[1] - https://lightning.network
[2] - https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...
The argument that "only large entities will be able to keep up with that" doesn't really hold - thats the status quo already.
It's sound engineering. Like in other systems by composing layers you can achieve the advantages of each component while addressing their costs, without creating insurmountable complexity... "have your cake and eat it too".
Particularly, the central Bitcoin system is a global broadcast medium-- necessarily for its security. Global broadcast is inherently somewhat limited in its scalability (though less than some assume). Other layers effectively add "transaction switching" to Bitcoin, radically improving scalablity and performance with their own costs which are good trade-offs for their applications.
As far as the status quo of traditional finance... If you're happy with the status quo! Use it!
(I'm going to assume you don't mean the status quo of Bitcoin--because 28kb/sec isn't something only large entities can keep up with, it adds up over time-- but even cumulatively its managable)
You could recreate the status quo of centralized finance with Bitcoin, but it wouldn't be obviously better: at least systems like visa and paypal are purpose build to do what they do. Bitcoin takes on a lot of costs and tradeoffs to achieve decenteralization.
Bitcoin was created to be money that existed above and outside of the vulgarities of immediate human politics, just like how strong encryption made it effectively impossible for some sysadmin to just read your files based on some excuse.
I think having that option in the world is extraordinarily valuable.
The Engineering discipline relies on empirical studies. With constantly full blocks, you have no way to measure transaction demand.
Fees are only a weak indicator of transaction demand because of substitute goods.
Flowee the Hub (Bitcoin Cash full node implementation) can sync the equivalent of 4GB blocks using just a cheap quad-core VPS.
But being able to barely keep up means that if you fall behind for even a moment (say, if your connection drops... or if miners get lucky and mine a bunch of extra blocks) then you will _never_ catch up. Operating anywhere near the limit of your processing rate is non-viable for that reason.
You need to be able to process many times the network's capacity so that you can catch up in a reasonable amount of time.
To get back to reality, I don't think any sane person has advocated for anything close to a 2GB blocksize cap at any point in the near future. Bitcoin Core uses a maximum 4MB block weight and Bitcoin Cash uses a 32MB cap currently. This cheap VPS could sync the entire Bitcoin (Core) blockchain from 2009 to present in less than 12 hours. The biggest block size cap (not full blocks, the cap) being tested seriously is 1GB. I'm sure you know all this, though.
But this is the logic of one of the main devs who championed the "fee market" idea of Bitcoin[0], that high fees are required for Bitcoin to function. And who in 2017 celebrated when fees were around $50.[1]
[1]: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/the-fee-market-myth-b9d189e45...
[0]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...
Fees prevent spam
Even the Lightning Network whitepaper states it needs much larger blocks, and for it to work well you need to be able to settle quickly and cheaply on-chain, which is not the case with full blocks.
And this, you want to do after significant adoption?
So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?
> Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other.
I have no issues with developing 2nd layers, but ignoring on-chain scaling and not even looking at what can be achieved is beyond stupid.
In fact we know that moderate blocksize increases are safe (we can increase it many times before block propagation time becomes an issue for example). Yet we've thrown that out and placed our hope that 2nd layers will magically solve this for us.
> So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?
No, that's exactly what has happened to Bitcoin, and what the Bitcoin developers have been saying the last few years. It's what I'm saying is so stupid.
The Lightning Network has been "ready in 18 months" the last 4 years. And it's still not ready.
The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.
Contrary to the claims of the article the term "fee market" was introduced and promoted by Jeff Garzik-- rather than people opposing him as the article claims. (Fee market is kind of a bad term, the correct term would be blockspace market, but it actually made sense in the original usage which was about wallets paying 'fees at market rates').
> The answer is lies in the free market. Move transaction fees away from hardcoded limits, and towards something more dynamic, with economic feedback between merchants, users and miners. ... Also introduced is an anti-spam rule that avoids relaying transactions whose value is below that of the transaction fee required to send it. This rule self-adjusts over time, as the "tx fee required to send" changes over time. In a dynamic fee market, it might change a lot.
( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196138.msg2044717#ms... )
> 2010-11-19 20:55:42 <jgarzik> eventually we'll all be paying TX fees, sooner or later. and competition to get -some- fee (at lower prices) versus no fee kicks in.
> 2011-02-28 04:13:57 <jgarzik> amiller: it's inevitable that fees will be required. nobody should be assuming bitcoin transactions are / will always be free.
> 2011-03-01 20:32:21 <jgarzik> fees are inevitable
> 2011-03-10 22:14:34 <jgarzik> I think TX fees are a great feedback system; a healthy attribute of bitcoin.
> 2011-11-07 22:43:12 <gavinandresen> Lolcust: yes, but I worry because transaction fees are broken right now-- clients and miners really need more flexibility to let fees go where the market decides, instead of us guessing what the right fees are.
> 2012-10-11 17:01:27 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I think storage and network will be cheap enough that any non-zero fees will be interesting to miners
> 2013-03-16 00:47:40 <gavinandresen> So: I have no idea what the right answer for fees is. We need to create a market between miners and users, and let the fees go where they belong.
> 2013-03-17 21:12:04 <jgarzik> TD: Satoshi obviously wanted fees to support the system long term. If there is no scarcity, there are no fees.
And people being willing to pay substantive fees to use Bitcoin is absolutely something to celebrate, Bitcoin's long term security is completely dependent on fee income. Getting a non-trivial part of the rewards from fees is a basic validation of the concept.
> 2013-03-17 21:12:44 <jgarzik> TD: The current situation, where block subsidy dominates other incentives, clouds thinking on block size
> 2013-08-12 17:59:33 <jgarzik> auctions make me want replace-by-fee :)
> 2014-05-12 15:13:22 <gavinandresen> hearn: fee cap, meaning what? Fees need to be a market, and rise or fall based on supply and demand for block space
> 2014-08-15 12:37:53 <jgarzik> Merge this useful change, and next will come the call to remove block size limit altogether, which will throw a nuclear bomb onto any nascent fee market.
> 2014-08-15 12:38:37 <jgarzik> All the VCs and execs want an infinite block size limit. It's a sad fixation.
That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.
> The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.
Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees. I'd say even better as people will stop using Bitcoin or move to other cryptocurrencies when fees grow.
Saying that the "fee market" (or "blockspace market" if you want) is supported by the white paper extremely dishonest. The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees. Zero fee transactions were on the other hand accepted from day one.
How so? I'm fairly proud of my actions, and I'd be happy to discuss any of them with you.
> The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees.
There is nothing that actually supports that the claim that it was spam protection, thats just blind unsubstantiated assertions.
The system has anti-spam mechanisms in it all along that worked independently of the blocksize.
I think it's fairly likely that Satoshi didn't give these details a lot of thought... It's a champagne problem, and for as many things as he clearly thought through there were many others that were a little rough (e.g. like the broken original longest chain rule).
> Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees.
This is being slowly disproved in practice. Bitcoin currently pulls in $3m per month in fees. The most popular fork with no blocksize limit pools in a couple thousand dollar at most, with a substantially lower amount of fees per transaction. Even if their block was 95% full at their current rate, it wouldn't be more than a few percent of its funding from inflation (while bitcoin fees currently are as much as 25% of that altcoin's inflation).
Assuming it isn't inhibited by node resource usage, propagation centralization pressures, or other considerations it could always be increased in the future... going the other day with an ecosystem that depens on effectively zero fees would be much harder. I don't think it's an accident that analysis supporting unlimited block sizes assumes perpetual inflation instead of limited supply.
Agree, although this assumes that the free market cannot be trusted to regulate the size of the blockchain which seems possible with automatic transaction rebroadcasting. Are you familiar with the technique? Thoughts on it?
https://youtu.be/agppUdX9YvI?t=105
I'd be curious what you think about the approach. The basic idea is that forcing new and old transactions to compete for space on-chain pushes the blockchain into an equilibrium where data-in equals data-out. On either side of the equilibrium point block producers can increase their profits (and reduce costs) by moving towards equilibrium. So no need for a hardcap and no need for perpetual inflation.
> One of these researchers, Jonathan Postel of the University of California’s Information Sciences Institute and an editor for the Request of[sic] Comments (RFCs) which is a document series capturing the development of the Internet.
> Postel has stated:
> “We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering”
> Basically, the monolithic design of TCP would soon become inflexible and unable to scale efficiently. Therefore TCP was split into two protocols, TCP & the Internet Protocol (IP).
https://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/history-of-ip-address...
The comparison with TCP and IP is limit in that TCP data all goes inside IP packets. With second layer transaction systems the relationship is different: the security and stability comes from the underlying blockchain. The higher part adds capacity.
Bitcoin forms a trustworthy robotic court system upon which the wheels of automated commerce can ride.
Secondly, Lightning isn’t “additional complexity” fir bitcoin— it’s taking complexity and putting it where it belongs— at the platform layer.
TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger. Same with bitcoin. And the application layer should be kept separate from the transport layer.
Technically larger MTUs can increase performance somewhat by reducing per-packet overheads... but the effect marginal and not that enormous with good nics and drivers.
But still, probably not the best example. :)
Good thing for you it's in the interests of extremely rich and powerful people to see that your sabotage is well supported, and good thing for the rest of the world you have a containment chain where your stupidity is restricted from bleeding over to the rest of them, and every single other chain appears to be completely mercifully free of your idiotic philosophy.
If fees are a barrier to you, you can make your transfer of value using any other traded cryptocurrency (or lightning whatever it is).
Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).
Probably because that point has nothing to do with anything, as basically every single blockchain in existence has fees that go to miners. BTC isn't the slightest bit unique in that.
> Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).
Which once again has nothing to do with the artificial useless block limit. The cryptocurrency that is most mined is the one in which mining is most profitable, the US federal reserve could launch a competitor tomorrow with a goal directly opposed to every other cryptocurrency in existence and if they paid more per SHA256 hash rate unit they would become the most mined cryptocurrency.
> Which once again has nothing to do with the artificial useless block limit.
It has everything to do with block limit because its whole purpose is to make each block more valuable for the miners so that a lot of hashpower competes to mine that block.
Size of mining reward and transaction fees per given amount of kb of transactions is vital thing for miners. Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block. Since transaction fees will eventually become the only reward for the miners tampering with their value would be just as frightening as tampering with the block reward (like doubling it or halving it on a whim). It would affect miners. And miners are ultimately who decide with their legs on what version of crypto to secure.
> The cryptocurrency that is most mined is the one in which mining is most profitable, the US federal reserve could launch a competitor tomorrow with a goal directly opposed to every other cryptocurrency in existence and if they paid more per SHA256 hash rate unit they would become the most mined cryptocurrency.
Sure, but if you are not federal reserve and can't invest billions of your own money in your crypto then what bitcoin does is exactly how you get to be the most mined crypto.
Wrong, this assumes it is the only way to make each block more valuable, it is not only not the only way, it is the most stupid way imaginable; an artificial production quota completely unhinged from underlying physical reality.
> Size of mining reward and transaction fees per given amount of kb of transactions is vital thing for miners.
Transaction fees per given data volume is less important than net profit on actual services provided, a chain that has a thousand times the capacity and a hundred times lower costs is still ten times more profitable than the competition.
> Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block.
Just as stupid as saying that increasing seats on a train decreases the ticket revenue on that train. Completely false.
> Since transaction fees will eventually become the only reward for the miners tampering with their value would be just as frightening as tampering with the block reward
Tampering with the value of transaction fees is exactly what setting an unjustified artificial production quota does. And yes, this is "frightening" to a certain extent, but if you're still around on BTC by now, nothing is going to frighten you into abandoning it because it's absolutely valueless and idiotically stupid at this point in time, propped up only by the self-admitted unbacked charade that is transparent USDT manipulations.
> It would affect miners. And miners are ultimately who decide with their legs on what version of crypto to secure.
And as a miner, we will mine whatever pays the highest immediate return on invested power, no matter how ridiculously stupid that thing appears to be to us, it still makes sense to do that and immediately sell it and pocket the difference between the nearest sensible competitor to that for those who actually accrue proper genuine working cryptocurrencies with utility or whatever other legitimate financial instrument you care to mention that isn't transparently sabotaged and utterly broken.
> Sure, but if you are not federal reserve and can't invest billions of your own money in your crypto then what bitcoin does is exactly how you get to be the most mined crypto.
On the contrary; if you are the federal reserve, or that clique of financial manipulators (see AXA investment in Blockstream), and you're desperate to protect your collapsing imaginary financial system from genuine auditable competition, taking control of BTC and ploughing money into an avenue anybody with an ounce of sense could tell immediately was a dead end just from the specifications of the chain is how you get to be the most mined crypto whilst maintaining plausible deniability that you're meddling in the process at all.
That's true but you it's not guaranteed that you'd get 1000 times more transactions when you increase capacity 100 times. It's a gamble and if bitcoin did that it would get unpredictable result but show miners that it is willing to gamble with their profitability.
>> Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block.
>Just as stupid as saying that increasing seats on a train decreases the ticket revenue on that train. Completely false.
Increasing number of seats might cause the train to be partially empty and if this one isn't the next one might be. Since people get tickets on auction then non-full trains bring no revenue because tickets for them cost zero. So it might be not sufficiently attractive to participate in the burden of sending more trains.
When there were ton of transactions fees skyrocketed but in weeks they went back to normal and tx fees revenue for miners dropped. Tx fees dropping to too low value in times where they are main income source for miners might be what kills bitcoin. Same way that low traffic might kill a train line if trains are running mostly empty and tickets don't have fixed price and their are auctioned instead.
Again. Bitcoin is built and governed for survivability first. You can do it differently with other cryptos. You can even fork bitcoin. People did. Miners voted with their legs on which solution they prefer. It's really miners that decide everything.
I don't get where you were going with federal reserve tangent. I'm just getting a vibe that you overestimate politics and underestimate economy.
This argument is stupid both because it justifies restricting the chain throughput even further to whatever arbitrary number you like above zero and assumes it's always an unalloyed positive because the artificial scarcity should always drive up the price, and because it is completely ignorant of the fact that failing to raise the limit as originally planned has already resulted in 50+ USD transaction fees as an actual result, followed by a mass abandonment of the BTC chain relative to the volume at the time, followed by an uptake of competitive chains.
All existing empirical evidence makes a complete mockery of it, as if it weren't enough from an economic perspective to actually be trying to justify an artificial production quota forcibly imposed from a central committee up front.
> Increasing number of seats might cause the train to be partially empty and if this one isn't the next one might be
And yet still the promotion of artificial scarcity in volume businesses is seen as idiotic, which it is. Perhaps your assumptions are wrong and capacity planning actually aims to serve estimated demand in every other field except the BTC one.
> Since people get tickets on auction then non-full trains bring no revenue because tickets for them cost zero.
This is false, tx fees on non full blocks on chains that aren't sabotaged like BTC are still not zero, and there's no arbitrary limit on what they might be. Suggestions have even been made that the tx fees should be set by a second lowest bid auction where all transactions above the second lowest fee are accepted and that is set as the net as both the most customer and revenue friendly option in BCH for example.
> When there were ton of transactions fees skyrocketed but in weeks they went back to normal and tx fees revenue for miners dropped.
Which is to say a business failed utterly to scale and was largely abandoned by its customers, with the knock on effects on the share price of that business, yes. This is not by any measure a success, and only a complete moron like Greg Maxwell would "pop champaign" (sic) over the event.
> Tx fees dropping to too low value in times where they are main income source for miners might be what kills bitcoin.
This doesn't make even theoretical sense, if the miners don't want to mine blocks at a given revenue level, it is up to the customers to raise their tx fee bids in order to ensure the flow of blocks, and it doesn't matter what the block limit is in question for that to be the case, no matter how high or low it is, it's still true.
> Same way that low traffic might kill a train line if trains are running mostly empty and tickets don't have fixed price and their are auctioned instead.
And this is even more idiotic, low traffic might indeed kill a train line, setting auctions on the tickets that exist in order to save it absent demand isn't a solution, it's a ploy of abject desperation guaranteed to fail, which is why nobody else in the history of time perhaps has ever been that stupid.
> Again. Bitcoin is built and governed for survivability first.
BTC is built and governed to be hamstrung and useless, and the post-hoc narrative after changes that implement that hamstringing will be whatever idiots suck up and accept. By and large actual usage moves on because customers don't care about unconvincing and frankly idiotic justifications for obviously stupid moves. And that's exactly what we actually see in reality on this question.
> You can do it differently with other cryptos.
And every single other crypto in existence agrees that it is in fact stupid to do it the BTC way and does indeed do it differently. Which is supposed to be "just some weird coincidence" or everyone else in the world being wrong and the core coterie being inexplicably right.
> You can even fork bitcoin. People did.
As well they should, since BTC is useless and sabotaged.
> Miners voted with their legs on which solution they prefer. It's really miners that decide everything.
Wrong, miners mine what is most profitable, not what solution they prefer, and according to the core coterie, miners decide absolutely nothing, in fact your idol gmaxwell has literally said that if miners disagree with the way that the core council runs bitcoin that they should be fired. In response, miners have demonstrated that they don't give a damn if BTC dies completely and will happily mine whatever else is more profitable than it as a result. The fact that the BTC faithful aren't concerned about this despite the slow adjustment of the BTC DAA is just another indication of just how stupid said faithful actually are, as it's an obvious existential risk to the chain.
> I don't get where you were going with federal reserve tangent. I'm just getting a vibe that you overestimate politics and underestimate economy.
This, like every other point you made, is wrong, but since you admit you don't even understand the point I'm not going to bother discussing it. What "vibe" you get from admitted ignorance on a subject isn't worth addressing.
Yes. There might come a time when block reward is miniscule, volume of transactions is too low to support mining at reasonable level, and the only way to incetivize the miners will be to reduce block size.
> already resulted in 50+ USD transaction fees as an actual result
Briefly. And 50$ is not an unreasonable fee if you are transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars in value to sell it at the peak.
> followed by a mass abandonment of the BTC chain relative to the volume at the time, followed by an uptake of competitive chains
Which is completely fine because small fraction of bitcoin value comes from it being transferred. Bulk comes from it being scarce and secure which limited block size helps to ensure.
> This doesn't make even theoretical sense, if the miners don't want to mine blocks at a given revenue level, it is up to the customers to raise their tx fee bids in order to ensure the flow of blocks
Single miner can ensure flow of the blocks once difficulty adjusts. Bitcoins doesn't die because it stops transferring. Bitcoin dies when so many miners leave it to make double spend attack trivial.
There's no reason for any bitcoin user to give any transaction fee if all transactions fit in the next block. Even if all but one miner leave bitcoin.
> low traffic might indeed kill a train line, setting auctions on the tickets that exist in order to save it absent demand isn't a solution
You misunderstood. I'm not saying that auctioning tickets is supposed to save train line dying to low traffic. What I was saying is that train lines can die to low traffic even more likely if tickets don't have fixed price but they are auctioned instead (like bitcoin tx fees).
> Suggestions have even been made that the tx fees should be set by a second lowest bid auction where all transactions above the second lowest fee are accepted and that is set as the net as both the most customer and revenue friendly option in BCH for example.
From what I'm getting, you don't only want to increase block size but also change how should fees work.
Maybe you should focus your advocacy efforts on other crypto that's closer to your liking because you don't seem to like anything about bitcoin except for the name and perhaps popularity that it managed to accumulate from the ground up and hold without your enlightened guidance.
> Wrong, miners mine what is most profitable, not what solution they prefer
They prefer the solution that is most profitable for them. Or are you saying that they cry all the way to the bank?
> ... your idol gmaxwell ...
I have no idea who that is.
I'm speaking purely from what I know about how bitcoin works and what I think makes it successful. I'm not familiar with other peoples opinions on the subject let alone which specific people hold which specific opinions.
> gmaxwell has literally said that if miners disagree with the way that the core council runs bitcoin that they should be fired
Not sure if you can fire someone you never hired and have no relationship with. But in a sense yes. If you don't like what bitcoin is you are free to mine something else. But statistically you will want to mine bitcoin because it's built to be most profitable for you.
> they don't give a damn if BTC dies completely
Can you show me some data that indicates that bitcoin is close to dying?
Also, why do you give so much of a damn if BTC dies or not? There are so many cryptos. You can jump ship at any time. Why are you so attached to bitcoin?
General remark: When I think something is stupid, innane, idiotic, moronic and useless that's usually for me an indication that I don't quite understand the thing or at least the reasons why a lot of seemingly reasonable people pursue it and I should learn more.
> What "vibe" you get from admitted ignorance on a subject isn't worth addressing.
Do you admit ignorance often? Because it is a declaration of openness to information and it usually prompts people that have some point worth communicating to clarify it. If you do not admit ignorance you are missing out on a lot.
And if artificial scarcity to increase miner revenue is not only not objectionable but desirable as well as entirely effective, there is no reason that this should not be done repeatedly, and right now.
Of course, that's not actually true, and that's why it's not happening. The argument is invalid.
> Briefly. And 50$ is not an unreasonable fee
In a competitive free market, any fee is an unreasonable fee if it's imposed ignorant of the fact that you are in a competitive free market that doesn't impose the artificial scarcity promoting production quotas your inefficient operation does. This describes the state of every other blockchain absent the sabotaged and useless BTC chain.
> Which is completely fine because small fraction of bitcoin value comes from it being transferred. Bulk comes from it being scarce and secure
A pile of dogshit from a particular dog now deceased close to the reactor meltdown site in Chernobyl is both scarce and secure, it is also completely valueless because it has no utility and even as fertiliser there is a universe of potential substitute goods available. BTC has no value beyond stupid people heavily invested in it unaware they have been flatly conned and not understanding how any of this works or what the original plans actually were. The end result of that is obvious.
> Single miner can ensure flow of the blocks once difficulty adjusts
Which will never happen if the rate of the departure of hashing power exceeds the rate at which the chain proceeds towards the next DAA interval. That rate is not even 8% per day. The chain will be destroyed entirely if hashing power departs faster than that, and the only way to "fix it" will be a hard fork, which BTC morons have been propagandised to believe is dangerously fatal, and thus as a final fate for BTC it can't be ruled out.
> There's no reason for any bitcoin user to give any transaction fee if all transactions fit in the next block.
Flatly wrong no matter how many times you repeat it, because miners choose which transactions go in the block and their choice is not contingent solely upon available block space.
> From what I'm getting, you don't only want to increase block size but also change how should fees work.
I don't care at all what BTC does, I consider it a useless lost cause at this stage and have no opinion of it beyond that. My point was many other chains are looking at many other alternatives to ensure that their chain is the one that ends up with the most economically optimal usage of hashpower, and I cited an example of that as something I had heard come up in discussions for BCH.
> Maybe you should focus your advocacy efforts on other crypto that's closer to your liking because you don't seem to like anything about bitcoin except for the name and perhaps popularity that it managed to accumulate from the ground up and hold without your enlightened guidance.
I was a Bitcoin maximalist from the very beginning, largely ignored every single other coin in existence, and frankly when Mike Hearn left his description of the situation and the suggestion that the chain would actually refuse to scale in the future even when the demand was clearly there was so puzzling to me I flatly refused to even believe it until the 2017 BCH split actually happened and everything unfolded exactly as he had said.
You and those like you don't seem to grasp just how utterly idiotic what has been done in BTC actually is. It is so foolish, and the justifications for the behaviour so hamfisted and constantly shifting, that the only reasonable conclusion to explain it is outright sabotage.
And I do focus my advocacy efforts solely on other crypto, and warn people in as strong terms as I am able since the BCH fork that BTC has been outright sabotaged to uselessness and is very likely doomed.
> They prefer the solution that is most profitable for them. Or are you saying that they cry all the way to the bank?
Every miner who I've spoken to about the situation who actually understands what happened is indeed very concerned for the long term health of the ecosystem given the equilibrium which the BTC sabotage has resulted in. Not a single one of them ever intended for this idiocy to actually take hold, and yes, we're all just trying to make the best out of an insanely bad situation. If you want to call that "crying all the way to the bank" go right ahead.
> I have no idea who that is.
The person largely responsible for the sabotage in question, and from whom the flatly wrong arguments you are attempting to throw around actually originated.
> But statistically you will want to mine bitcoin because it's built to be most profitable for you.
Until it's not, and then you will very happily see it destroyed and be relieved this insane episode is over and done with.
> Can you show me some data that indicates that bitcoin is close to dying?
Everything we've discussed so far.
> Also, why do you give so much of a damn if BTC dies or not?
Because all fatally stupid ideas should die, and the more fatally stupid, the more so this is. BTC is about the most fatally stupid architecture I have ever heard of in my entire life, and its continued existence is an affront to sensibility.
> here are so many cryptos. You can jump ship at any time. Why are you so attached to bitcoin?
I jumped ship to actual Bitcoin BCH back in 2017 already. I'm not attached to BTC at all, I only want it to die.
> General remark: When I think something is stupid, innane, idiotic, moronic and useless that's usually for me an indication that I don't quite understand the thing or at least the reasons why a lot of seemingly reasonable people pursue it and I should learn more
Great, follow your own logic and stop bothering me, go watch Jersey Shore re-runs, a lot of seemingly reasonable people pursue that as well as a raft of other things I'm equally confident as marking out as absolutely without value. In the meantime, I'll be happy with the observation of many decades of experience in the technology industry which tells me what the BTC chain doing is in fact utterly idiotic, completely unjustified as a point of fact, and it has indeed been the victim of a well financed external sabotage attack.
> Do you admit ignorance often?
I admit ignorance whenever I know that I am ignorant of something, or when I find out post-hoc that I was previously ignorant of something. This doesn't apply in this case, it is you and the people like you who are so clearly and flatly wrong, and it is extremely easy to in detail dismantle your position and explain precisely why.
Signed,
Another Bitcoin early adopter who became totally disillusioned with the BTC/Bitcoin Core project due to precisely the BS you've highlighted in this thread
Imagine there’s a train line. Trains go at regular intervals and have fixed number of seats.
Operator of the train line gradually issues unfalsifiable coins which there will eventually be specific number of and not one more. You can carry any amount of coins while you ride the train. People started to find them valuable so you can buy them before departure and sell on arrival.
Tickets for the train are auctioned for coins. Only the people who bid most can ride the next train. You can even bid 0 coins and get on the next train for free if not enough people outbid you.
Making train go is the cheap and easy part. What’s expensive is securing it from robbers that could disrupt the service and tank the value of the coins. Operator outsources this task to Miners&co. They make the train secure proportionally to the amount of real money they spend. To compensate them operator pays them with freshly minted coins for securing each train. Since operator intends to emit a predetermined number of coins in total it has to periodically lower Miners&co reward for each train secured.
There’s a risk that the price of the coins won’t grow fast enough and securing trains will get less and less profitable for Miners&co and they will secure trains less and less until train line falls victim to the robbers.
To create a second source of income for Miners&co operator gives them the fees that people bid to be on the next train. Operator is not sure if it will suffice but that’s the best he could come up with.
There’s a surge in coin price and people start to ride trains like mad to sell their coins at places where there are buyers. People outbid themselves to be on the next train to the point that travel becomes uneconomical for casual travelers. Some of the travelers say: “Make the trains larger so we can all fit in for cheap”. Operator could do that at no cost, because running trains of any size is the cheap and easy part.
If the operator decides to make the trains larger he is lowering the amount of coins that people will have to pay to travel and thus lowers income of Miners&co and thus lower the incentive to maintain high security of the trains. Incentive that the operator already wasn’t sure was sufficient to keep Miners&co interested forever. Operator would be taking away profitability from Miners&co and make them worry that he could just take away more of their profitability in the future on a whim. What’s next? Even less fees? Maybe no base reward for securing trains? Maybe fixed or increasing reward that makes coins not scarce anymore and thus less valuable in terms of real money?
If the operator decides to not make the trains larger, he makes the casual travellers that like to travel often with a small amount of coins unhappy, to the point of using other trains and coins altogether. But the operator keeps Miners&co profitable and communicate to them that he doesn’t intend to change any core rules in a way that negatively affects their profitability
Travellers say, if the operator makes the trains larger, and as a result makes travel faster and fees lower then more people will travel and coin will become more valuable offsetting any loss of profitability that Miners&co suffers as a result of larger trains.
But the operator knows that what makes his coins valuable is not that his trains are fast, or large or cheap or used often. What makes coins valuable is that they are in strictly limited supply and that the trains will operate forever secured strongly enough to never get disrupted by robbers. So the operator chooses not to make trains larger because Miners&co profitability and trust must be considered before anything else because security they provide is one of the two necessary things for the coins to be valuable.
Some people are very upset and they make their own train line and coins (which they give to people that own operators coins). Miners&co prefers to secure operators trains more and the new larger ones less. Price of operators coins doesn’t suffer and follows usual curves it previously followed around moments of high interest. Operator can infer from that that he chose correctly.
Will the operator be able to keep trains running safely forever? Nobody knows, because outside of well modeled problems, nobody knows what the future will be. And this train line is the first of its kind. I you think it’s doomed you are free to ride any other. There are so many now that do various things differently. Choose wisely because many of them already died abandoned by Miners&co.
You and people like you think I am making fun of you because you are flatly wrong about so many things in the space, and seem to have no idea that you have been conned. I'm not making fun of you at all, I'm pointing out the ways in which you are wrong.
> You can even bid 0 coins and get on the next train for free if not enough people outbid you.
Wrong, you can have an empty block with bids in the mempool below the threshold which miners are willing to incorporate, and they still don't get into the block. You don't magically get into the block on a zero bid just because it's not full.
> Making train go is the cheap and easy part. What’s expensive is securing it from robbers that could disrupt the service and tank the value of the coins.
Wrong, on the security front we have proof of work output in the ~800k USD equivalent every hour range, on the actual functionality front, the primary chain has been sabotaged to be so dysfunctional it barely matches a fax machine in raw throughput, this is equivalent to a depleted uranium armoured rail car with a convoy of tanks as an escort, but it's only 5x5 inches and it runs on a mousewheel. Other node software not subject to the BTC sabotage runs enormously better, things like flowee the hub getting up into tens of thousands of validated transactions per second on commodity hardware, but they're so poorly adopted as to be basically unknown. In terms of deployed infrastructure, we're stuck with the 5x5 mousewheel pushcarts because of the BTC sabotage.
> Since operator intends to emit a predetermined number of coins in total it has to periodically lower Miners&co reward for each train secured.
Wrong once again, there's no "has to" about it, the emission schedule could have been a completely linear flat rate. It was chosen to be a steeply declining curve to bomb the project if it turns out not to actually be a useful service for which people are actually willing to pay, that is, uptake and increased usage is intended to make up for the lost value of the decreasing block reward. The steeply declining curve ensures that the interests of all the maintainers of the Bitcoin network are aligned, as only an insane fool would ever try and actually sabotage the network to be dysfunctional knowing that this would be the inevitable fate if they did.
The BTC sabotage turns this on its head and assumes that instead scaling should be crippled on purpose, and an artificial limit should be forcibly imposed in order that the supply quota can hopefully address the diminishing block reward over time.
This, like basically everything else in BTC, is extremely, indescribably stupid. The inevitable fate remains the inevitable fate for the aforementioned stupidity.
> There’s a risk that the price of the coins won’t grow fast enough and securing trains will get less and less profitable for Miners&co and they will secure trains less and less until train line falls victim to the robbers.
Wrong, because the price of coins is not the only variable that dictates how much security is invested into each block. BTC simply attempts to force it to be so for no good reason and this is transparent sabotage.
> Operator could do that at no cost, because running trains of any size is the cheap and easy part.
Wrong. Operator alone does not get to choose to do that period, a block limit of x does not imply a block floor of x, miners can and do still choose to emit blocks significantly below the block ceiling.
The entire rest of your analogy collapses because it based upon these incorrect assumptions.
Tangent: I would not recommend running lightning on such hardware. State is local to the node, unlike with on-chain scaling. That implies you need server-grade (read: redundant) hardware.
As for block size, it's been ages since I looked into this stuff at all (and I've only ever watched out of the corner of my eye), but my impression is that the block size is currently limited for relatively arbitrary reasons. I don't think there is actually a lot of resistance to increasing the size sometime. It's just that the developers want to limit the size now to guide development in certain ways.
And really, as far as I'm concerned that's totally fair. If you don't like it, fork the coin. Or start a new one. Or stick with Bitcash. The developers are in control because that's the whole point -- to guide development in the way that they think will work best. Not everybody is going to agree. So what?
I think the only reason people get upset is because of the ludicrous amount of potential money on the line. And again: if you are controlling that ludicrous amount of potential money, you are able to vote with your feet -- to the extent that you can convince other people with ludicrous amounts of potential money to follow suit. If all that insane speculation and fraud were to vacate Bitcoin, the developers could happily code away and there would be nobody left to complain.
Let's face it. If we believe that there are billions of dollars tied up in BTC, the owners of that coin could easily afford to hire programmers to fork the protocol. They don't do it because the politics of doing so is essentially impossible. Most people want to stick with the dev group. Again, I'm left with saying, so what?
The same problem also limits block size, since large blocks take longer to propagate.
But that's why Ethereum went with GHOST, which was originally proposed for Bitcoin. Instead of choosing the block with the most hashpower behind it, you choose the block with the most hashpower in the entire tree after it, so that forks contribute to a block's security. The original paper calculated that this allowed both faster blocks and higher throughput, and it's the reason Ethereum has 15-second blocks.
Here are a couple papers:
https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/38121/why-did-e...
...which says Ethereum actually uses a version of the "Inclusive Protocol," which according to its paper has similar advantages:
https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~yoni_sompo/pubs/15/inclusive_ful...
I am pretty sure that isn't true. I'm looking at the code, and the only thing I see included for 'uncles' is the header. This has the beneficial property that higher orphan rates increase difficulty which should lower orphan rates.
OTOH, it doesn't appear that including other people's orphans is incentive compatible without the rest of ghost (because it lowers your own future income).
"a version of" -- there is no close in cryptography. :) Security analysis usually do not apply well to approximations.
Edit: See also this answer, https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/41647
Lightning was not ready when Bitcoin capacity was crippled by the aforementioned tiny cabal of developers in favor of Lightning.
Lightning remains unready, forever 18 months away from the promised usable technology.
There's a myriad of reasons people don't buy things with third-party checks.
This is provably false. Lightning is huge and growing:
* more than $6 billion USD in liquidity
* nearly 11,000 nodes
* tens of thousands of transactions daily
* a growing ecosystem (https://www.lopp.net/lightning-information.html)
You can see the real-time stats at https://1ml.com/
There is only $6 million in capacity, not $6 billion.
Daily transactions are more likely in the few hundreds per day, not tens of thousands. Although this can't be determined with accuracy.
Plus the design itself is flawed. You have to be online to receive money. No cold storage. Routing at scale isn't solved.
Lightning was supposed to make tx fees low right? Well it technically has, but it also introduced the following problems that Bitcoin never had:
- LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.
- If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.
- In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. Well when Bitcoin fees hit $3 a few months ago, 60% of the Lightning network capacity was locked up in miner fees lol... defeating the purpose of microtransactions and the LN network
- In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. In addition to stealing your LN private keys, a bad user can attempt to steal your funds when you're offline. Which is why LN requires a 3rd party service called Watchtowers to watch over your funds. Way more complicated than Bitcoin
- The unsolvable routing problem. A good chunk of LN transactions will fail simply because the routing is weighted and chanes constantly. Compare that to Bitcoin's gossip network which doesn't require any weighted routing. FYI weighted routing is currently a mathematically unsolved problem.
- LN is centralizing around LNbig.com At one point LNBig.com had over 70% of the entire LN network capacity. LN will continue to centralize around these big hubs, because they can offer cheap connections and low fees than a regular peer can. Welcome to Bank of America LN Hub TM.
- With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.
- Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved. Like the race condition when a big hub closes and hundreds of users all attempt to race to transmit their transaction to miners.
- In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion... And Blockstream blocked a minor 2MB increase. So good luck.
So congrats to Lightning, for "solving" 1 problem and creating 12 new ones.
There's many more, but these are the ones easily digestable by users without going into the deeper technical problems with LN. There's a reason Lightning is always 18 months away from completion....for 5.5 years now. While Bitcoin Cash just works.
Correct, but this is clearly stated in its whitepaper and is one of the tradeoffs to get massively more txs and privacy.
> If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.
Correct, but you can also move those funds to other channels you have already opened. Also, loop-in and loop-out are coming. Also, receiving multiple bitcoin transactions on a single UTXO is a privacy hit for all involved.
> In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. (...)
You need to if you don't plan to aggregate your settlement and opening txs, or aggregate those transactions with others. All if that tech is still coming.
> In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. (...)
This is your first statement rewritten. I will not address it again.
> The unsolvable routing problem. (...)
And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.
> LN is centralizing around LNbig.com (...)
Like bitcoin was centralizing around Satoshi's mining farm in the first year of Bitcoin? LN is at infancy stage, and has a hard cap on what amount of BTC you can open a channel with.
> With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.
Besides the fact that bitcoin will still be there, all of these points are explained as part of the network. I don't understand why you are harping about these sorts of issues when the whitepaper or easily found literature about LN clearly state these issues. Also; don't forget that LN doesn't have to be the only second layer on Bitcoin. I can imagine banks building a second layer walled garden with the feature of settling onchain. Heck, this could be made in less than a year, and would basically give every user in the world the option to buy bitcoin. They would however need to have the right volume of BTC available, so it would be utterly devastating to those vested in fiat (which is why they aren't doing it yet).
> Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publicly stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved.
Drya is, to my knowledge still very positive on LN, don't know about Poon though.
> In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion (...)
With the then current code, and the then current block size. Block size has increased with Segwit. Taproot will further increase capacity. Channel factories are a thing thought of after publishing the white paper, etc.
> While Bitcoin Cash just works.
Bitcoin Cash works. I agree. It's miners will keep raising the block size and spammers will keep filling those blocks to make the ghost towm seem inhabited. Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online. After that, it will centralize to a small set of players that will be able to change the consensus rules to their wish. Is that the decentralized peer-to-peer money you wanted? This attack vector is a considerably more important threat than reduced adoption will ever be.
Why do you assume BTC/LN will improve scalability properties but not BCH? On-chain capacity can be optimized over time without increasing the average cost for running a node.
Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.
Definitely not true.
As I previously mentioned in this thread, lightning has over $6 billion USD in liquidity, nearly 11,000 nodes and tens of thousands of transactions every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980404
Oh that's funny. While you're right that payments failing for not finding a route is a big problem, it's not even the real problem with routing.
The problem is for LN to function at scale, it have to centralize around a few big hubs. Because otherwise routing is impossible, and transactions will fail.
Decentralized routing is an intractable problem, and LN have to choose between centralization and scaling.
The problem with lightning privacy is that to get good privacy you need more than about 2 hops. The problem is that every hop locks up money equal to the amount transferred: increasing the cost of the transaction.
The study also finds that the LN is currently subsidized, and based on the capital costs alone, fees should be comparable to on-chain (BTC) transactions. BCH transactions are currently subsidized as well, but not to the same extent (I estimate 3cents/kB would pay for processing and storage).
https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...
https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin-meetup/2015-02...
And, that is before all the issues. Oh well... When Lightning comes to an end later this year, you will have a new boondoggle thing I guess?
Everyone was holding their breath for your prior fraudulent manipulation ( https://i.redd.it/lktxhvvvmny31.jpg, https://i.redd.it/02oagc805u441.png ) has long since died from asphyxiation. I think you might need a new approach.