Quote from: gmaxwell on August 22, 2014, 05:31:13 AM

Quote from: jl2012 on August 22, 2014, 03:43:05 AM

Some of the 1MB-block supporters believe we should keep the limit forever, and move 99.9% of the transactions to off-chain. I just want to point out that their logic is completely flawed.

Can you cite these people specifically? The strongest I've seen is that it "may not be necessary" and shouldn't be done unless the consequences are clear (including mining incentives, etc), the software well tested, etc.

I am not going to cite to provoke unnecessary debate. As you are not one of them, let's stop here.

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I've been maintaining a node with my 100Mb/s domestic connection since 2012. It takes less than 800MB of RAM now which I have 24GB. CPU load is <0.5% of a Core i5. Harddrive space is essentially infinite. I don't anticipate any problem even if everything scales up by 10x, or 100x with some optimization.

Great. I live in the middle of silicon valley and no such domestic connection is available at any price (short of me paying tens of thousands of dollars NRE to lay fiber someplace). This is true for much of the world today.

This kind of connection is available in Hong Kong for maybe 10 years. Today, with $20/mo we have 100Mb/s. We can even have an 1Gb/s fiber directly connected to the computer at home with only $70/mo.

Anyway, I know our case is atypical. However, I'd be really surprised if you can't do the same in silicon valley in 10 years. Also, I doubt one would have any difficulty to rent an 1U collocation space with 100Mb/s for $100/mo in silicon valley.

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Therefore, people are not running full node simply because they don't really care. Cost is mostly an excuse.

I agree with this partially, but I know it's at all the whole truth of it. Right now, even on a host with solid gigabit connectivity you will take days to synchronize the blockchain this is due to dumb software limitations which are being fixed... but even with them fixed, on a quad core i7 3.2GHz and a fast SSD you're still talking about three hours. With 100x that load you're talking about 30 hours 12.5 days.

Few who are operating in any kind of task driven manner e.g. "setup a service" are willing to tolerate that, and I can't blame them.

Most of them are here for profit so they won't do it anyway, no matter it's 1MB or 100MB.

Also, I can't see why we really need to verify every single transaction back to the genesis block. If there were no fork floating around, and no one is complaining in the last few months, it's really safe to assume the blockchain (until a few months ago) is legitimate.

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People are not solo mining mostly because of variance,

There is no need to delegate your mining vote to a third party to mine it would be perfectly possible for pools to pay according to shares that pay them, regardless of where you got your transaction lists from bur they don't do this.

Again, they won't do it no matter it's 1MB or 100MB, unless the protocol forces them to do so

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At the end of the day, theoretically, we only require one honest full node on the network to capture all the wrongdoing in the blockchain, and tell the whole world.

And tell them what? That hours ago the miners created a bunch of extra coin out of thin air ("no worries, the inflation was needed to support the economy/security/etc. and there is nothing you can do about it because it's hours burried and the miners won't reorg it out and any attempt to do so opens up a bunch of double spending risk") How exactly does this give you anything over a centralized service that offers to let people audit it? In both there can always be some excuse good enough to get away with justifying compromising the properties once you've left the law of math and resorted to enforcement by men and politics.

In the whitepaper a better path is mentioned that few seem to have noticed "One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency". Sadly, I'm not aware of even any brainstorming behind what it would take to make that a reality beyond a bit I did a few years ago. (... even if I worked on Bitcoin full time I couldn't possibly personally build all the things I think we need to build, there just isn't enough hours in the day)

That isn't the whole tool in the belt, but I point it out to highlight that what you're suggesting above is a real and concerning relaxation of the security model, which moves bitcoin closer to the trust-us-were-lolgulated-banking-industry... and it that it is not at all obvious to me that such compromises are necessary.

It's beyond infuriating to me when I hear a dismissive tone, since pretending these things don't have a decentralization impact removes all interest from working on the technical tools needed to bridge the gap.

Why that would take hours to broadcast a warning like that? Let say you are a merchant and you can't afford you own full node. You primarily rely on Blockchain.info but you also run an SPV client to monitor the block headers. As long as one of your peers is honest, you should be able to detect any problem in the data of Blockchain.info within 6 confirmations (since the block headers won't match).

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The real problem for scaling is probably in mining.

I'm not sure why you think that miners are paid for their participation. Some of them habe been extract revenue on the hundred thousands dollars a month in fees from their hashers. There is a lot of funds to pay for equipment there.

I mean, a 100MB block is not a problem for bitcoin whales and altruistic players to run full nodes, and we will have enough honest full nodes to support SPV clients. For miners, however, as block propagation is crucial for their profit, a big block with O(n) propagation time will cause problem. Gavin's O(1) proposal gives some hope, but I have to admit I don't understand the maths behind it.

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I'm just trying to set a realistic target, not saying that we should raise the limit to 100MB today. However, the 1MB limit will become a major limiting factor much soon, most likely in 2 years.

In spite of all the nits I'm picking above I agree with you in broad strokes.

No matter that will be a hardfork, or an auxiliary block softfork, this will be the most dramatic change to the protocol. However, I can't see any real progress in reaching consensus despite years of debate.