Bitcoin is Eating Itself
medium.com
medium.com
https://i.imgur.com/bjRILt4.png
Now, a mere mention of this will get you banned from /r/bitcoin. It's amazing how quickly the anti-authoritarian spirit of Bitcoin turned on its head.
Is it so that transferring bitcoin now costs more than $0.01? And the amount being transferred is subject to some consideration? (if so, by whom? and in what way?)
Bitcoin transaction fees have skyrocketed. They are around $50 per transaction now.
One user up above said: "If your transaction wants to compete with the limited block space for each transaction, you have to increase your fee"
My question is: is there any end in sight where transaction costs might come down? Because otherwise BTC is totally unusable as a currency.
I think folks who are really invested in BTC (like the Winklewoss brothers who have holdings above a bil value (in essence, illiquid, as holdings of that amount tend to be) might work to make transactions low using whatever new technology thereby making it a viable monetary platform, otherwise I don't see this thing as not failing spectacularly sometime in the future.
Big blockers believe that it should possible to solve this problem directly, by increasing the block size limit. "Small blockers" argue that this is not a suitable solution in the long term because the block size would need to grow to gigabytes per minute to compete with existing payment networks and that would be technically challenging and politically undesirable (since only a handful of well-connected nodes would be able to handle all that traffic).
The promised solution, according to the small blockers, is to add extra layers to the bitcoin network, with things such as the Lightning Network. Regular folk would clear their transactions through payment processors and only these payment processors would still use the original bitcoin network. Big blockers complain that these second-layer solutions are not truly decentralized and do not conform to the original ideals of bitcoin. They also point out that there are lots of unsolved problems and technical challenges for these second layer solutions, which have been constantly "just around the corner" for a long time...
Pending transactions with anything above 140 satoshis per byte are currently clearing, as you can see here:
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2d
The average bitcoin transaction is around 250 bytes, which means transaction fees in the area of 0.00025BTC and up are clearing in half an hour or less. That's about $4.
Lets keep the hyperbole to a minimum, please?
P.S. As you can see by mousing over that chart a bit, there /are/ a lot of people paying as much as $50 for a transaction. These people are sometimes morons, but more likely they are transacting on exchanges where they have to use predefined fees instead of setting them themselves. This is why it's important to use your own wallet instead of a web wallet. It lets you control these kinds of things.
P.P.S If you set those charts to 6 months you'll see some interesting patterns start to show up. Speculation on what's causing them is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's a lot of politics involved. Some people have vested interests in generating a fee based panic. I don't know the full picture though.
It's what bitcoin core developers prefer. They don't want segwit to bloat the blocksize before lightning is ready.
Last I checked, current market rates are about $30 for a typical transaction.
To happen, transactions must be included in a fixed size block in the global block chain. Currently, there is not enough room per block, so space is auctioned off on a per byte basis. The size of a transaction is not related to the number of bitcoins involved, but the number of "utxo" involved. Essentially, if Alice sends you 1BTC and Bob sends you 1BTC, you do not simply have 2BTC, you have 2 utxo's each worth 1BTC. If you want to send more than 1.5BTC in a single transaction, you will need to include both utxo's, which will increase the size and therefore the fee. In contrast, if Carol sent you 2BTC in a single transaction, you can then send 1.5BTC at the same cost as 1BTC because only 1 utxo is involved.
In a world with sufficeint space in a block, you could still need fees because the miners might decide to leave empty space instead of includeing free-rider transactions. This does not actually save them money, but if they control a non-trivial amount of the hashrate, it could encourage people to increase there fees in order to decrease their confirmation time (especially if all the major miners do this).
The community is considering several approaches to mitigate the problem and the different approaches have exposed the distinct underlying motivations of miners, merchants, exchanges and customers/users.
The Bitcoin Core developers took it upon themselves to change that roadmap and now their supporters accuse anyone who disagrees of being radicals.
Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol.
Bitcoin is currently not usable as currency, and is of course, not store of wealth - thing is not a liquid asset at all.
Proposed scaling solutions were scientific research years ago, and research is still being done. The implementation obviously takes years to finetune and the scaling solution might not work as well as research predicted.
All other coins are early stage tech and research too.
People were enjoying the tech when it was less popular and seemed like magic, now when big numbers come into play it is obvious things where blown out of proportion way too early.
...Even though a lot of the community seem to agree the major figures who pushed for Bitcoin Cash were Judases trying to cash in so major subversion of the code/market has happened at least once already.
There may be a way to make a real, usable currency out of these ideas. It doesn't exist yet in reality.
Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't
solved its scaling problem.
The proposed lightening network is based on an unsolved problem in computer science (routing optimization, LN thus maintains a map of all nodes be broadcast to all nodes), not to mention the LN design would rely heavily on centralized hubs of "liquidity providers" i.e. paypal style KYC payment processors - completely antithetical to the concept of "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". LN conveniently favors large centralized liquidity provider payment hubs as the siphon for fees, which only becomes palatable when the alternative is excessive fees to miners on the underlying network.
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
and they've been claiming it's just around the corner since 2015: https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712
Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental
scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not
to forced by protocol.
Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users.
Bitcoin is suffering from a toxic cult like community, and questionable developer team.
Other crypto-currencies are working on solving the issues while BTC is being sold off to fund LN investors.
In the world of science, that's nothing.
> Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB.
"They"? Who is this mystical "they"? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy Satoshi added the limit early on and defended it as a deterrent to spamming the network.
> The proposed lightening network is an unsolved problem in computer science
Nobody brought up the Lightning Network, but it seems like you have an axe to grind here.
> This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users.
I agree with this, I think Bitcoin governance has become overly political and increasingly territorial, with a cult-like worship of a sets of devs (and you belong in one cult or the other).
That being said, I have great faith in the implementation of blockchain based contracts and currency overall, even if Bitcoin is just one step on the long chain of its evolution.
The Apple App Store came out in June 2008, 9 years ago. From the fart buttons topping the charts, entire companies and business models have been found and Bitcoin is still stuck. They're not making progress.
PoW blockchains like Bitcoin only work by attempting to increase the capital cost of write access to the database. PoW blockchains purposefully waste as much computing power as possible and the transaction speed remains limited just the same even as computing power is added.
Re: [PATCH] increase block size limit
Satoshi
October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM
It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time
it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the
older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an
alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to
upgrade.
Growing the blocksize is not a sustainable way to scale bitcoin. This is why people are saying that Bitcoin is still not a mature technology; the problems associated with scaling it are still unsolved problems of computer science.
Second, the Bitcoin unlimited team has already tested and demonstrated gigabyte blocks. That would be about 1.6MB per second. This is already achievable with a $12 per month VPS, far less than a single btc transaction.
I am still working through it, but it seems that with (somewhat optimized) current software they hit 10 minute propagation time at 1GB blocksize, with about 500tx/s (t=4549).
EDIT: This experient is also still young. As of the November 2017 talk I linked, they were using 4-6 miner nodes, and a UTXO pool simmilar to the current network (to the point where the presented would not even give numbers for memory and disk IO because he viewed them as not relevent to what would really be seen).
I submitted the linked talk to HN. Comments at [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be...
In 2016 Visa made 86 billion transactions, that is average of ~2600 per second, one magnitude less, than you expected.
What is false? Are you saying it is governed as a product? Incremental scaling improvements are research fun projects that are not being forced on developers (that are the users of bitcoin protocol). No one forced SegWit, I'm pretty sure Schnorr signatures will not be a hard fork too.
Any kind of rational organization making a good product would get out of an extreme situation as this one is with a hard fork.
Microsoft, probably the best example of how to do backwards compatibility, decided to force Win8 on everyone because, obviously, managing old software was an issue. Just like managing transactions with uncompressed keys is, yet there's still plenty of them being added to the chain today.
Bitcoin is obviously a vehicle for intellectual stimulation first, Bitcoin as a product is out of the view. I mean, you have core developers optimizing validation code on CPU (who needs that thing to be 4x faster now, anyway?) and doing heavy refactoring for segwit, braintickling over schnorr for months, coming up with ways to do confidential transactions, doing bulletproofs to reduce the size of confidential transactions, doing prototypes of that research etc.
There's obviously no long-term scaling solution in sight, this is all still very early research.
2. Bitcoin without LN isn't nearly worth its valuation, but bitcoin with LN is worth many times its current valuation so we're settled somewhere in the middle.
3. I'm inclined to trust Brahm Cohen more than your flawed analysis of LN routing: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-b...
2. You have absolutely no way to accurately verify or anticipate that claim.
Feel free to provide a retort to my claim that Bitcoin is flawed from Satoshi's implementation and upon examination of the computer science and codebase behind BTC, the false equivalence to gold and store of value will fail as it becomes obsolete to something else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991762
3. Brahm Cohen is suggesting a prerequisite of 3 escrow deposits, which would require 6 transaction fees.
This is a bizarre answer to the article he was responding to, as it fails to avoid the gravitation towards payment processor style hubs.
Also there’s nothing wrong with long routes. They settle
out in the middle just fine, despite the author’s
dismissiveness to the possibility that they can.
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
2. My claim is simply that Bitcoin is worth significantly more with LN than without? You then take a more preliminary argument that Bitcoin is worthless to begin with, which is laughable.
3. 6 on-chain transaction fees that support millions of off-chain payments. And your hub argument is a feature of a distributed network itself, not of LN in particular. Say a "hub" emerges and starts charging fees. Market competition paired with efficient routing solves this easily.
If you don't understand Brahm's argument, I suggest reading through it again. He's a pretty smart guy when it comes to distributed networks.
Blockchain and the concepts around it, on the other hand, are existing tech that can be used in many sustainable ways to create distributed ledgers and other things that do not have to share the same problems (although many people are on the get rich quick plan by requiring mining, ICOs, and other plans that only reward creators and early adopters).
Research behind implementing Schnorr signatures, lightning network, confidential transactions, efficient confidential transactions (bulletproofs), is bleeding edge research in cryptography mixed with whole bunch of other fundamentals.
Nodejs required practically no academic research while bitcoin needs it heavily today still.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf
For example, you have papers like above being published in the context of bitcoin. 60 pages of untrivial math, and that's just one idea of how to scale bitcoin.
It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit.
Like you said, it's an experiment, and the experiment should have been allowed to play out along the original roadmap of large blocks. Hopefully the Bitcoin Cash fork will succeed where Bitcoin Core failed.
Okay. The blocksize is raised and now people find new uses when the thing scales better. Streaming money is one such use case. Now you raise the blocksize to a level that needs to support streaming money, now it's so big that your ASICs cannot validate all the incoming blocks, blockchain grows faster than validation.
How to fix the problem now?
Blocksize is a temporary solution to a current popularity issue. Let's just let the hype die a little bit, so there's time to find a proper solution.
If Internet issues were solved by meddling with topology or adding more cable we'd get no where near the current efficient protocols.
In other words: even if raising the block size limit doesn't provide a solution for infinite scale, it could potentially still provide significant benefits, yet Bitcoin Core doesn't want to try it to find out.
I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.
As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions.
People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.
There's only one way to find out. This is what Satoshi said on the issue:
>“Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.
>The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
>If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal."
Satoshi Nakamoto Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:56:27 -0800 https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...
Bitcoin is an experiment with many economic participants, and the parameters and goals of that experiment were changed mid-way through by key developers and forum moderators, without the agreement of all economic constituents.
So now it's not a currency, and it's not an store of value, it's just a research project.
It feels a tad bit irresponsible for the bitcoin community to have gone around advertising this as the currency (later store of value) of the future, while apparently not knowing if scaling to worldwide levels would even be possible.
Edit: The fees are above $20 now.
I've paid $30 shipping for a < $100 item before when I really needed it to be delivered on time, so I can see paying a $30 surcharge to purchase an item.
If you're buying some uncommon product that's only available with bitcoin, then paying a 30% transaction fee might be worth it versus not being able to purchase the product at all.
These days, I find Bitcoin completely unsuitable for sending money. I use Bitcoin Cash, which verifies in ten minutes for something like one cent of fees (first block), but I guess that's because nobody uses it. Still, Bitcoin itself is out of the question for me personally, I'm not paying $30 for a transaction for anything.
Despite all the advancements of storage and networking, it’s still essentially 1MB to a maximum of 1.8MB if everyone implements a complicated and costly to develop system called SegWit, and to fully use SegWit you have to use backwards incompatible addresses.
Your $3 Bitcoin transaction might get cancelled before it gets written to the blockchain...
As far as store-of-wealth it has a different risk profile than both fiat currencies & physical stores like gold: more independent of government monetary policy, possibly harder to take by force, possibly more plausible-deniability, more liquid and lower txn-cost than gold, more volatile than both. That risk-profile is not perfect but is clearly useful to some.
Finally there's the value that it can provide as the trusted base for other off-chain solutions (like lightning-network).
So in other words, all those Bitcoin cheerleaders mocking Western Union, the traditional banks for their excessive fees... Bitcoin is 1,000 times as expensive? And this is a selling point?
I've never heard of fee ratios in economics or finance - this sounds more like one of these things that people 'create' to justify things... "oh, it's an outstanding fee ratio!".
Does it make sense that someone would be willing or able to quantify the risk of my losing a bitcoin deposit held by a third party? Is there someone selling such insurance now?
The FDIC has some ability to control and regulate the banks that it insures, including dealing with a failed bank. If somebody random claims to provide insurance, it doesn't inherently imply they have the same powers/information.
Edit - https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...
Which sounds like what I would want to hear as a customer. However in context, that refers specifically to "fiat currency" only. So I would have to assume that whatever the insurance does, it doesn't protect me in the same way with respect to digital currency...?
Of course, I have never been in a situation where SIPC insurance mattered, so I don't have that to compare to.
But the level of risk here is not clear to me, and the language suggests it could be different from what I think of as normal.
And yes, it does. Much like a transaction on the blockchain might if you paid only $3 in mining fees. Or you could pay $30-50 and get it cleared much more quickly, just as I could pay for a wire transfer and get things done in n hour or two.
A single address can be the recipient of multiple payments (outputs) and a transaction spends those outputs. Since each output must be referenced in a transaction, each output takes up some space and fees are calculated based on the size of the transaction in bytes, not its value in BTC. This diagram I made a few years ago might help visualise: https://github.com/olalonde/bitcoin-notes/blob/master/svg/tr...
I knew the scaling problem was bad, but I didn't realize it gets worse as Bitcoin ages!
In general, expect transactions to have two outputs. The payment, and the extra. And since outputs become inputs, transactions will average about two inputs too.
A few shavings might get orphaned here or there, but that doesn't have a huge effect on the operation of the rest of the coins.
3000 BTC is worth over $40M, not $4M.
edit: oops, article dates from April.
There's a joke going around at the moment: "Dad, can I borrow a Bitcoin?" "$15000? Why should I give you $14000? What do you need $16000 for?"
Really glad I didn’t sink too much into it, but I’m still pissed when it’s several grand worth of coin that I can’t ever withdraw.
In fact, once you set up an account, sending and receiving money with coinbase is pretty simple. But yes, setting up an account with all the verification stuff isn't neat in the first place and storing your keys at an online provider is unacceptable for any sane person.
On the other hand, there are some very easy to use desktop wallets like Exodus and making offline backups of your keys by writing down a few words (BIP-39) is pretty simple too. Sadly, not all wallets support BIP-39 (for various reasons), and e.g. Exodus complicates the matter by asking you for a password before telling you the words which is completely unrelated to BIP-39.
So Bitcoin itself could be very easy to use. In my eyes the only real problem is obtaining them. I mean for everything else you just need to download some software and off you go. But to buy bitcoins you still need to register yourself with some institution which takes a few hours at least. It would be so much simpler if you could just buy some bitcoins at ebay/amazon/steam/...
It's also a somewhat unproven concept. Trustless multi hop payment channels have been proven to work, but a fully functioning network of them hasn't.
- when the prices shoot up, attracting speculators
- when the prices crash down, spooking speculators
- when bigger players move in and pay for quicker transaction clearance
- when time passes
Exchange fees go down:
- when it's calm and quiet, and there is no frenzy
So a bit like a fishhook, then?
All we need is a way so that the “coins” do not go to the one with the most computing power, or the one who got in first, but distributed equally among the population.
>but distributed equally among the population.
I am aware of no blockchain based technology that offers a solution to this problem. Central to the problem that blockchains are intended to solve is that there is no good way of identifying individuals. That is to say, there is nothing to stop me from opening a million accounts in the system and acting as if I was a million different people. The insight behind POW style blockchains is that it does not matter if I claim to be a million people, because that would not give me any more compute power, and so will not allow for an attack on the system.
If we could come up with a way of providing some sort of proof of individuality we would solve alot of problems.
I've been thinking about this in the past weeks because I find the energy consumption hard to justify.
Proof of individuality still would allow people of power to use an army of identity soldiers... but the same people can buy hash rate today, so that would not be a regression.
Which would point toward some form of Proof of (Human Free Will + Random Selection) being the "ideal" mining scheme (at least theoretically). And all other schemes, being practical attempts to approach that as much as possible.
How different is that from powerful people controlling or enslaving individuals to make money which they can then use to acquire control over the network?
I wonder how this would work. Let's assume there was a database of public keys for every citizen of the world, and every citizen knew their private key - how could we use that?
Could we assign the right to mine the next block according to some deterministic pseudo-random algorithm that selects the next public key from the previous one? I guess that could work, though it would reqire some timeout in case someone is not interested in mining.
The next question, how do we define some sort of public-private key pair in a way so a natural person can only create a single public key and can keep their private key secret?
Second, if you look, I think you'll find that Bitcoin shares a lot of attributes with Ponzi schemes; you could say that it's a Ponzi whose innovation is to be globally distributed on the Internet. Specifically:
* Returns to Bitcoin investors are funded by successive waves of future investors; Bitcoin's value will collapse without a steady supply of them.
* A significant part of the capitalization of Bitcoin is owned by "hodlers" who accumulate "paper" earnings that don't demand any real-world reckoning.
* It's structurally difficult to withdraw funds --- particularly large amounts of funds --- from the Bitcoin network; see, for instance, Tim Bray's experience.
* The whole phenomenon is backed by a core group that includes significant "early" or "founder" allocations.
Part of the problem with trying to pull apart "Ponzi schemes" and "bubbles" is that many (but not all) previous bubbles were fueled in part by a series of Ponzi schemes; for instance, during the first bubble, IPOs for companies that could not possibly have succeeded under any circumstances, or, during the housing bubble, AAA-rated securities for bundles of distressed mortgages.
Bitcoin's only real value is that of the chance of being adopted as currency. For it to become a currency people have to start buying bitcoins, as it is the only realistic way get hold of them. So the only way to make value for the current holders(older invenstors) is more people buying into it(revenue paid by new investors)
Anyone can do their own research and come to conclusions about the future valuation of Bitcoin.
Well if all the above are not enough for you to classify as a Ponzi scheme, not sure what to say. I have no further arguments.
* Outsized returns
* All the returns are funded by successive waves of investors
* Most "investors" hold, riding it out in the hopes of accumulating gains
* Easier to get into than out of, even if some eventually can
* Fraud
Because you'd need to do that to replace the proof of work and assign coins to natural persons.
Bitcoin doesn't identify natural persons, it just knows public keys. There might be thousands of them belonging to the same entity.
Scams..? Most retailers don't do it.
Thanks.
Bitcoins true value might be close to $500 once these hidden potential sellers emerge and transact. The current back and forth market activity does not illuminate the true supply and demand. In fact because the exchanges are unregulated, the market activity is highly manipulated. So even just thinking it's worth a lot because its going up, is falling for a Ponzi. The reason it's going up is precisely because of the greedy pouncers waiting in the grass. When they decide to act it will be equivalent to a bank run. Then we will see the true supply and demand curves. Until then, the charts are as if Madoff is supplying them...