Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 102 - kick the can down the road to 2MB

From: Angel Leon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2015 17:13:25 -0400

When blocks are found under or over the 10 minute threshold, hashing
difficulty is raised or reduced dinamically to keep a balance. This
intelligent measure has avoided us having discussions and kept a balance.

The same way you can't assume how much hashpower there will be to find the
next blocks, why can't we have a
function that adapts to the transactional volume on the blockchain, one
which allows us to grow/shrink an acceptable maximum block size. We're not
putting caps on processing, why should we put a date based cap on
transactional volume per block? You can't predict the future, but you can
look at what's happened recently to correct these limits.

Such function/filter should be able to recognize real sustained growth in
transactional volume and let us adjust the maximum accepted blocksize to
allow for the organic growth that will come due to real activity from
things like distributed market-places, decentralized bitcoin based services
(and all the things the community dreams about and might be building
already), truly decentralized technological breakthroughs that geniunely
need to use the blockchain. <Going the off-chain way only leads to
centralization and personal/corporate agendas, which to me goes against the
Bitcoin ethos>

It should be able to adapt fast enough so that we don't have episodes where
people need to wait 4 hours to days for transactions to get on the
blockchain and be confirmed. I believe proposals that include "every
100,000 blocks" are out of touch with reality, the blocksize needs to adapt
the same way blockdifficulty already adapts to growth or lack of hashing
power.

I'm not a statistician/mathematician, but I'm sure if we propose the
parameters that need to be considered for a realistic blocksize that
reflects the needs of the Bitcoin network users, there's plenty of
crypto/statistician/mathematician brain power to propose such filtering
function here.

Things that could be considered:
- median number of transactions per block (between 6 to 12 hours, you
should be able to adjust to a real shopping sprint for instance, or huge
pop band/artist decides to sell concert tickets on Bitcoin)
- median fees offered per transaction (can we detect spammers)
- median blocksizes
- median size per transaction
- number of new addresses signing off transactions, number of addresses
we've already seen in the blockchain before (are these spammers creating
lots of new addresses to move around the same outputs, is there an
efficient way to detect the likelyhood of a transaction being spam? Bayes?
No clue, no mathematician)
- median velocity between which an address receives an input and sends it
to another one?
- more things I've no knowledge of since I'm not familiar with the details,
but could immediatly come to mind to the experts.

Mining Centralization is already happening due to its competitive nature,
we don't complain or try to force hashing limits, we shouldn't do the same
for storage. There will be no shortage of blockchain mirrors, and those
interested in running full nodes, will surely find a way to do so.

Angel

http://twitter.com/gubatron

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Friday, July 17, 2015 3:55:19 PM Jeff Garzik via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > BIP PR: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/173
>
> I'm concerned that miners are prematurely bumping their soft limit to 1 MB
> lately. The only reason block size limit lifting is remotely reasonable is
> if
> we can trust miners to at the very least keep their soft limits set at a
> manageable size, but this assumption appears to already be failing in
> practice.
>
> We are unlikely to approach 1 MB of actual volume by November, so I would
> prefer to see the activation date on this moved later - maybe November
> 2016,
> if not 2017. It would also be an improvement to try to follow reasonably-
> expected bandwidth increases, so 15% (1.15 MB) rather than doubling.
> Doubling
> in only a few months seems to be far from a "conservative" increase.
>
> If we can get some kind of commitment from miners not to move their soft
> limits beyond 1 MB until some future-agreed-on point, maybe the BIP is
> acceptable as-is.
>
> On Friday, July 17, 2015 4:12:05 PM Tier Nolan via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > It establishes a precedent for hard forks not to require a vote though.
>
> Hardforks are not something where voting makes sense. They need consensus
> among /nodes/, not majority among /miners/. No hardfork has ever had such a
> vote.
>
> Luke
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