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The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

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Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#141

Post by BigBubbler »

johndevor wrote: post #39
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #36

I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.

Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)

Lol, no LN does not solve almost anything. It will be good for some centralized and KYC-rich uses by businesses and their customers. It will not make BTC into a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.

Among the "Bitcoins", only Bitcoin Cash is keeping that dream alive.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#142

Post by lawn »

nullc wrote: post #135
lawn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's laughably bad engineering to try to solve the scaling issue of the base layer by adding another layer on top. It's like you'd try to solve a throughput problem of IP by layering TCP or HTTP on top. But this is the logic of one of the main devs who championed the "fee market" idea of Bitcoin[0], that high fees are required for Bitcoin to function. And who in 2017 celebrated when fees were around $50.[1] [1]: http…

The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience. The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one. Contrary to the claims of the article the term "fee market" was introduced and promoted by Jeff Garzik-- rather than people opposing hi…

> The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience.

That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.

> The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.

Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees. I'd say even better as people will stop using Bitcoin or move to other cryptocurrencies when fees grow.

Saying that the "fee market" (or "blockspace market" if you want) is supported by the white paper extremely dishonest. The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees. Zero fee transactions were on the other hand accepted from day one.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#143

Post by BigBubbler »

nullc wrote: post #134
kain_niak wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still limited to 1 000 000 bytes per 10 minutes and then some for segwit which was a unnecessary hack job that actually makes blocks bigger without much added throughput.

That isn't true. In Bitcoin the block size limit was eliminated and replaced with a block weight limit which better reflects the long term operating costs for node. The raw 'size' of transactions inherently is becoming less meaningful in the long term with things like transaction compression and compact encodings. The weight limit doesn't map perfectly to any size limit because its limiting different things, this eve…

Probably technically true, but, it is just a part of the dishonest language-shell-game to fool people into thinking BTC can really scale to become a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. 1.3 MB is still tiny! Pretending a small difference matters is so disingenuous.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#144

Post by nullc »

BigBubbler wrote: post #143
nullc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't true. In Bitcoin the block size limit was eliminated and replaced with a block weight limit which better reflects the long term operating costs for node. The raw 'size' of transactions inherently is becoming less meaningful in the long term with things like transaction compression and compact encodings. The weight limit doesn't map perfectly to any size limit because its limiting different things, this eve…

Probably technically true, but, it is just a part of the dishonest language-shell-game to fool people into thinking BTC can really scale to become a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. 1.3 MB is still tiny! Pretending a small difference matters is so disingenuous.

Blocksize is a rate.

If you were traveling at 120 MPH and then accelerated to 156 MPH you would not say that this was a small difference without consequences.

It mattered significantly, in several respects. E.g. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#145

Post by nullc »

sunared wrote: post #131
nullc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of his last messages in 2010 before going publically inactive, Bitcoin's creator wrote: > Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... ) Hal Finney, one of the main developers of PGP and Bitcoin's first user wrote in 2010: > I believe this will be the ultim…

> Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices. He was talking about people like you. He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit. Stop trying to twist his words. Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise. At least here I won't get censored by theymos like on r\bitcoin…

> He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit.

I don't know about 'centerally planned' but he hardcoded a limit into the consensus rules.

> Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise.

That's the point. And I a pointing out that they said all these things in 2010-2014-- as you can see some of the quotes (esp from Jeff) are quite emphatic. I could quote a lot more.

The narrative a lot of people are transmitting about Bitcoin is untrue, and by showing the diversity of these views going WAY back from people who later tried to push through changes I think makes that point pretty well.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#146

Post by nullc »

lawn wrote: post #142
nullc wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience. The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one. Contrary to the claims of the article the term "fee market" was introduced and promoted by Jeff Garzik-- rather than people opposing hi…

> The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience. That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done. > The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one. Many transactions paying…

> That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.

How so? I'm fairly proud of my actions, and I'd be happy to discuss any of them with you.

> The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees.

There is nothing that actually supports that the claim that it was spam protection, thats just blind unsubstantiated assertions.

The system has anti-spam mechanisms in it all along that worked independently of the blocksize.

I think it's fairly likely that Satoshi didn't give these details a lot of thought... It's a champagne problem, and for as many things as he clearly thought through there were many others that were a little rough (e.g. like the broken original longest chain rule).

> Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees.

This is being slowly disproved in practice. Bitcoin currently pulls in $3m per month in fees. The most popular fork with no blocksize limit pools in a couple thousand dollar at most, with a substantially lower amount of fees per transaction. Even if their block was 95% full at their current rate, it wouldn't be more than a few percent of its funding from inflation (while bitcoin fees currently are as much as 25% of that altcoin's inflation).

Assuming it isn't inhibited by node resource usage, propagation centralization pressures, or other considerations it could always be increased in the future... going the other day with an ecosystem that depens on effectively zero fees would be much harder. I don't think it's an accident that analysis supporting unlimited block sizes assumes perpetual inflation instead of limited supply.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#147

Post by vegarde »

lawn wrote: post #128
__s wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2nd layer avoids bloating the ledger. Once limits of 2nd layer are being explored, you can make adjustments to 1st layer with information about how that'll improve 2nd layer throughput. This is like arguing that we shouldn't have in-memory caches, we should just have faster disks Fees prevent spam

Once limits of 1st layer are explored (the Bitcoin developers have never even bothered to research where the limits are) you can augment it with 2nd layer solutions. Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other. Even the Lightning Network whitepaper states it needs much larger blocks, and for it to work well you need to be able to settle quickly and cheaply on-cha…

Let me get this clear: You want to WAIT until it's evident that we can't scale anymore, and then add 2nd layers?

And this, you want to do after significant adoption?

So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#148

Post by nullc »

6nf wrote: post #85
Empact wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what I last heard from merchants that accept it (e.g. Bitrefill), it's about tied with Ethereum for second in payment volume, after Bitcoin.

Thats bullshit. ETH has loads of transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin. Lightning network transaction volume is almost zero right now.

You have no idea what lightning transaction volume is, for all you can tell I'm currently making 1000 transactions per second in a loop between a set of lightning wallets. :)

Because lightning is actually relatively scalable it doesn't broadcast every action to everyone.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#150

Post by lawn »

vegarde wrote: post #147
lawn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once limits of 1st layer are explored (the Bitcoin developers have never even bothered to research where the limits are) you can augment it with 2nd layer solutions. Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other. Even the Lightning Network whitepaper states it needs much larger blocks, and for it to work well you need to be able to settle quickly and cheaply on-cha…

Let me get this clear: You want to WAIT until it's evident that we can't scale anymore, and then add 2nd layers? And this, you want to do after significant adoption? So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?

I think you should re-read what I wrote:

> Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other.

I have no issues with developing 2nd layers, but ignoring on-chain scaling and not even looking at what can be achieved is beyond stupid.

In fact we know that moderate blocksize increases are safe (we can increase it many times before block propagation time becomes an issue for example). Yet we've thrown that out and placed our hope that 2nd layers will magically solve this for us.

> So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?

No, that's exactly what has happened to Bitcoin, and what the Bitcoin developers have been saying the last few years. It's what I'm saying is so stupid.

The Lightning Network has been "ready in 18 months" the last 4 years. And it's still not ready.

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