Quote from: cellard on December 23, 2015, 12:45:30 AM

Quote from: tl121 on December 22, 2015, 11:26:31 PM

Quote from: cellard on December 22, 2015, 11:02:07 PM

Quote from: Amph on December 22, 2015, 11:21:34 AM

still not sure about segregated witness, if it not carry any risk, why satoshi has not think about it since the beginning, when he limited the block to 1?

i welcome the synching speed up, this is needed for those that have not strong machine, not my case, as i can sync and open the client in 20 seconds..

Yes, it will be great to be able to open the client faster, in my case, it is very much needed, because my hardware is 5 years old now. About the segregated witness feature, im not sure but if it only has an impact on light clients, it's still important because consider that most people aren't going to be running full nodes anyway, so improvements on this department are welcome.

The code speedup is a useful improvement. However, it does not increase the capacity of the bitcoin system since the capacity is limited artificially by the 1 MB blocksize limit.

Segregated witness does nothing for light clients. It may increase the network capacity in a complex way, because it changes what counts in the 1 MB block limit. It does not reduce bandwidth usage at all, so it amounts to a complex way of partially bypassing the 1 MB block limit. The same effect could be achieved with much less effort by a simple increase in the block size, say to 2 MB. Segregated witness also requires all of the clients to be updated in a non-trivial way, including SPV clients which don't care about the block limit.

What you are seeing is a political game being played by bitcoin core to make it look like they are doing something. For someone who knows how bitcoin works they are not doing good engineering. In particular, they are not following the KISS principle. (Keep It Simple Stupid. Don't do something complex when a simple change can accomplish the same thing.)

We can't raise the blocksize too much because it would compromise decentralization of nodes. For example, for me downloading the blockchain is a pain in the ass. If the blockchain gets bigger im just not going to deal with running a node. Slowly less and less people with care and we distribution of nodes will be centralized, which banks and governments would love.
But yes 2 MB seems like a good compromise, even tho it solves shit nothing in the long run tho.. in the long run we aren't scaling up without something like the LN anyway.

Downloading the blockchain was slow until a few months ago, when a change in networking software provided a big speedup, making verification the limit on most computers. In the pipeline is faster software for validating signatures, which should provide another large speed up. As the size of the blockchain expands (as it will with time unless Bitcoin dies) there will be more pressure onto software improvements to speed things up. This pressure will be maximized if the block limit is raised or removed. Finally, it is possible to prune the block chain and this is in the process of being phased in.