Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#241

Post by mikeash » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

Hermel wrote: post #71

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://…

I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not…

If you believe that Bitcoin needs to scale up far beyond 10x the current size, then it's like driving your car at 10km/h per hour on the highway and refusing to increase your speed because you're trying to get to the moon and going faster in your car won't help in the least.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#242

Post by chicagomint » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

julian_1 wrote: post #128

rothbardrand wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing proprietary about Lightening Network. Lightning network was started by a startup, who published the paper, there are several open source implementations of it, and to my knowledge there's no actual involvement of Blockstream. Blockstream has their own solution (that doesn't need segwit right now) called Liquid. Liquid Network and Lightening Network are different things and work in a different ways. A…

I referred to Blockstream and this is their patent front announcement, > Today we are excited to announce some important steps we are taking on the patent front, why these defensive steps are necessary, and our hope that others will see merit in our approach and follow our lead. ... > Our Patent Pledge assures developers and users of our technology that we will not sue them for patent infringement, provided they comp…

It is worth mentioning that the EFF endorsed Blockstream and this sort of "defensive patent" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/blockstream-commits-pa...

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#243

Post by asymmetric » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #175

sktrdie wrote: post #158

All this "unconsensus" is weird to me given that PoW was created to fix just that. I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners. After all, anybody can be a miner. Anything other than that just doesn't make it decentralized anymore. If you trust the developers, exchanges or even users to make decisions, then why not just make a BitcoinSQL where the servers are c…

One of the things that was confusing to me is the U in UASF. It's not a user actived soft fork, its certain miners vs other miners.

The U in UASF means anyone who runs a full Bitcoin node, irregardless of whether they're mining or not.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#244

Post by criddell » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

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…

Were the scaling problems not predicted or known in the original design?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#245

Post by BenjiWiebe » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #217

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://…

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.

So everyone quits making transactions for a week while Visa catches up? Or does there backlog increase indefinitely? OR do they have to settle at the same rate as record, just delayed? I'm guessing the last one...

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#246

Post by gruez » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:39 PM UTC

whiskers08xmt wrote: post #215

runeks wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitfury recently released an analysis, that predicts that 95% of current miners, would find mining to be unprofitable at blocksize of 8MB. I don't understand this. Due to what would 95% of current miners find mining unprofitable at 8MB blocks?

8mb blocks would mean that the bitcoin blockchain, would grow by 35 gigabyte a month. Compare this to the total blockchain size of about 120gb right now. This increases the cost of mining, by requiring miners to keep up on harddisk space. This cost can be amortized, as you can scale your processing independently of your harddisk space, making it even more profitable to mine for big investors, than smaller fish.

>This increases the cost of mining, by requiring miners to keep up on harddisk space

miners typically mine in pools. so they don't need to download the blockchain because the pool is doing it for them.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#247

Post by qznc » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #167

knocte wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anybody can be a miner That is false, nowadays. > Let's not forget that anybody can be a miner! Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :) Bitcoin's mining algorithm is so simple that mining industry has specialized too much, and now the best technology for it is ASICs. You cannot mine (or rather, it's nowhere near profitable) if you don't have access to this kind of hardware. And o…

> And of course, claiming that anybody can have access to this hardware is very very debatable. The best indicator of how this is not accessible by everybody is how centralized this industry is nowadays (just look at the correlation between ASIC manufacturers and owners of mining pools). Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :) https://coin.dance/blocks Where is the centralization?…

If Antpool, BTC.top, F2Pool, and Bixin conspire, they control 51% of the mining power. There is the oligarchy aka centralization.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#248

Post by lisper » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #238

Hermel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not…

Increasing the block will solve the problem until the new size is not enough, which will be very soon. A larger block means a larger blockchain, and the nice thing about the blockchain is that you can download the entire thing. With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user, which means that only specifically equipped entities such as miners will be able to…

> With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user

This has nothing to do with the block size. The size of the chain is proportional to the number of transactions. Whether those are sliced-and-diced into small blocks or large ones is completely irrelevant to how big the chain is. The only thing the block size influences is how many transactions can be mined in one block, i.e. the rate at which transactions can be processed.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#249

Post by qznc » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #216

imaginenore wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners. How about Bitcoin owners instead? Your vote is proportional to how much you have.

That's a proof-of-stake! There are coins that use it. The only that comes to mind is peercoin (first to use PoS IIRC).

Ethereum (Vitalik) wants to switch to PoS.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#250

Post by BenjiWiebe » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 2:53 PM UTC

alex_duf wrote: post #228

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…

So whilst the chain is split, am I correct to assume you can spend your money twice?

Yes, if you can find a place to spend your coins that accepts the old chain, and another place that accepts the new chain.