Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system
by
VeritasSapere
on 25/12/2015, 15:00:19 UTC
Capacity increases FAQ was posted a few hours ago:

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq
Hopefully by April next year, in time for the halving, this matter is completely settled.
This matter has not been settled at all. Core has made its position rather clear, it is diverting from the original vision of Satoshi. If Core got its way they would block the stream of transactions in favor of off chain solutions. There is presently massive opposition to this move by Core and I suspect that we will see an industry or user led fork rectifying this situation soon.

This is a test of the governance mechanism within Bitcoin. Core should not decide on the future of Bitcoin for all of us. Bitcoin should not rely on a centralized authority in the form of Core to make decisions for us, the market or the economic majority should rule Bitcoin instead, this is best reflected through having multiple alternative implementations to choose from. Since an election with only one choice would be the equivalent to totalitarianism after all. Fortunately we do now have three alternative implementations which will increase the blocksize. BitcoinXT, Btcd and Bitcoin Unlimited.

Jeff Garzik recently wrote an article describing the dire situation we are in, I do at least have confidence that this situation will resolve itself because of the incentive structure of Bitcoin and the ability to hard fork which ensures the continued freedom of the protocol.

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html
Pretty sure centralized nodes run by datacenters, which is what BitcoinXT etc will deliver, wasn't part of the original Satoshi vision.
You are arguing a straw man in regards to BitcoinXT, most people in the developed world will still be able to run full nodes in their homes under the schedule outlined in BIP101. Furthermore in regards to the vision of Satoshi, he was a greater big blocks proponent compared to most of us.

Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall.  If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale, it may already be the case by that time.  Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms.  Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical.  I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section Cool to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
But for now, while it’s still small, it’s nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won’t matter much anymore.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
The threshold can easily be changed in the future.  We can decide to increase it when the time comes.  It's a good idea to keep it lower as a circuit breaker and increase it as needed.  If we hit the threshold now, it would almost certainly be some kind of flood and not actual use.  Keeping the threshold lower would help limit the amount of wasted disk space in that event.
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.