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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#331

Post by RandVal30142 »

Taek wrote: post #223
simias wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, but then again how this complex routing will be implemented in practice remains a bit foggy and highly experimental: http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/whitepape... And while this is an important feature of lighting, it's not actually a "feature" when compared to Visa or MasterCard and the centralized banking system from the point of view of the user. Ideally this should all be hidden away…

Users don't need to worry about routing when they connect to the internet, though in fact the computer is making 10+ hops for any given connection. Lightning will work the same way. Nobody needs to worry about graph theory, they can just generally assume that the graph is fully connected, and that their software will be able to find a path from A to B.

>Users don't need to worry about routing when they connect to the internet

God I wish this was still true. The internet is so fragmented now I have to have IPs in different nations for a unified experience.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#332

Post by polyomino »

joosters wrote: post #166
julian_1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter-argument is that the Lightening work is a proprietary development outside of bitcoin core (lead by Blockstream) and the work is even patent-encumbered. They state the ip is for defensive purposes only - however that is questionable given that anything they implement, automatically becomes prior-art. It is also contrary to the spirit and practice of the majority of crypto/alt projects. It is unreasonable to…

The 'lightning network' has been one of the promised solutions 'coming soon' for many years now. Except, no-one has solved all its problems yet. There remain difficult issues to do with routing of transactions, and some horrible money-losing behaviour if users don't stay online to protect their channels from being looted. On top of that, there's not enough space on the blockchain to allow everyone to open & close a p…

There are already working implementations of lightning on litecoin which can route transactions.

lighting is designed to be able to farm out channel enforcement to other nodes on the network to prevent cheating while preserving privacy.

lighting does require more block space to operate globally than is available. It still scales better than bitcoin though.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#333

Post by buttershakes »

PaulHoule wrote: post #329
buttershakes wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% sh…

Well, they do scale. It's just a question or how much they scale. A practical perspective says we don't need to scale to VISA levels right now, we just need to slowly increase the block size to encourage adoption and new users while keeping fees low, while additional scale measures are explored and integrated. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is susceptible to centralization risks independent of the block size. The nodes that are doing validation for light clients are important, but don't need to store the entire blockchain to do that validation and so are largely limited by compute and bandwidth. If we slowly increase bandwidth requirements on a reasonable schedule we can continue to grow Bitcoin's base for years. Is it reasonable to expect we can handle 24 megabyte blocks in 6 years? There are other ways to handle scale that are less complicated than Segwit. This entire thing might fall under extremely premature optimization.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#334

Post by kerkeslager »

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…

There are easy ways to deal with block chain size, many of which are in use already.

The only proposals on the table for off chain storage add profiteering middle men to the system. I'd rather pay for storage.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#335

Post by thehardsphere »

ithought wrote: post #83
isubkhankulov wrote: post #12

this post feels like propoganda. prior bitcoin upgrades have gone much smoother and when they do go wrong the community banded together to spread the right information. albiet the userbase was likely a lot smaller back then.

If the soft fork goes through, the Chinese miners are going to attack the chain. If the soft fork fails, Core developer Luke-Jr said they'd change the Proof of Work algorithm and possibly create an altcoin (or bitcoin if enough follow). This is like a Russian Roullete situation. The gun's loaded, all signs point to neither side conceding. It's the cypherpunks vs the corporate miners (plus some former devs and very cr…

I think the proper analogy is that it's a Mexican Standoff, not Russian Roulette.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#336

Post by campbelltown »

zero_iq wrote: post #165
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…

I am rather stunned that the entire global bitcoin network, with its colossal combined computing power, and staggering electricity consumption, is only capable of sustaining 7 tps. The level of inefficiency here is mind-boggling. Surely this must be one of the least efficient, least environmentally-friendly computing ventures ever?

The colossal compute power goes up when more fiat enter the system and traders speculate the price up. It is a security mechanism, not a throughput mechanism

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#337

Post by kerkeslager »

girst wrote: post #330
kerkeslager wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. And how many applications actually have to store the block chain?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#339

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#340

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

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.

Certainly some thought/think that, but I don't think it was every correct to do so. What it does, is it makes the politics around money more explicit.

You might use a crypto with a fixed monetary supply, with fungible tokens, with permanent fixed inflation, etc. etc. The difference is that there's a choice and a market for these tokens.

There's also the notion that nation states wield a great deal of power through currencies, and that removing this power from nations may be desirable.

Anyone who thought that Bitcoin wouldn't be political, however, was badly missing the mark. All one has to do is see the intense ideological motivations for holding Bitcoin that many have.

For many, the consensus-generating nature of the network is the real interesting part about it.

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