I will take it on faith that those graphs are factually accurate.
That goes for the graphs of blockchain.info as well. Luckily, all data is public, so everyone can check it if he wants.
A large majority of people already accept that Blockchain.info produces factually accurate information, so it seems to make little to no sense to me that you would be attempting to suggest that blockchain.info may either not be credible or that it is somehow similar in stature to some other random source.
I never said that blockchain.info isn't credible. In fact, that list of blocks and their sizes of my first reply came straight from blockchain.info . I objected to your reference to a graph of average block sizes, because taking the average of block sizes is not a good way to try to show that there's enough space left. On the other hand, it is you who put blockchain.info on a pedestal. I don't see why the graph of Coindesk, or a site like tradeblock.com would be considered a less good source.
they still don't demonstrate some kind of emergency state, and even though a bit more granular than blockchain.info, they are not really showing anything that should cause panic.
Suppose a bus company starts running a service in 2010. At first, you'd only see one or two people in the bus. As the bus service becomes more known, more people travel on the bus. Nowadays, busses are often completely occupied. It's common that people are left at the bus stops having to wait for the next one, esp. if they bought the cheapest tickets.
You can see that this happens more and more often. However, anyone who bought the most expensive ticket always manages to get on the next bus. Nevertheless, it happens more and more often that more and more people with the cheap tickets have to skip buses.
Yet, you say there's no reason for panic. You don't expect that the demand for the bus service will keep growing.
Your analogy of a bus seems somewhat forced, and the subsequent post of AlexGR seems to adequately, reasonably and effectively respond to various deficiencies of your bus analogy. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg14164904#msg14164904
I think it's a good analogy, which makes the issue easier to understand. If there are flaws in the analogy, I'm happy to discuss them. The criticism of AlexGR that people on a bus are real, and Bitcoin transactions in a block (according to him) are not, is just childish.
His other remark that it's cheap to buy all the space in a block (because blocks are quite small and transactions cheap), doesn't discredit the analogy. If someone wants to take out the high speed train from Amsterdam to Paris, he can buy all the train tickets. It's doable, and effectively a DOS attack preventing any other people from using the train. If anything, it shows my analogy is a correct one.
and maybe even if there are ways to show charts that separate spam and legit transactions
I can imagine that a flood of tx without fee can be considered spam. But nowadays, only mining pools use zero fee tx to payout their miners. There are hardly any zero fee tx issued otherwise. (800 in the past 24 hours, source:
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ ) But if a tx carries a fee, how to decide if it's spam or not? What is your definition of spam?
I have no fucking clue about various technicalities.... I am of the understanding that there are a lot of transactions that are being sent to the blockchain to make it seem to be more full than it is in order to attempt to whine about some kind of blockchain crisis. AlexGR addressed some of this in his post, too when he discusses how inexpensive it is to fill up the blocks with nonsense.
If you don't understand the various technicalities, then our discussion stops right there. I do acknowledge that some people like to issue txs for no other reason then to show what happens when blocks are full for a significant period of time. Those periods are easily to recognise as they last a couple of days. However, don't forget these attacks are so easy, because there's only so little free space left an attacker needs to buy up.
I get the sense that seg wit filters out spam too, so maybe we are going to witness some better representations of what's going on once seg wit is live?.
How does SW filters spam? How does it decide which tx is spam and which is not?
I don't really know on a technical level, and so I rely on some of the descriptions regarding what it is supposed to do. My understanding is that it separates transaction involving fees from other non-fee information. Accordingly, we are likely going to see how it plays out, but it seems to incorporate a lot of good solutions that may address some of the spamming matters.
If you don't know if SW is going to mark certain tx as spam, then don't claim it. "Lets see how it plays out" doesn't give me much confidence. That both applies to implementing SW as a complicated soft fork, as to changing the working of the blockchain from plenty of room in blocks to scarcity of space in blocks.
Anyhow, there is work on seg wit at the moment and a plan to begin with that (coming soon) and then to give further consideration to whether an additional physical block size limitation needs to be incorporated as well.. so I really am still having difficulties grappling with some of the panick.
How many people need to wait for how many next buses until you panic? Or don't you care about others, as long as you can afford your bus ticket?
Why does it matter what I think?
Because I'm having a discussion with you. If I wouldn't be interested in what you think, I wouldn't take you serious.
and I never said that the blocksize never needs to be increased, as you seem to be attempting to attribute to me.
Unless I understood you wrong, you seem to think that blocks are not almost permanently full, or not getting there so soon in order to plan for an increase of the block size limit. I beg to differ, and I'm trying to show you (1) blocks are quite full already, and (2) as the number of tx roughly doubles every year, it is clear that the growth of Bitcoin usage will have to come to a halt very soon. Of course, once LN is up and running, things may be different. But I'm far, far from convinced this will be the case in 6 to 12 months from now.
In other words: how many tx do you think Bitcoin should be able to process today, in 3 months, in 6 months, and in one year's time?
getting repetitive. I think that there are expansion plans in place... good enough for me for the moment....
You don't answer my question. It may be (still) good enough at the moment, but next year? For sure, it can't be more than 400,000 tx. Something got to give.
Fact: the number if tx per day is close to the limit of 250,000. We recently touched that twice. (sources:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= ,
http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-daily-transactions/ )
We crossed the 20,000 tx/day in June 2012
We crossed the 50,000 tx/day in August 2013
We crossed the 100,000 tx/day in March 2015
We crossed the 200,000 tx/day in January 2016
And the hard limit is a little over 250,000...
So, do you think 250,000 tx/day is sufficient for Bitcoin to be successful? Do you think 400,000 tx/day is sufficient by the end of this year, when SW is rolled out and most other software is updated to take advantage of it? Do you think 400,000 tx/day will be enough until LN comes into existence?
Again, it doesn't really matter that much what I think.
Then we can stop this discussion.
But it seems that AlexGR addressed this matter too.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg14164904#msg14164904In essence, there may be some peaks of 250k transactions per day, but likely not even really close to that in regards to legitimate transactions and there remain adequate expansion plans already in the works and likely many more to come.. so why fret about something that is still in the works and not at an emergency state yet?
Transactions that are paid for are legitimate. If you want to use the intent of the person doing the tx as criterion for legitimacy, then you throw out the censorship resistance quality that Bitcoin is famous for.
