Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __blockcipher__ | Hacker News Reader

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__blockcipher__

Serious question: Why does hackernews seem to be biased towards BTC over BCH?

In my opinion, any honest examination of the tradeoffs between block size, orphan block rate, cost to run a non-mining node (which do not contribute to network security except indirectly via serving SPV wallets), and mining fees, will show that a 1-1.7MB block size limit is just too low for current tx volumes.

The current BTC network is unusable due to the massive fees. Even worse, those who actually used the currency (sorry, I mean store of value?) get penalized for having so many UTXOs. UTXOs directly increase the size in bytes of the transaction, increasing the fees you pay.

I've paid probably an average of $30 fees over the last 2 months, with the highest fee being $100 on a $4000 transaction (fee is related to size in bytes, not dollar value transmitted, I'm giving those numbers just to show how ridiculous it is)

EDIT: Also worth mentioning that the Coinbase CEO does not like blockstream because they censored Brian Armstrong (the CEO) for supporting BIP 101. Bitcoin Core has used a lot of heavy handed and very sketchy tactics to wrest control of the ecosystem in Satoshi's absence. They view themselves as the sole guardians of "consensus".

Increasing block size is not a sustainable solution for scaling transactions. Transaction fees are too high and BTC should move to 2MB as a short-term fix but the long-term fix is off-chain solutions like Lightning.

The Bitcoin Unlimited team has tested 1 GB blocks and presented their research and findings at conferences already.

That being said, the least sustainable solution is to keep blocks at 1 MB for btc. The core group have ousted and alienated everyone who made bitcoin work originally. The fees have priced out everyone who created the ecosystem originally. It is crystal clear to anyone even slightly paying attention that they have done nothing but lie and censor.

If you are getting all your information from /r/bitcoin you should know that it is censored into oblivion and has been nothing but propaganda for years now. Bigger blocks obviously work and the 'lighting network' not only has raises enormous questions about how it can work, it has been promised as just around the corner for multiple years now.

The Bitcoin Unlimited team tested on a tiny network ; ~6 miners with a highly simplified set of transactions that made some of the statistics collected so meaningless that they explicitly left them out of the talk. Under these conditions, they found that 1GB was the point where the network broke under its own weight [0]. If you were to run the full sized bitcoin network, you would likely see problems much sooner than 1GB. As far as I recall, they did not even address the centralization argument (eg. the network may "work", but give a disproportionate advantage to large miners).

[0] This actually happened a couple of times earlier, but those were fixable with straightforward software optimizations.

Apparently we're already seeing block size increases give disproportionate advantage to large miners on Ethereum, which allows miner voting on block size similar to Bitcoin Unlimited's proposal and is processing the most transactions out of all the major coins, at much smaller transaction rates than that: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7pfshh/why_is_8m_... (Ethereum probably isn't as highly optimized as Bitcoin though.)

This is a generalization that is meaningless without the context of what the bottleneck actually is. Bandwidth works, processing blocks 1,000 times bigger works, what exactly do you think would be the problem? 1GB every 10 minutes is 1.6MB/s. The DOCSIS 3.0 standard goes higher than 100MB/s and anyone can rent a VPS with a gigabit connection for $15 - $20 USD per month.

https://youtu.be/LDF8bOEqXt4?t=4722

The bottleneck is propagation time. Also "The propogation time did not depend strongly on the network bandwidth for the given nodes"

Keep in mind that it is not sufficient for each node to have the bare minimum amount of bandwidth to download 1 block every ten minutes. When a node mines a block, we need that block to propagate across the entire network (~11,000 nodes [0]). Further, we want this propagation time to be relatively trivial; otherwise the number of orphan blocks would increase giving an advantage to large mining clusters and reducing the overall security of the network.

[0] https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/

Then why is even a harmless increase to 2 or 4 refused? The current confirmation time and fees are beyond any worst case scenario, but yet there are still people completely brainwashed to argue that Bitcoin Core is perfectly fine.

Bitcoin Cash scale what it can scale, that is, blocksize. That's it, it is a pragmatic approach absolutely obvious for anyone with more than 2 year of experience in programming.

> Then why is even a harmless increase to 2 or 4 refused?

A side-effect of SegWit is a partial increase to up to 4; the average block size is already above the previous limit of 1.

In your work, do you champion short term solutions?

Yes, when they are easy and they get the job done. Then you move on to the long-term solutions.

Bitcoin Cash skipped activating segwit, so they seem to be on track to avoid any of the existing long term solutions which require segwit.

For now the technical aspects of cryptos are simply not all that important. We're still in the incubation phase where crptos are being used as assets instead of currencies. And at this point all that matters is public perception and security, which go hand in hand. And I think the lack of any individuals behind Bitcoin also greatly benefits it. The team behind Ethereum, for contrast, somewhat belies the notion of decentralization - even moreso after they chose to unilaterally roll back "their" ledger.

The next phase begins when 'regular' people are engaging in at least occasional direct exchanges of currency using private wallets to purchase goods/services. That would highlight the technical issues with Bitcoin, but even then I suspect Bitcoin will remain the top dog as a store of value and we'll collectively choose a runner up for rapid exchange/verification. It might not even be an independent coin itself, but a strap-on tech that helps protect against double spend, even if with a sub-100% accuracy in exchange for speed. The idea there being that it would primarily be used to mostly validate small-value transactions, with an inherently reduced double spend incentive, whereas big value transactions could go through the main coin.

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