily cost $10 worth of bitcoin for both sides to fund a $1000 channel. Why would I want to tie up $1000 to use this. I'd rather just pay the 3% to send via Paypal.
Internet connection? It's under 128kbps, less than a 2 channel ISDN link.
And for someone that cannot afford a 100$ drive every 5 years, toss the old blocks after saving a checkpoint and just keep the last X months plus UTXOs?
How does this improve with offchain transactions? What's the point of validating the blockchain if it's no longer a peer to peer network? That can't be any better than validating from checkpoints.
It's true that decentralization will decrease if/when Bitcoin nodes require significantly more resources to run. But LN isn't good for decentralization either. Most big blockers want to maintain decentralization as well, they just think that it's better to try to scale the blockchain instead of scale via third party companies.
There's no reason to expect that every block, especially in the near term, will approach that 8MB limit. It will scale with actual transaction volume instead, as Bitcoin did before the 1MB limit became a problem -- 1MB blocks were exceedingly rare; the block growth was fairly steady until it hit the upper bound. [1] It's reasonable to expect that the block size curve will continue to rise with transaction volume, but capping out the full 8MB is unlikely for some time.
If space in blocks is abundant then transaction fees should settle at the approximate per byte cost to the miner of the additional transaction.
I would expect smaller block sizes to be more profitable for miners, all else being equal (e.g. ignoring that high transaction costs make BTC less valuable).
1) It will grow by 1GB/day only if the blocks are full. Which they won't be for a long time, unless that branch becomes much more popular.
2) 8TB drive is $175 on Amazon. That alone can hold ~1 thousand days of full blocks. That's almost 3 years worth of blocks. By then the HDD prices will likely be even lower.
3) If some regular user will want to mess with the whole blockchain (which is such a strange argument, most don't care for it), downloading 8TB of data takes less than 18 hours on a gigabit connection. It will take years to get to 8TB.
4) There's no real objection to SegWit, as long as it comes with the large blocks. But consider what happened with Segwit2X - as soon as Segwit support solidified, a talk of ditching the 2MB extension started, a classic bait and switch. It's all over /r/bitcoin.
Do I have this right? Some miners want to increase blocksize, keeping Bitcoin in line with its original "peer to peer" nature, and thus are going to do Bitcoin Cash, with 8MB blocks to start.
Others want Bitcoin to become a settlement layer, and certain backers have said that $1000 tx fees would be great, since that means BTC won as a settlement layer. This kills the peer to peer aspect though, and end users would rely on offchain third parties to actually get transactions done. This group has fought to keep small blocks, despite recent congestion and increasing fees. The argument is that increasing blocksize can't solve all problems so why even start, and that increasing it even a bit would somehow prevent regular people from validating the chain.
Complicating matters a bit is that some miners have an optimised way of mining, exploiting Bitcoin block header layout to get an optimisation during hash calculations (AsicBoost). This is a 20% advantage but also encourages mining occasional empty blocks. AsicBoost is incompatible with many suggestions of changing the Bitcoin protocol, giving economic incentives to object to such things. This muddies the water.
On the other side, companies have invested a lot into becoming clearinghouses (Coinbase) or inventing ways to do offchain tx (Blockstream) casting doubt on their intentions of killing P2P and making BTC just for settlements.
It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps to force the issue?
> It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps to force the issue?
Yes, and it seems also out of spite. They could have increased to 2MB in order to avoid the horrible congestion on the network for a couple years. Once that was in place, they could have continued the SegWit work.
In fact, originally, everyone was in support of SegWit. Even the big-blocks camp (we can see that from the New York Agreement, where virtually the whole industry supported both big-blocks and SegWit). The only reason so many like Bitcoin Cash are against it today is because the debate has become emotionally-charged and us-versus-them. SegWit is an all-around good idea.
But the Core developers held out from a blocksize increase because, once they had declared that going from 1MB -> 2MB would be the end of the world, the network would become "centralized", etc, they didn't want to walk it back and simply compromise.
IMO, this is the main reason the ecosystem is migrating to Ethereum. It's not because of the Turing-complete scripting that is possible on Ehtereum, it's because development has been a lot more sane.
Despite the problems they've had (e.g. the DAO), the Ethereum ecosystem is more diverse and professional. They rationally discuss problems and make tradeoffs. They encourage alternate implementations, whereas the Core folks have engaged in baseless fear tactics to ensure theirs is the only implementation on the network[0] (and not talking about protocol changes--simply alternate implementations of the same protocols and consensus rules).
I think unless these leadership problems are addressed somehow, Bitcoin is going to fade into obscurity as others, like Ethereum, lead the way.
> Others want Bitcoin to become a settlement layer, and certain backers have said that $1000 tx fees would be great, since that means BTC won as a settlement layer
This is dramatically misconstruing the legitimate points made by the anti-big-blockers. The simplest fix would be to say "Others _are content with Bitcoin becoming a settlement layer_".
Making changes is always dangerous given the fact that Bitcoin is fundamentally a consensus-driven protocol. So far, none of the block size proposals has managed to garner a significant consensus. Here I mean "consensus" in a general version of Satoshi's "one CPU one vote" consensus; that's the only consensus here that is resistant to Sibyl attacks.
In addition there's the argument that increasing the block sizes necessarily entails increasing the orphaned block rate, which decreases network security. This happens because the larger the blocks are, the longer it takes for the network to recognize a legitimate block, and thus begin mining on top of it -- any mining that takes place after a block is found is wasted power and does not contribute to network security.
There's also the notion of long-time viability of the decreasing block reward without developing and addressing the problems on forming a fee market to ensure that miner compensation is commensurate with their costs so that subverting the network will always be dramatically more expensive than helping the network.
Finally there's the argument that block size increases make it more expensive to run full nodes by increasing space requirements.
These are real concerns, not just some notion of "increasing blocksize can't solve all problems why even start".
It happens that I disagree with this view; the first argument (forks are tricky) is, in my mind, the only valid one, and if Bitcoin Core threw their efforts behind finding a good, non-gameable, non-spammable block increase implementation, then we could get consensus.
>It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps to force the issue?
Segwit, which activates on Bitcoin soon, already increases the the block size to ~2MB. Because Bitcoin Cash doesn't implement Segwit, increasing to merely the same size as Bitcoin wouldn't have been compelling.
The argument is that higher cost of node operation is actually what kills the "peer to peer aspect." Trustless second layer networks such as Lightning use "third parties" to route money across the network, but never in a trusted/custodial fashion.
The lightning network works just fine as a daily transaction layer. Increasing the block size would never work as a large scale transaction system because the block size would have to grow to 100s of GB a day to reflect even a small percentage of total transactions. It's a short term hack that creates problems down the road.
Something I haven't seen in the comments yet: it's a realistic possibility that the Core team will make a change to Bitcon's proof-of-work, with the explicit goal of shutting down miners' efforts to implement the "2X" part of Segwit2X (a block size increase).
So while disaster has been avoided for now, and Bitcoin Cash is unlikely to garner much support, they could become the longest chain within a year or two if they keep at it. As the Bitcoin Cash developer said in the article:
> If the Segwit2x agreement fails to implement the 2x part, which is not entirely unreasonable, and only ends up being being basically SegWit without the 2x, many miners will likely defect to Bitcoin Cash.
He's right. The Core-versus-the-world battle is far from over.
Still wrapping my head around the Bitcoin ecosystem, but listened to an interview of Nick Szabo by Tim Ferris where Nick pretty explicitly indicates that increasing the block size isn't a good idea and shouldn't even be a debate. He makes it sound like anyone in the "know" understands this.
What is the argument for the other side?
A Reddit post has the quote here, but I recommend the whole interview.
This is not surprising. The miners (or I guess I should say "some miners") want to retain their power by keeping all transactions on-chain in Bitcoin Cash, but I think at the end of the day a coin only has value if it has wide acceptance in the community, mainly including the people who actually use it for transactions. I think Bitcoin Cash will fail, but in the short term people will try to see how far "greater fool theory" will go by selling their Bitcoin Cash coins while still holding on to their bitcoins on the main blockchain.
> want to retain their power by keeping all transactions on-chain in Bitcoin Cash
Exactly what power is that? The power to collect smaller mining fees?
Honest question - what's the status of Lightning? Core promotes it as the solution to scaling and it's essentially a page on github. Litecoin already has Segwit and no one is using Lightning. Am I missing something here?
Another difference is the project says it will support multiple implementations of its software, a move that's not surprising given the criticism that Bitcoin Core's software is too dominant on the bitcoin network.
What does that mean exactly? Bitcoin being open source and anybody being able to connect to the network means that anybody can fork the client if they want to, doesn't it?
After all that's exactly what this Bitcoin ABC fork is doing.
>Indeed, the cryptocurrency is currently trading at $461, meaning it's worth about 18% of bitcoin's current price of $2,568, in an already-open futures market.
This statement needs a lot of asterisks added to it imho.
BCC has been trading at $600K USD volume in the past 24 hours [0] compared to Bitcoin's trading volume topping over $600M USD in the same time period.
BCC futures have only been trading on a single, unpopular exchange, that does not allow withdrawal of the coins being traded until only after the fork takes place.
If you can send them BCC to trade before the fork, I fail to see why you can only cash out after the fork.
I'm all for Bigger Blocks, but claiming that BCC has 18% support of the community based on that single price valuation is extremely misleading imho.
From a volume standpoint, I would argue that it has less than 1% support of the community at large.
Chains splitting off is a very interesting phenomenon. Just like with Ethereum Classic splitting off Ethereum, the value of the original chain can be divided into two, albeit unequal, parts. The process may even create new value - though I suppose it might just as well destroy value.
What I've also wondered about though is multiple chains combining into one. Does anyone know if this has happened before?
I believe there is a strong analogy here to how company stock can evolve, when companies are either split out as separate entities, or merged into one, respectively.
One important detail that this article is missing is that the proposed fork forces a new sighash. This is important because it prevents a replay attack.
This whole thing is actually really straightforward if you evaluate it from the perspective of governance. In bitcoin, miners run software and the software they run controls the performance of the network. Miners therefore control the future software state of the network.
Anything that moves transactions off of the network or decreases the number of miners queried per transaction is therefore antithetical.
If you are a miner, lightning and segwit just hurt you. The only way you'll allow them is if you believe that to do otherwise would slay the golden goose.
The counterpoint to this (not that I necessarily disagree) would be that 2nd layers solutions add new value to the network, and thus add value to a Bitcoin transaction. This is very likely to occur to some degree (e.g. micro-transactions and fast retail transactions that Bitcoin can't do), but will also cannibalize some on-chain activity.
Also, altcoins present a real competitive risk; failure to maintain an advantage over them will see network value approach zero.
It's quite possible that this fork is negligible for awhile. But because parties such as Core will likely refuse to let the segwit2x part of segwit happen [1, many others], if the miners follow through on their promises, then this could be real entertaining to watch if the larger miners start switching to BCC during this later period.
Just like when ETH split into ETH and ETC, it seemed as if almost everyone dumped their ETC coins as quickly as possible. But contrary to what most predicted, the chain ended up having real value. It seems like quite a few Bitcoin holders are planning on doing this as well, although many are being more cautious this time around and holding their BCC instead.
You don't want to sell your stash of the next Bitcoin, just in case you're wrong. These things are impossible to predict for normal investors.
I've got some stored in a client called bitcoin-qt, which I haven't opened in years and I expect would take months to catch up with the block chain as it is. Should I be worried about trying to shift them before (or after) the fork? Am I likely to be tied into which ever fork the bitcoin-qt maintainers support? Should I be trying to transfer to a paper wallet before the fork?
If you haven't opened it in years, do nothing. Wait for the dust to settle. Then you can decide what to do with it; whatever you have in that wallet will still be valid on both sides of the fork.
So... were I a bitcoin holder at the present time (I'm not) then I'm potentially going to have those same bitcoin on two chains? So depending on what value is held in either chain this could be a huge financial boost?
Unless of course this tanks the system entirely, but that seems unlikely.
Most likely the sum value of each token is not going to be much different from the pre-split value of the original token. Or if it is, it means that people on both sides are relieved and optimistic about this technique for conflict resolution, and really do see it as value added.
If you care about one token over the other, the best thing to do is let the dust settle, then sell all of your non-preferred token for the preferred token. Financially, this should not set you back even if you prefer the minority token - you just end up with a bunch of them, and the total value of your wallet is still about the same.
Bitcoin isn't worth $2500 per Bitcoin by magic. It's worth that because of supply and demand.
The only change might be that some of the demand shifts to BitcoinCash instead of Bitcoin, meaning the price of both will be lower than the price of Bitcoin now, but they'll likely add up to about the same amount.
It has special meaning to people frustrated with the stubborn refusal from bitcoin-core to raise the block size. Bitcoin has two major factions, and this is more or less a peaceful way for them to split out.
I'm hoping it decreases the overall level of conflict, as both groups will be able to get what they want here.
Question: according to Coin Dance[1], SegWit will lock in around 14 days from now. Will the max block size be what the SegWit code says, or the 2MB that SegWit2x has chosen? There is a majority of nodes running Bitcoin Core, but a majority of miners that run SegWit2x nodes. So what will happen?
What do you think the exchanges will do here (aka Coinbase) [Yes I know you should pull all your BTC off...].
If there is a hard fork, are they just going to wait until the dust settles and then give people access to both coins? I.E. BCC would magically appear in your account. Or do they seriously intend to not support one of the chains and just have all their users holding BTC worth X% less?
[+] [-] gtrubetskoy|8 years ago|reply
I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?), but I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work.
I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs.
[1] https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/maste...
Edit: If you're not familiar with lightning, you should read up on it. The gist of it (my understanding, I am not exactly a bitcoin expert) is that if I trust someone, there is no need to announce to the whole world that I just gave my kids ice cream money, it's between me and them. And it's instant. The blockchain is used only as last resort, when one of the parties does not cooperate as as agreed.
[+] [-] simias|8 years ago|reply
Not that it will do them a lot of good, what matters most is what the exchanges and other important economic entities handling bitcoins consider "the real bitcoin", having a majority of nodes won't do much.
There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet.
Furthermore ~400GB per year is not particularly insane, you can get a 6TB drive for less than $200 and that'll be enough to store more than 15 years worth of blockchain.
As for bandwidth it amounts to less than 14kB/s on average.
>there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs
Maybe, but I'm a bit surprised that so many people believe that LN will be successful when we have so little data on how it'll actually work. But I'm going to repeat myself, I already explained my concerns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965 (with some insightful replies).
In particular I can't really imagine how LN could reach a Visa-level number of transactions without having a few mega "nexus nodes" concentrating most of the open LN channels. That would give those nodes some power as they could decide who they pair with (which channels they open) which would be a big blow to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.
The idea that every bitcoin user would each end up having a handful of channels open and we'd keep routing around the graph (with all the balancing issues it involves) to pay everything seems rather optimistic and aligns poorly with real-world incentives.
[+] [-] mrb|8 years ago|reply
No. You provide no stats, no costs, to justify why 8MB is prohibitive while 1MB is fine. In reality 8MB blocks remain easily affordable. The limit where it starts being quite costly for an individual to run a full node is around 100MB:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825934
And by the time we get to 100MB, computing, networking, storage technology will have improved and let us go even further.
[+] [-] lmm|8 years ago|reply
It should mean lower transaction fees for users, but more transactions are possible so the miners make it up on volume. Win-win.
> I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs.
If you trust your counterparty you wouldn't be using bitcoin in the first place. SegWit/lightning seems to undermine most of the point of bitcoin; certainly moving to transactions happening off-chain would be a radical change and it's not clear it would preserve bitcoin's positives (e.g. decentralization). Whereas increasing the block size is a simple, well-understood change.
[+] [-] disconnected|8 years ago|reply
Isn't this inevitable? Once demand of anything increases beyond a certain threshold, individuals can no longer supply enough of that thing to satisfy that demand, because they are overwhelmed by the costs of logistics, storage, maintenance and so on.
In the case of bitcoin, I imagine that soon you'll need to have dedicated machines for this task. Not a lot of people can afford to have one - or several, for redundancy - machines to do it.
Hence, the "power" - like in anything else - is in the hands of those that are willing to make a significant investment to keep things running. The payoff for them is that they can profit from providing this service. If I understand correctly, this comes in the form of transaction fees.
Or did you think that bitcoin could rise to the level of, say, Visa or Paypal on the backs of volunteers? Bitcoin isn't even "mainstream" yet, and the network is already buckling.
I think this outcome was more than predictable.
[+] [-] deweller|8 years ago|reply
Let's talk about the realities of Lightning for a minute. Lightning is an interesting technology solution to scaling transactions and settling on the blockchain. But realize that there are significant drawbacks.
In order to spend anything on the lightning network, you need to have funds locked in a channel with a hub. And you can only spend the maximum that is in your hub. Likewise, you can only receive up to the maximum that the hub has put in the channel. In other words, your net credit or debit balance can't exceed the maximum put in by the other side.
There are some significant user experience drawbacks to this approach. I want to send someone $100, but I only have $50 in my channel. So now I need send $50 more of bitcoin and wait 20 minutes for confirmations. Then I can send the $100. It is even worse if I want to receive $100. Now the hub (bank?) has to approve my request to "receive" $100 because it costs them fees and capital to fund the channel. Make no mistake, the hubs will pass these fees on to you, the consumer.
Suddenly this starts to look a little more like Paypal then we want. Granted it is a better version of Paypal - there can be multiple, interoperable hubs - but with small blocks, funding transactions will not be cheap.
In a small block world, Lightning network fees will likely be more than you think. It could easily cost $10 worth of bitcoin for both sides to fund a $1000 channel. Why would I want to tie up $1000 to use this. I'd rather just pay the 3% to send via Paypal.
[+] [-] MichaelGG|8 years ago|reply
And for someone that cannot afford a 100$ drive every 5 years, toss the old blocks after saving a checkpoint and just keep the last X months plus UTXOs?
How does this improve with offchain transactions? What's the point of validating the blockchain if it's no longer a peer to peer network? That can't be any better than validating from checkpoints.
[+] [-] ve55|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewla|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-size.html
[+] [-] smokeyj|8 years ago|reply
> I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners
Bigger blocks = more supply. Wouldn't the cost go down?
[+] [-] rictic|8 years ago|reply
As space in blocks becomes crowded we should expect transaction fees to grow, and indeed they have: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
If space in blocks is abundant then transaction fees should settle at the approximate per byte cost to the miner of the additional transaction.
I would expect smaller block sizes to be more profitable for miners, all else being equal (e.g. ignoring that high transaction costs make BTC less valuable).
[+] [-] imaginenore|8 years ago|reply
2) 8TB drive is $175 on Amazon. That alone can hold ~1 thousand days of full blocks. That's almost 3 years worth of blocks. By then the HDD prices will likely be even lower.
3) If some regular user will want to mess with the whole blockchain (which is such a strange argument, most don't care for it), downloading 8TB of data takes less than 18 hours on a gigabit connection. It will take years to get to 8TB.
4) There's no real objection to SegWit, as long as it comes with the large blocks. But consider what happened with Segwit2X - as soon as Segwit support solidified, a talk of ditching the 2MB extension started, a classic bait and switch. It's all over /r/bitcoin.
[+] [-] grey-area|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hossbeast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h1d|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|8 years ago|reply
Others want Bitcoin to become a settlement layer, and certain backers have said that $1000 tx fees would be great, since that means BTC won as a settlement layer. This kills the peer to peer aspect though, and end users would rely on offchain third parties to actually get transactions done. This group has fought to keep small blocks, despite recent congestion and increasing fees. The argument is that increasing blocksize can't solve all problems so why even start, and that increasing it even a bit would somehow prevent regular people from validating the chain.
Complicating matters a bit is that some miners have an optimised way of mining, exploiting Bitcoin block header layout to get an optimisation during hash calculations (AsicBoost). This is a 20% advantage but also encourages mining occasional empty blocks. AsicBoost is incompatible with many suggestions of changing the Bitcoin protocol, giving economic incentives to object to such things. This muddies the water.
On the other side, companies have invested a lot into becoming clearinghouses (Coinbase) or inventing ways to do offchain tx (Blockstream) casting doubt on their intentions of killing P2P and making BTC just for settlements.
It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps to force the issue?
[+] [-] apeace|8 years ago|reply
> It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps to force the issue?
Yes, and it seems also out of spite. They could have increased to 2MB in order to avoid the horrible congestion on the network for a couple years. Once that was in place, they could have continued the SegWit work.
In fact, originally, everyone was in support of SegWit. Even the big-blocks camp (we can see that from the New York Agreement, where virtually the whole industry supported both big-blocks and SegWit). The only reason so many like Bitcoin Cash are against it today is because the debate has become emotionally-charged and us-versus-them. SegWit is an all-around good idea.
But the Core developers held out from a blocksize increase because, once they had declared that going from 1MB -> 2MB would be the end of the world, the network would become "centralized", etc, they didn't want to walk it back and simply compromise.
IMO, this is the main reason the ecosystem is migrating to Ethereum. It's not because of the Turing-complete scripting that is possible on Ehtereum, it's because development has been a lot more sane.
Despite the problems they've had (e.g. the DAO), the Ethereum ecosystem is more diverse and professional. They rationally discuss problems and make tradeoffs. They encourage alternate implementations, whereas the Core folks have engaged in baseless fear tactics to ensure theirs is the only implementation on the network[0] (and not talking about protocol changes--simply alternate implementations of the same protocols and consensus rules).
I think unless these leadership problems are addressed somehow, Bitcoin is going to fade into obscurity as others, like Ethereum, lead the way.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160316061949/https://blog.conf...
---
EDIT: Corrected "Bitcoin ABC" to "Bitcoin Cash"
[+] [-] andrewla|8 years ago|reply
This is dramatically misconstruing the legitimate points made by the anti-big-blockers. The simplest fix would be to say "Others _are content with Bitcoin becoming a settlement layer_".
Making changes is always dangerous given the fact that Bitcoin is fundamentally a consensus-driven protocol. So far, none of the block size proposals has managed to garner a significant consensus. Here I mean "consensus" in a general version of Satoshi's "one CPU one vote" consensus; that's the only consensus here that is resistant to Sibyl attacks.
In addition there's the argument that increasing the block sizes necessarily entails increasing the orphaned block rate, which decreases network security. This happens because the larger the blocks are, the longer it takes for the network to recognize a legitimate block, and thus begin mining on top of it -- any mining that takes place after a block is found is wasted power and does not contribute to network security.
There's also the notion of long-time viability of the decreasing block reward without developing and addressing the problems on forming a fee market to ensure that miner compensation is commensurate with their costs so that subverting the network will always be dramatically more expensive than helping the network.
Finally there's the argument that block size increases make it more expensive to run full nodes by increasing space requirements.
These are real concerns, not just some notion of "increasing blocksize can't solve all problems why even start".
It happens that I disagree with this view; the first argument (forks are tricky) is, in my mind, the only valid one, and if Bitcoin Core threw their efforts behind finding a good, non-gameable, non-spammable block increase implementation, then we could get consensus.
[+] [-] TD-Linux|8 years ago|reply
Segwit, which activates on Bitcoin soon, already increases the the block size to ~2MB. Because Bitcoin Cash doesn't implement Segwit, increasing to merely the same size as Bitcoin wouldn't have been compelling.
[+] [-] statoshi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grabcocque|8 years ago|reply
Cryptocurrency developer: "Hold my beer"
[+] [-] apeace|8 years ago|reply
So while disaster has been avoided for now, and Bitcoin Cash is unlikely to garner much support, they could become the longest chain within a year or two if they keep at it. As the Bitcoin Cash developer said in the article:
> If the Segwit2x agreement fails to implement the 2x part, which is not entirely unreasonable, and only ends up being being basically SegWit without the 2x, many miners will likely defect to Bitcoin Cash.
He's right. The Core-versus-the-world battle is far from over.
[+] [-] flashdance|8 years ago|reply
Proposals from the core development team have widespread support from businesses and exchanges [1].
Saying it's bitcoin core versus the world is a tad bit hyperbolic.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support
[+] [-] rcarrigan87|8 years ago|reply
What is the argument for the other side?
A Reddit post has the quote here, but I recommend the whole interview.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6fhmge/nick_szabo_...
https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/
[+] [-] CaliforniaKarl|8 years ago|reply
You can monitor https://www.btcforkmonitor.info to see when the forks take place.
(The site was discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809259)
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smokeyj|8 years ago|reply
Exactly what power is that? The power to collect smaller mining fees?
Honest question - what's the status of Lightning? Core promotes it as the solution to scaling and it's essentially a page on github. Litecoin already has Segwit and no one is using Lightning. Am I missing something here?
[+] [-] dcosson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|8 years ago|reply
What does that mean exactly? Bitcoin being open source and anybody being able to connect to the network means that anybody can fork the client if they want to, doesn't it?
After all that's exactly what this Bitcoin ABC fork is doing.
[+] [-] k2xl|8 years ago|reply
https://hackernoon.com/how-to-move-money-from-coinbase-to-yo...
Here is why you need to move from Coinbase to your own wallet before Aug 1st: https://keepingstock.net/move-your-coins-out-of-coinbase-to-...
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|8 years ago|reply
This statement needs a lot of asterisks added to it imho.
BCC has been trading at $600K USD volume in the past 24 hours [0] compared to Bitcoin's trading volume topping over $600M USD in the same time period.
BCC futures have only been trading on a single, unpopular exchange, that does not allow withdrawal of the coins being traded until only after the fork takes place.
If you can send them BCC to trade before the fork, I fail to see why you can only cash out after the fork.
I'm all for Bigger Blocks, but claiming that BCC has 18% support of the community based on that single price valuation is extremely misleading imho.
From a volume standpoint, I would argue that it has less than 1% support of the community at large.
[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/
[+] [-] jsnathan|8 years ago|reply
What I've also wondered about though is multiple chains combining into one. Does anyone know if this has happened before?
I believe there is a strong analogy here to how company stock can evolve, when companies are either split out as separate entities, or merged into one, respectively.
[+] [-] placeybordeaux|8 years ago|reply
https://steemit.com/bitcoincash/@bitbizke/bitcoin-cash-imple...
[+] [-] GordonS|8 years ago|reply
How do I access my Bitcoin Cash coins after the split? Is there another wallet I need to install?
Also, is there any news on what exchanges will trade Bitcoin Cash?
[+] [-] josh2600|8 years ago|reply
Anything that moves transactions off of the network or decreases the number of miners queried per transaction is therefore antithetical.
If you are a miner, lightning and segwit just hurt you. The only way you'll allow them is if you believe that to do otherwise would slay the golden goose.
Edit: Source: I run a crypto hedge fund.
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|8 years ago|reply
Also, altcoins present a real competitive risk; failure to maintain an advantage over them will see network value approach zero.
[+] [-] ve55|8 years ago|reply
It's quite possible that this fork is negligible for awhile. But because parties such as Core will likely refuse to let the segwit2x part of segwit happen [1, many others], if the miners follow through on their promises, then this could be real entertaining to watch if the larger miners start switching to BCC during this later period.
Just like when ETH split into ETH and ETC, it seemed as if almost everyone dumped their ETC coins as quickly as possible. But contrary to what most predicted, the chain ended up having real value. It seems like quite a few Bitcoin holders are planning on doing this as well, although many are being more cautious this time around and holding their BCC instead.
You don't want to sell your stash of the next Bitcoin, just in case you're wrong. These things are impossible to predict for normal investors.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support
[+] [-] bitcoinfused|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cesarb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|8 years ago|reply
Unless of course this tanks the system entirely, but that seems unlikely.
[+] [-] Taek|8 years ago|reply
If you care about one token over the other, the best thing to do is let the dust settle, then sell all of your non-preferred token for the preferred token. Financially, this should not set you back even if you prefer the minority token - you just end up with a bunch of them, and the total value of your wallet is still about the same.
[+] [-] jstanley|8 years ago|reply
Bitcoin isn't worth $2500 per Bitcoin by magic. It's worth that because of supply and demand.
The only change might be that some of the demand shifts to BitcoinCash instead of Bitcoin, meaning the price of both will be lower than the price of Bitcoin now, but they'll likely add up to about the same amount.
[+] [-] serg_chernata|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taek|8 years ago|reply
I'm hoping it decreases the overall level of conflict, as both groups will be able to get what they want here.
[+] [-] um_ya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runeks|8 years ago|reply
https://coin.dance/blocks#proposals
[+] [-] PhrosTT|8 years ago|reply
If there is a hard fork, are they just going to wait until the dust settles and then give people access to both coins? I.E. BCC would magically appear in your account. Or do they seriously intend to not support one of the chains and just have all their users holding BTC worth X% less?
[+] [-] jstanley|8 years ago|reply
Here's what they say: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/284421...
Notably:
> Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin.
[+] [-] GordonS|8 years ago|reply
Now would be a good time to get your BTC out of Bitstamp, to ensure you get access to your BCC coins when the fork takes place.