Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Merits 2 from 2 users
Re: [May 2024] Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs
by
BlackHatCoiner
on 29/05/2024, 11:39:50 UTC
⭐ Merited by JayJuanGee (1) ,garlonicon (1)
That doesn't sound so bad at all
This would be extremely bad. I don't know where to start.

  • One mining pool would gain enormous advantage. 100 GB everyday is 700 MB every 10 minutes. Verifying an ECDSA signature takes about 1 millisecond on modern CPU. With just 4 MB block size, there can be about 7000 transactions every 10 minutes. If each has just one ECDSA signature, it takes 7 seconds to verify the block. With 700 MB block size, it'd take 175x as much time; 1225 seconds, which is 20 minutes. The mining pool with the most hashrate would render the rest unprofitable and gain all the hashrate.
  • Spam is taken to the next level. People can now embed entire movies on-chain, which can introduce legal problems, and with a few large mining farms owning all the nodes, it'd be much easier to shut down the network.
  • There is no fee market competition. All transactions paying 1 satoshi have high-priority, until there are more than 800k transactions unconfirmed within 10 minutes. This renders the system unsustainable over the long-term.

Let's be realistic: there are 18,500 full nodes
Being pedantic here, but there are more than 50,000. The 18,500 are listening nodes.

If I have to choose between 1) a user keeping their coins on an exchange or using custodial LN and 2) a user keeping their Bitcoin in a SPV wallet that relies on several large server farms, the latter sounds more decentralized.
I see what you did there, but here's the difference: In the former, you have the option to use Bitcoin with no trusted third parties. In the latter, you may have self-custody, but you're forced to trust third parties (or realistically, practically forced).

I believe Bitcoin should be accessible with no trust required, and thus, I stand with the former.

I think a lot of Bitcoin users expect Bitcoin to scale at some point.
People expect Bitcoin to scale through second layers. I don't think there are a lot of people aware of Bitcoin's history, believing it'll solve the problem by tinkering with the block size.