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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#321

Post by josu »

coryfklein wrote: post #294
zby wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a situation where the transactions are of such a big value that even the 7 transactions per second are enough to pay for the whole system sustenance. But yeah the system currently burns resources on a level comparable to gold mining ( https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-work-8d8265def194 ) - but it is much less useful than gold (for value store).

Forgive my ignorance, but hasn't the historical value store of bitcoin eclipsed that of gold?

It is too early to judge. A good store of value probably shouldn't increase in value 3-10x each year. If I were to put $1000USD in gold today, I could be fairly sure that in 30 years it will still be worth, at least, $500USD. If I were to do the same with bitcoin, I have no idea what would even happen in 5 years.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#322

Post by kerkeslager »

buttershakes wrote: post #316

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chai…

My understanding is that SegWit allows companies to insert themselves as middle men in the system who provide fast transactions.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#323

Post by kerkeslager »

zby wrote: post #53
jpatokal wrote: post #20

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). Ho…

It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin protocol processes about 7 transactions per second. Doubling the speed by doubling blocks will not make it much closer to the 50K transactions per second of a system like VISA. But it is probably possible to scale the transaction system off-chain - with https://…

Surely Hacker News understands exponents enough to see that doubling the size does get us to Visa-like 50k transactions in only 16 doubles.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#324

Post by buttershakes »

kerkeslager wrote: post #322
buttershakes wrote: post #316

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chai…

My understanding is that SegWit allows companies to insert themselves as middle men in the system who provide fast transactions.

This is probably exactly what will happen, because the chain will not be able to support transactions directly in quantity, and so we end up with a plethora of middle men who are responsible for opening and maintaining payment channels. That scales pretty well, but a hybrid solution is probably best. Moores law and all that.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#325

Post by [deleted] »

kerkeslager wrote: post #322
buttershakes wrote: post #316

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chai…

My understanding is that SegWit allows companies to insert themselves as middle men in the system who provide fast transactions.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#326

Post by buttershakes »

mmagin wrote: post #320
buttershakes wrote: post #316

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chai…

As an outsider, I find it especially amusing that cryptocurrencies are supposed to make it so that users don't have to live with the politics surrounding traditional currency.

It's unfortunate but as a consensus driven system it is much different structurally than say Linux. I can fork the Linux code and run my own version and nobody cares and it still has utility (for me), but Bitcoin as a whole requires a lot of different parties to agree on the code they run for it to be effective. I'm undecided as to whether that is a fatal flaw or a feature.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#327

Post by RandVal30142 »

rothbardrand wrote: post #116
lawn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main narrative being pushed by Blockstream and Core who are afraid of loosing control over the main Bitcoin reference client, beware. > I think you missed the key issue. Mining is largely centralized under the control of Bitmain, both via pools and indirectly via miners they have sold False, bitcoin mining has never been as decentralized as it is now: https://coin.dance/blocks > Segwit2X is a compromise--…

This is not a narrative, this is the technical facts. You're pushing a narrative. Bitcoin mining has never been as centralized as it is right now with one man controlling over %70 of the hash rate via multiple pools. Many of those pools are just the same player operating under different names. Segwit2X is in fact a compromise, and I linked to a blog post where Bitmain complains about it. They want to "activate segwit…

>This is not a narrative, this is the technical facts. You're pushing a narrative.

Then you immediately launch into narrative, one that avoids detailing how Jihan doesn't control the hashrate. Individual buyers and operators of Bitmain's mining hardware do. You are attributing things in plainly incorrect ways.

>Bitcoin mining has never been as centralized as it is right now with one man controlling over %70 of the hash rate via multiple pools.

Nothing about the owners or the choices they can make with their hashrate. All some narrative about "evil Jihan."

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#328

Post by andrewla »

sethev wrote: post #312
_red wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 7 TPS claim is an apples-to-oranges comparison. You must remember that Bitcoin transactions are "settled" in that 7 TPS timescale, whereas VISA transactions are merely "recorded" in their 50K TPS rate. In reality, it generally takes a minimum of 15 days for your VISA transaction to "settle" with your bank account. Thereby the true TPS rate is orders of magnitude lower for VISA.

Even if you spread Visa's transactions evenly over time, the 100 billion transactions per year [1] that they perform would be a couple orders of magnitude higher than what bitcoin can support (~3000 TPS) [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visa-...

I think you mean to use a total transaction number for bitcoin, rather than a per-second number, to compare to Visa.

If we use the 7 TPS number that people seem to be using (even though the real number I think is slightly lower), then we end up with 220,752,000 transactions in a year; three orders of magnitude less than Visa.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#329

Post by PaulHoule »

buttershakes wrote: post #326
mmagin wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider, I find it especially amusing that cryptocurrencies are supposed to make it so that users don't have to live with the politics surrounding traditional currency.

It's unfortunate but as a consensus driven system it is much different structurally than say Linux. I can fork the Linux code and run my own version and nobody cares and it still has utility (for me), but Bitcoin as a whole requires a lot of different parties to agree on the code they run for it to be effective. I'm undecided as to whether that is a fatal flaw or a feature.

I think blockchains are more practical for a few traders who meet around a Buttonwood Tree (permissioned) than they are for the public.

The reason we got so far before blockchains were invented was that you've never get a paper in a CS conference if you built a distributed system that did not increase it's ability to handle more workload AT ALL when you add more nodes.

If 5 parties that don't trust each other 100% share a blockchain they get a lot of benefit from that. Upping that 5 to 500 or 5000 does not increase the value proportionately. That is, blockchains don't scale.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#330

Post by girst »

kerkeslager wrote: post #323
zby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin protocol processes about 7 transactions per second. Doubling the speed by doubling blocks will not make it much closer to the 50K transactions per second of a system like VISA. But it is probably possible to scale the transaction system off-chain - with https://…

Surely Hacker News understands exponents enough to see that doubling the size does get us to Visa-like 50k transactions in only 16 doubles.

surely HN understands exponents enough to notice that 1MB * 2^16 = 64GigaBytes.
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