Quote from: TimMarsh on December 26, 2017, 05:54:39 AM

Quote from: Brandon Cheliak on December 26, 2017, 01:50:31 AM

Quote from: DCEBrief on December 25, 2017, 07:19:26 PM

Our Christmas Wish for All of You

https://dcebrief.com/our-christmas-wish-for-all-of-you/

Hope everyone had a good Christmas holiday.

Here is a situation worth keeping an eye on, as it is a reflection of Bitcoins lack of scalability:

Average confirmation time hit as high as 1416 minutes yesterday.
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=30days

It also appears as though every block is completely full.
https://blockchain.info/blocks/1514164923044
https://blockchain.info/blocks/1514078523044

Brandon, that 1,416 minutes sounds really bad, and it is just under twenty-four hours. So I looked up the times for bank transfers over Christmas just to compare. Turns out that a bitcoin transaction only takes between 1625% of the time taken by the banks. Times vary but bank transfers sit between 46 days.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/payment-processing-takes-christmas-break-20111219-1p1xg.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/expat-money/8860887/Christmas-is-coming-but-whats-the-best-way-to-transfer-money-abroad-in-time-for-the-festivities.html

And while you're right that bitcoin is a long way from meeting a daily transaction needs, you've made me wonder if other cryptocurrencies are missing out on the poor performance criticism only because their systems are under less load.

Over the last year, bitcoin transactions per day peaked at 490,644 on December 14.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

So I grabbed some other data to compare it with and found that bitcoin was the second highest with Ethereum managing more than three times as many transactions per hour. This is impressive considering that the Ethereum network is also running a lot of other processes through its in-built programming language.

What I get from this little dig around is that the only reason for bitcoin not meeting the current demand is design decisions that determine the bitcoin coding. The fact that decentralised consensus works at all is amazing and fantastic, but in the case of bitcoin, it appears to be failing the general community at this stage. And I'm left wondering if the main cause of this is that it is not community consensus anymore. Instead it is the consensus of a few massive mining operations who seem to carry a lot more weight than the few community nodes mining away on their personal computer.

I agree that inability to achieve consensus in direction has been a major detriment to Bitcoin, plaguing it for years now. There has likely been hundreds of thousands of man hours wasted, developing implementations and code that ended up being scrapped.

When a group of nodes start running a different version of the software, this creates a fork with the exact same transaction history and balances that existed prior to the fork, but moving forward each would operate independently. How miners play their part in deciding which is the predominant blockchain, is by processing transactions; because if there were no miners, transactions would not be processed. Less supported blockchains are also much more susceptible to a 51% attack, especially if there are some large players or groups with massive hashing power capabilities in the given algorithm.

Theoretically, the majority of nodes could be running a version of Bitcoin with larger block sizes, but the majority of miners may still be more inclined to run the original and continue to process full blocks because there are more transaction fees (1000+tx/block @ $30 average tx fee).

When it comes down to it, even the little guy can still play a part in deciding the future direction of Bitcoin. On the Bitcoin network, a node is a node. Given that there are less than 12,000 nodes at this moment (most in data centers), a collaborative effort could still easily be mounted by ordinary people to implement new code more conducive to scaling Bitcoin. But if the miners are not incentivized enough to make the switch, does this really solve any problems? This argument has been going on for what seems like an eternity in the industry, and no ground has been made to break the stalemate.