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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#301

Post by exit »

atemerev wrote: post #137

For me, the lightning network is the obviously right solution, bringing more decentralization and totally removing the need for global consensus. Why it is not that popular, I don't know.

> Why it is not that popular, I don't know.

because using sha256 for proof of work was a mistake - it's too easily implemented in specialised hardware.

now mining power is centralising and small groups can manipulate blockchain policies in their own interest.

bitcoin should PoW-chain to a memory-hard hashing algorithm.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#302

Post by modeless »

kilimchoi wrote: post #92
modeless wrote: post #68

The problems described in this post are unlikely to happen. There is an attempt to split ("fork") the network scheduled for August 1. The people forking will force activation of a new feature, Segwit, while the non-forkers won't. However , the non-forkers are currently planning to activate Segwit as part of a compromise plan before the deadline. If this compromise happens as planned, there will be no need to force-ac…

If the community soft-forks as you say, then this will be disastrous since corporate miners will not be onboard and the forked chain will be vulnerable to attacks which could result in UASF chain's demise.

The UASF chain's demise would not be disastrous at all, it would simply be the status quo. Bitcoin would continue as normal.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#303

Post by jcfrei »

simias wrote: post #143
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://…

While I agree that only increasing block size forever (or simply removing the size limit) doesn't seem reasonable in the long run, are we sure that segwit and the off-chain scaling solutions proposed today will really solve the long-term scaling issues of BTC? All the practical "here's how lightning's going to work" papers I've read so far leave me very skeptical. Here's an example: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/…

The simulation starts with each user having 14 channels open - seems like quite a strong assumption for a serious test (starting with 0 channels for each user and then randomly opening new ones would be much more interesting). After a talk by one of the lightning devs I also got the impression that they are betting that several hubs with thousands of channels would quickly emerge - due to the fee gained by running a channel. Needless to say this would undo quite a bit of the decentralized nature of bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#304

Post by worditup »

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?

Yes and no. 1 Bitcoin is worth more than an ounce of gold ($2340 Bitcoin to $1215 ounce of gold). But the value of all outstanding Bitcoin vs all mined gold is much lower ($39 billion all Bitcoin to $8 Trillion all gold).

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#305

Post by zby »

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?

What are you really asking about? What is historical value store of bitcoin? The value stored in bitcoin is still orders of magnitude less than that stored in gold.

Sure the exchange rate of bitcoin has grown much - but it does not make it better value store now, rather the opposite.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#306

Post by ambicapter »

unabridged wrote: post #50

This is late FUD, a last minute whine by the owners of "bitcoin.org" aka core. The discussion over scaling has been happening for many months and consensus has actually just been reached in the last couple weeks. 85% of the mining power is signalling for segwit2x, and if this continues it will lock in before Aug 1st completely avoiding the scary situation talked about in the post.

Does this mean that you could end up holding on to bitcoins that don't have anymore value? Or are you fine if you just wait for the longest chain to emerge and don't do any transactions until then?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#307

Post by flashdance »

knocte wrote: post #164
sktrdie wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it false? I didn't say "mining is profitable". I just said anybody can do it, and that's the key. Just like anybody can seed torrents without any incentive, or just like Tor nodes exist without any incentive.

Expanded a bit my answer. IMVHO, ASIC hardware provides such a huge efficiency boost that even if everybody in this planet ran a mining raspberry pi, the ASIC manufacturers would maybe still own more than 51% of the hashrate.

Not maybe, definitely. A first-gen pi can mine at 200KH/s [1], and a 3rd gen pi is roughly 10x faster in cpu tests [2].

At 2 MH/s per pi, times 7 billion people, you get a paltry 14 petahashes/s. That's a hair over 0.2% of the network...

You'd need three trillion raspberry pis to get half the network. Good luck with that!

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis...

[2] http://lifehacker.com/how-the-raspberry-pi-3-benchmarks-agai...

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#308

Post by grubles »

jancsika wrote: post #160
zby wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well - increasing the block size is not costless - it is not just pushing the gas pedal a little more like in your example.

What is the cost? I would assume it is consolidation of mining power since larger block size makes it even less likely for smaller players to be able to verify new blocks in real time. But isn't mining power already consolidated?

The cost is, with 8MB blocks, 95% of nodes that validate consensus will be excluded (unable to keep up or become too costly to run) within 6 months - as per BitFury's (heavily invested Bitcoin mining company) research on bigger blocks: http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz...

Without full nodes validating consensus, miners can (will) force protocol changes (eg. change 21,000,000 coin limit) on users, effectively changing the decentralized leaderless attributes to a centralized dictatorial less-efficient PayPal. At this moment, bigger blocks mean a less-free (as in speech) bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#309

Post by kakarot »

GenericsMotors wrote: post #284
kakarot wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized currency comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. The tech is still in its infancy. Take it or leave it.

Then seems to me it's on its deathbed, not in its infancy. A handful of Chinese mining pools will decide which fork retains any value...so much for decentralization.

You are conflating Bitcoin with decentralized currency.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#310

Post by paulmd »

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, which means that only specifically equipped entities such as miners will be able to have a copy of it, and that is a big problem.

This is eventually going to be a problem sooner or later regardless. The fundamental decentralization of Bitcoin depends on everyone having the whole blockchain. Any sort of "checkpointing" mechanism inherently relies on trusting authoritative nodes about network state, at which point it's no longer decentralized.

(However this is somewhat of a distinction without a difference. In practice you are trusting the nodes on the network anyway - the network is authoritative because everyone agrees to treat it as authoritative. If everyone agrees to trust some other blockchain as "the real truth" then you can either accept the new authoritative network or be on your own chain that nobody else accepts - which is what happened to Ethereum after the DAO hack.)

This is a fundamental limit to the Bitcoin model and will have to be addressed sooner or later. The data is already past ~100 GB (and totally incompressible) and that's with blocks so small that the network is choking due to lack of capacity. This is only a few years' worth of records, what does the big picture look like in 20 years?

Segwit is absolutely mandatory to allow interfacing other chains in a secure manner. Pretty much everyone agrees transaction malleability is a huge design flaw (apart from some Chinese farms which are abusing it via AsicBoost).

What I specifically have a problem with is the way both sides have drawn arbitrary lines here. It's not SegWit or a larger block, we can have both. And in fact the Core proposal does include a larger block, on a surface level this dispute is over how much bigger it should be (the Unlimited devs want a much larger block right away). Again, pretty much everyone agrees that transaction malleability needs to be fixed except that group of miners.

On a deeper level it's about a power struggle between the Bitcoin Core devs and the Bitcoin Unlimited devs, and between the various factions of miners.

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