Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase

From: Alan Reiner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 13:51:51 -0400

Actually I believe that side chains and off-main-chain transactions will be
a critical part for the overall scalability of the network.  I was actually
trying to make the point that (insert some huge block size here) will be
needed to even accommodate the reduced traffic.

I believe that it is definitely over 20MB. If it was determined to be 100
MB ten years from now, that wouldn't surprise me.

Sent from my overpriced smartphone
On May 8, 2015 1:17 PM, "Andrew" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Alan Reiner <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>>
>> This isn't about "everyone's coffee".  This is about an absolute minimum
>> amount of participation by people who wish to use the network.   If our
>> goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network
>> that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure.  If even 5% of the
>> world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to
>> open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above
>> 100 tps.  And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations)
>> that want to use it.
>>
>
>> The goals of "a global transaction network" and "everyone must be able to
>> run a full node with their $200 dell laptop" are not compatible.  We need
>> to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly
>> audited by everyone and their mother.  The important feature of the network
>> is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it.  But not
>> everyone is required to.   Trying to promote a system wher000e the history
>> can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach,
>> even with our miniscule 7 tps.  Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the
>> capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system
>>
>
> These are good points and got me thinking (but I think you're wrong). If
> we really want each of the 10 billion people soon using bitcoin once per
> month, that will require 500MB blocks. That's about 2 TB per month. And if
> you relay it to 4 peers, it's 10 TB per month. Which I suppose is doable
> for a home desktop, so you can just run a pruned full node with all
> transactions from the past month. But how do you sync all those
> transactions if you've never done this before or it's been a while since
> you did? I think it currently takes at least 3 hours to fully sync 30 GB of
> transactions. So 2 TB will take 8 days, then you take a bit more time to
> sync the days that passed while you were syncing. So that's doable, but at
> a certain point, like 10 TB per month (still only 5 transactions per month
> per person), you will need 41 days to sync that month, so you will never
> catch up. So I think in order to keep the very important property of anyone
> being able to start clean and verify the thing, then we need to think of
> bitcoin as a system that does transactions for a large number of users at
> once in one transaction, and not a system where each person will make a
> ~monthly transaction on. We need to therefore rely on sidechains,
> treechains, lightning channels, etc...
>
> I'm not a bitcoin wizard and this is just my second post on this mailing
> list, so I may be missing something. So please someone, correct me if I'm
> wrong.
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 05/07/2015 03:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>
>>  On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>  (2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually
>>> really a bad idea.  It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and
>>> relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and
>>> adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability).  But
>>> more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a
>>> global transaction system.  It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for
>>> any meaningful commercial activity to occur.  If we continue with a cap of
>>> 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail.  Or at best, it will fail to be
>>> useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to
>>> failure).  We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps,
>>> which is probably still too low.
>>>
>>  [...]
>>
>>  1) Agree that 7 tps is too low
>>
>>  2) Where do you want to go?  Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the
>> world's coffees?
>>
>>  This is hugely unrealistic.  700 tps is 100MB blocks, 14.4 GB/day --
>> just for a single feed.  If you include relaying to multiple nodes, plus
>> serving 500 million SPV clients en grosse, who has the capacity to run such
>> a node?  By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network
>> node count is tiny and highly centralized.
>>
>>  3) In RE "fee pressure" -- Do you see the moral hazard to a software-run
>> system?  It is an intentional, human decision to flood the market with
>> supply, thereby altering the economics, forcing fees to remain low in the
>> hopes of achieving adoption.  I'm pro-bitcoin and obviously want to see
>> bitcoin adoption - but I don't want to sacrifice every decentralized
>> principle and become a central banker in order to get there.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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