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Comment by dylkil | Hacker News Reader

its a pity bitcoin devs are so opposed to changing the protocol. So much research has been done showing the feasibility of increasing bitcoins throughput. Xthinner for instance is capable of compressing bitcoin blocks by up to 99% using bloom filters [1]. Much of this research was conducted on the bitcoin fork, bitcoin cash, by people ostracized from the bitcoin community for wanting to explore these ideas.

[1]https://reddit.com/r/btc/comments/bas60b/by_the_power_of_cto...

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The actual transactions must all still be transmitted, so this "compression" is actually a way to avoid transmitting transaction data that has already been received by the other side. Bitcoin already does this and while maybe xthinner is better (I don't know) its absolutely not a 99X improvement over standard bitcoin. The problem with the bch people was that they were reckless and dishonest, not that they didn't occasionally create interesting things and have good points. It was a community that was problematic, but still contained some people doing good work.

It’s core principal; that the 1MB blocks use cap was arbitrary and holding back the network, remains 100% true.

The arguments against SPV wallet use in this text don’t ring true for me.

It may be arbitrary, but increasing blocksize to mitigate network congestion is not a good solution, since any cap you set it to will also be arbitrary, and harm decentralisation (block propagation time, node operation costs, etc).

And given how valuable it is to have data in a semi-permanent near-immutable distributed ledger, that block space would be filled up pretty quickly, solving nothing.

Keeping the limit however has inspired a number of novel innovations to use the space more efficiently, including segwit (effectively increasing blocks to 4MB), and taproot.

In short, block size increases are an "easy solution" that don't really solve much.

>since any cap you set it to will also be arbitrary

Unless you done quantitative analysis into the most appropriate blocksize. But that will never happen at this stage.

>problem with the bch people was that they were reckless and dishonest

Anything relevant you would like to share to back up this claim?

There were opportunists on both sides but the blockstream people argued that purely observational non-mining nodes somehow 'secure' the network despite having no effect and need to be possible to run with a non-broadband connection and less than 100GB of free disk space. Satoshi himself in the Bitcoin whitepaper estimated higher bandwidth and storage requirements for nodes than what the blockstream employed devs said were too high. The point of Wall Street getting involved was to kill Bitcoin as a currency and turn it into a pure speculator's playground. (aka bitcoin as gold)

https://news.bitcoin.com/xthinner-protocol-tested-on-bch-mai...

There are some very important changes happening in bitcoin (taproot, eltoo, lightning). Devs aren't opposed to protocol changes, they are opposed to ill-thought changes that make it less decentralized and weaker.

Wrong, they are opposed to changes that will stop them from profiteering off higher layer solutions they provide.

Devs are not profiting from 2nd layers, people who commit capital to these payment channels do! And even then it's tiny amounts.

MasterCard and Visa take tiny amounts, too.

DOGE and PRV (WSBCoin anyone?) don't require these layers.

Since when does Lightning Network not make it less decentralized? That's news to me

Bitcoin incorporated Compact Blocks which similar improves average case behavior.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawi...

Things like thinblocks or compact blocks only help on average. Bitcoin must be robust for worst case.

For anyone who joined late: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/61mxuj/block_size_limi...

The lower transaction throuput,the higher the fees, the higher the incentive for the miners to process transactions.

They probably don't want to mess with that dynamic too harshly.

this was the debate circa 2014/2015. Should the bitcoin network consist of many low fee transactions or few high fee transactions. Right now the incentive for miners to secure the network is produced with the block reward, but when the block reward runs out this incentive will be from fees alone. In order to provide miners with the same revenue as today when the block reward runs out, the average fee per tx will need to be close to $200. If you increase the block size to 100mb and use block compression tech like xthinner to make blocks essentially 1mb (like today), then the average fee needed is only $2.

Why many low fee transactions were not chosen?

You'll get many different responses to this question depending on who you ask. If you want to read into further i recommend you read the great scaling debate[1]. Its pretty long but does a fantastic job of summarizing the history.

In short the most popular reason for not having a block size increase (to allow many low fee transactions) was that it would increase the cost of running a full node, in turn centralising the network. More transactions would mean nodes would need a bigger hard drive and a better cpu to process the transactions. The small block camp wanted people to be able to run nodes on a raspberry pi. This theory is misguided in my opinion though, they chose to sacrifice cheap transactions to keep node running costs cheap.

[1]https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-deba...

They (the devs that control the repo that almost all miners run code from) chose to stifle the base layer to profit from higher layers using 'goat herders should be able to run a full node' as the excuse.

>to profit from higher layers

How are they profiting?

the liquid network is owned by blockstream and they get the fees for transactions on it.

Because Bitcoin works in a way that means miners, collectively, control the network.

They voted with their hash power against Bitcoin Cash when it forked, which was the “increase the limit” fork aiming at low fees and high number of transactions.

Those miners can now enjoy high fees as a result.

>use block compression tech like xthinner to make blocks essentially 1mb (like today), then the average fee needed is only $2.

Claiming that xthinner can reduce 100mb blocks down to 1mb is dishonest. It might reduce the network transfer down to 1mb (assuming you already the txes), but on-disk storage would stay the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25688004

block propagation was the main reason for being opposed to a block size increase, storage costs were debunked time and time again as being irrelevant.

A single transaction costs more than the space to store the entire chain many times over.

That economic analysis is clearly facile. If it worked, miners would want there to be 1 transaction per block.

Miners want to maximize transaction fees. So more is better. But there is a massive tradeoff, being every transaction must be stored to verify later.

In my experience, I have seen literally 0 devs that are trying to increase miner profits. No one is worried that miners aren't getting paid enough.

The miners control the network, longest chain and all that.

They also have lots of money to pay for devs.

Foolish to think a bunch of open source devs are controlling the protocol in defiance of miners who would rather they do something else.

This is the real reason for the block size cap.

Why not fork? Sure, it may no longer be Bitcoin Core... but legitimate non-backwards compatible forks seem like a good reason to start a new chain

this is exactly what bitcoin cash is

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