10x the transactions is not much at all. The comparison with the VISA network is not a valid one - with micropayments the volume could be 100x or 10000x - we should be able to accommodate it.
The only solution is to begin handling transations off-chain. But the problem is that there is no one good proposal for it. Until it is clear how off-chain transactions work, we will keep seeing this sort of stuff.
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.
But yeah - the size of the blocks does depend on the number and size of transactions and if you don't have transactions to fill up the block in full (i.e. so that its size is just under the maximal block size) - then the transactions will be the limiting factor.
Why do you think Satoshi's gave it an artificial 1MB limit if it didn't matter?
I have no idea why Satoshi chose a 1MB limit. Probably for the same reason he chose a 21M BTC limit on the total number of bitcoins that can be mined: both are arbitrary numbers that he pulled out of a hat. But the next time I see him I'll be sure to ask.
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.
The only proposals on the table for off chain storage add profiteering middle men to the system. I'd rather pay for storage.
Gas can mean ETH gas, petrol gas, or gas gas.
I have seen this myself with a production blockchain and blocks that were less than 1mb. Increasing the size increases this effect and gives Chinese miners and artificial advantage.
Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam.
Further, segwit increases block size and efficiency so there's no reason to not activate it.
This whole issue isn't about scale, core is still ahead of the curve on what's needed to scale, it's about control, and disabling ASICBOOST and keeping transaction fees high.
Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam.
Woohoo! No need for anyone to do anything then. Remind me again why everyone is trying to scale bitcoin?
Everyone is trying to scale bitcoin because bitcoin is growing dramatically... that doesn't mean that the "full blocks" and "high fees" we saw recently weren't due to spam.
Please logic.
Ironically, this has actually become a real Byzantine Generals problem. Guess Bitcoin can't actually solve that problem in the real world.
From what I understand, China isn't too keen on the whole endeavor since it circumvents their (stringent) capital controls. What happens if they turn the baleful eye of their deep packet inspection onto the Bitcoin network? (serious question)
(Background for those who don't know: encryption/etc don't work against the Great Firewall, it knows what a given type of connection "looks like" in terms of packets/activity, so it can identify (eg) a VPN session even if it's "wrapped" or "tunneled" across some other protocol. They use a massive amount of machine learning hardware to profile connections in realtime to pick out "suspicious" activity and those connections will be dropped after a few moments. It's not impossible to run arbitrary connections through the firewall but it's very difficult and getting harder all the time.)
But isn't mining power already consolidated?
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.
If there were no technical and economic tradeoffs to increasing the blocksize then yes, it would hard to see how otherwise intelligent people could oppose it. Everybody loves a free lunch. But there are tradeoffs, which you conveniently omit, which are giving those otherwise intelligent people pause, rightfully so.
Currently at 160GB or something with 1MB block, what storage do you think a node will require with 10MB block in the next 5 years when the usage will be growing?