Re: [bitcoin-dev] The need for larger blocks

[Venzen Khaosan <venzen@mail.bihthai.net>]

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Pieter,

Sure. Your thinking is sound. I take things beyond where you have in
your post, so I neither imply that this is your position or that this
is the progression of your stated point.

In one sense, one has to ask the question: is there a reasonable case
for making Bitcoin super-capacitated so it can compete with Visa and
just be the fastest-ever payment network with everyone jizzing in
their pants over its speed and capacity and availability and dividends.

By virtue of the core requirement of decentralization, for Bitcoin to
remain meaningful, it will never compete with Visa or the Fed's new
blockchain-based payment system. So, why attempt the impossible and
expend energy on the futile?

Bitcoin's protocol and payment network has features and benefits that
Visa et all cannot have, so I refute the notion, sometimes expressed
here, that 7tps is a major cap on growth and adoption.

Such thinking takes as its axiom the idea that increased adoption
correlates to increased value. Not true. Look at the price chart for
proof: More businesses accept and more people are using and
transacting via Bitcoin now than ever before and yet the price chart
points *down*, not up.

Why should any explicitly centralized exchange and business venture
have their use of the protocol facilitated? Was the protocol designed
to conform to financial capital demands or was it designed to
fundamentally change the way ordinary users interact with markets?

If those present here, do not realize that the blockchain is a means
of escaping (and destroying through its use and promotion)
centralization, then they have shells over their eyes. Bitcoin is not
meant to fit into the system, it will evolve the system, by the system
coming to it.

Does that mean we shouldn't raise the blocksize? Maybe. But 8GB with
BIP100's protections seems a reasonable change given the sudden
increase in network usage that a global liquidity crisis will impose.

Many scenarios are possible, but there is no onus on developers or on
Bitcoin to "keep up". Like it or not, the global economy will
inevitably be forced to Slow Down as a result of the same thinking
that upholds constant growth without sympathetic contraction.

Venzen Khaosan


On 06/26/2015 09:09 PM, Pieter Wuille wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> here I'm going to try to address a part of the block size debate
> which has been troubling me since the beginning: the reason why
> people seem to want it.
> 
> People say that larger blocks are necessary. In the long term, I
> agree - in the sense that systems that do not evolve tend to be
> replaced by other systems. This evolution can come in terms of
> layers on top of Bitcoin's blockchain, in terms of the technology
> underlying various aspects of the blockchain itself, and also in
> the scale that this technology supports.
> 
> I do, however, fundamentally disagree that a fear for a change in 
> economics should be considered to necessitate larger blocks. If it
> is, and there is consensus that we should adapt to it, then there
> is effectively no limit going forward. This is similar to how
> Congress voting to increase the copyright term retroactively from
> time to time is really no different from having an infinite
> copyright term in the first place. This scares me.
> 
> Here is how Gavin summarizes the future without increasing block
> sizes in PR 6341:
> 
>> 1. Transaction confirmation times for transactions with a given
>> fee
> will rise; very-low-fee transactions will fail to get confirmed at
> all.
>> 2. Average transaction fee paid will rise 3. People or
>> applications unwilling or unable to pay the rising fees
> will stop submitting transactions
>> 4. People and businesses will shelve plans to use Bitcoin,
>> stunting
> growth and adoption
> 
> Is it fair to summarize this as "Some use cases won't fit any
> more, people will decide to no longer use the blockchain for these
> purposes, and the fees will adapt."?
> 
> I think that is already happening, and will happen at any scale. I 
> believe demand for payments in general is nearly infinite, and only
> a small portion of it will eventually fit on a block chain
> (independent of whether its size is limited by consensus rules or
> economic or technological means). Furthermore, systems that compete
> with Bitcoin in this space already offer orders of magnitude more
> capacity than we can reasonably achieve with any blockchain
> technology at this point.
> 
> I don't know what subset of use cases Bitcoin will cater to in the
> long term. They have already changed - you see way less betting
> transactions these days than a few years ago for example - and they
> will keep changing, independent of what effective block sizes we
> end up with. I don't think we should be afraid of this change or
> try to stop it.
> 
> If you look at graphs of block sizes over time (for example, 
> http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=498), it seems to me that there is very 
> little "organic" growth, and a lot of sudden changes (which could 
> correspond to changing defaults in miner software, introduction of 
> popular sites/services, changes in the economy). I think these can
> be seen as the economy changing to full up the available space, and
> I believe these will keep happening at any size effectively
> available.
> 
> None of this is a reason why the size can't increase. However, in
> my opinion, we should do it because we believe it increases utility
> and understand the risks; not because we're afraid of what might
> happen if we don't hurry up. And from that point of view, it seems
> silly to make a huge increase at once...
> 
> -- Pieter
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing
> list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org 
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
> 
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