There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-...
There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-...
Specifically, it:
- reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a sufficiently scarce resources
- makes orphaned blocks more likely, which means that the probability of losing a block that you already successfully mined is increased.
Although I'm a large-blocker myself, Segwit has one thing going for it, namely, fixing transaction malleability. For anyone who has to deal with bitcoin in bulk (any business using bitcoin, basically), malleability is a killer bug -- it makes it very hard to detect if your transactions have made it on to the network, and impossible to chain transactions together reliably. That's who benefits from Segwit, and it's a big benefit.
It also enables some off-chain solutions that are infeasible in a malleable-prone network.
The opposition to Segwit, in my opinion, stems mainly from the fact that it is complicated, and was given priority over the "clear and present" problem of blocks being full that had a simpler solution of hard-forking to increase block size. So it's being held up as a totem by the large-blocking crowd of the poor decisions of Core, and for alleged conflicts of interest around the off-chain solutions.
Other than the risk of a hard fork itself, the negative effects of a block size increase are so small as to be meaningless, for users and for miners.
If bitcoin popularity grows, more transactions with lower per-tx fees will likely result in more total fees per block, compared to a world in which the block size is fixed and individual fees are higher. The induced demand will be a significant factor. This is fairly straightforward economics. This is a good thing by the way =)
Regarding orphan rates: I don't understand all of the gritty details, but I have seen some convincing explanations describing how, if block space isn't scarce, a miner's decision to include an additional tx is largely based on the likelihood that adding the tx will result in a block they find being "orphaned". So it is a self-regulating feedback loop of sorts. And as another poster said, it should affect all miner's equally, assuming they have a sufficiently sophisticated setup (low-latency, well-connected, etc).
For those don't know about orphan rates: An "orphaned" block is one that is wasted (and the reward thus lost). This happens when another miner finds a competing candidate block at a similar time and manages to propagate it more quickly through the network such that it is chosen by the majority as the next block.
A higher orphan rate won't reduce miner profitability. Since everyone would experience the orphaning, the difficulty will stabilize at a lower level and profitability should be the same.
This is exactly what happened when blocksize jumped from 100k to 250k: every small miner jumped to the largest pool (ghash.io) because they were seeing increased orphan rates, driving that pool over 50% of hashing power.
Larger block size increases computation necessary to solve the block, so it is equivalent to increasing the difficulty. Another factor is that you might decide to wait longer to get more transactions in the block. This reduces your chance of solving the block, but increases your payback. I can't see how it could possibly increase the orphan rate because it increases the possible spread for solution time (some people will wait, while other won't). In other words, it should decrease the orphan rate.
I suppose block size increases the network latency for advertising solved blocks... but going from 100k to 250k every 10 minutes does not strike me as being particularly problematic.
Also, I'm trying to verify your claim and I can't see any evidence of it. It appears that different clients were using different block sizes for a long time. The maximum block size on the BTC network has been over 250K since 2013, according to [0]. Also take a look of this graph of orphaned blocks [1]. It seems to be highly variable between 2014 and 1016, but then lower since then. I see no evidence of a sudden increase in orphans. Clearly, having most of the hashing power in one miner will reduce orphans, but I just don't see a connection at all with blocksize.
So what am I missing?
[0] - http://hashingit.com/analysis/39-the-myth-of-the-megabyte-bi... [1] - https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks?timespan=al...
No, they're merkled, so it doesn't.
> I suppose block size increases the network latency for advertising solved blocks... but going from 100k to 250k every 10 minutes does not strike me as being particularly problematic.
Doesn't matter how often it is, I find a block, I mine the child immediately. You have to wait until you've received and validated the block. It's all about latency.
> Also, I'm trying to verify your claim and I can't see any evidence of it. It appears that different clients were using different block sizes for a long time. The maximum block size on the BTC network has been over 250K since 2013, according to [0]. Also take a look of this graph of orphaned blocks [1]
Yep, this is now ancient history. Mean blocksizes tend to mask what's really happening, but I recall the orphaning problem and ghash.io spike personally.
And blockchain.info's orphan block measurements are completely unreliable :(
More background: https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535 (my blog)
Some claim that anything larger than 1MB will "hurt decentralization", but many others have shown this to be a very weak argument (sorry, I don't have any links handy).
You don't need every Jane Smith running a full node on a rasberry pi to have robust decentralization.
I actually don't fully understand the reasons for why the pro-segwit side doesn't want to increase the block size (even beyond 2MB), except that it's a slippery slope: with Bitcoin, every time you change the block size it requires a hard fork.
Increasing the block size isn't a long-term solution, because there's always going to be some new ceiling. Eventually increasing the block size will become impractical.
As an aside, some coins have a variable block size to deal with this. AFAIK Monero is the only "major" coin which features variable blocks. It's also the only coin that's actually private.
Can you cite any sources?
The Wikipedia article has two papers that draw similar conclusions about the traceability:
http://monerolink.com/monerolink.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7e8g-wJId8md3FYUGF0TlB5NjQ...
RingCT claims to conceal the amount, and "stealth addresses" claims to obscure output addresses, but I have not verified these claims because I'm reluctant to spend more time verifying a coin that I am skeptical about.
Monero enforces privacy on all transactions by default. Back in the day you could send non-private transactions but during one of the previous hard-forks they removed that ability.
That's it. Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners, and miners only. 'Nodes' in the whitepaper are synonymous with miners.
Non-mining wallets need to have enough bandwidth to download blocks from miners as they appear. For 1GB blocks 20Mbps is enough. Which means a full verifying wallet for 1GB blocks is practical on a LTE connection.
Storage is also a non-problem with utxo commitments.
You can only say this if you're too ignorant to be worth a damn on the subject, or are insane enough to think that the people who have developed the protocol for the last 8 years are all misguided. If you launch into some conspiracy about Blockstream, Inc., then we'll know it's a combination of both.
> Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners, and miners only
And exchanges, merchants, consumers. If you have a stake in the ledger by owning or accepting BTC, then you have a stake in the monetary policy of BTC. If you have a stake in the monetary policy of BTC, then you can only hope to enforce it (or attempt to change it) by running a node.
That's before the mathematics of bigger blocks, where the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size, as those with more hash rate get another bonus due to the latency increases of even a 1 MB block size increase.
If all that mattered in Bitcoin was the decentralization of miners, this game would have been over a long time ago. Anybody who thinks that even a landscape of thousands of miners, pooled by very few pools, is decentralized enough on its own, without others validating and auditing the blockchain, is too capable of assumptions to be let near engineering.
Why does every currency that has ever existed get devalued into dogshit by its policymakers? Every currency dies because those close to the mint can afford devaluation more than those further from it.
This is completely ridiculous. If someone can't send 2MB of data across the network in less than a few seconds, then of course they shouldn't be mining.
Argument from authority
>where the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size
proof by assertion
>is too capable of assumptions to be let near engineering.
ie 'u dumb'
I'm sure you convinced many people with your thoughtful comment. :)
Proof by assertion i.e. leaving off the second half of a sentence and leaving only the assertion.
ie 'u dumb' i.e. I have picked up on that you are calling me dumb and can only reply by misusing Debate 101 nomenclature.
Regardless, from what I heard it's not a problem anymore. Even if it was, allowing 'fast passage' for bitcoin blocks seems like a obvious course of action for the Chinese government, it's just another export industry at this point.
this article will probably cover it better than I can. https://coingeek.com/core-think-bitcoin-cash/
but there was only ever the "big blocks" camp to begin with. Starting with Satoshi and Gavin Andresen. The "small block" movement is the newer "vision" and didn't/wouldn't exist if not for the financial interest suddenly employing the core developers.
The market has wanted bigger blocks for YEARS, and each attempt was slandered/DDoS'ed/attacked. Bitcoin Cash is the result of the market finally getting what it wants.
ASICBoost might be a reason miners are against segwit. But enabling offchain payments kills the P2P aspect pretty hard.
There's no good reason for not having had at least 2MB blocks years ago. And it'd have provided solid info on the real impact, not just fear mongering.
It's silly to say it's not a permanent solution therefore not worth doing at all.
Blocksize should be growing at the same rate that bandwidth availability is growing, but is isnt. Why not? That wouldnt affect decentralization at all.
Secondly, the Chinese miners overwhelmingly support segwit2x, including the 2mb HF that comes with it. If they are trying to keep asicboost (which has not been proven to actually being used), why would they support segwit2x instead of trying to force BU instead? Segwit2x includes....you guessed it....segwit...which disables covert asicboost.