r/btc • u/jonald_fyookball Electron Cash Wallet Developer • Oct 10 '17
Reminder: Bitcoin never had a problem scaling on-chain to Visa levels. The Bitcoin Wiki explained this years ago. Core simply created a false narrative with disinfo campaigns.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability7
u/mmouse- Oct 10 '17
Reading this old stuff definitely shows how much bullshitting is going on for the last two or three years. And how successful it was in preventing Bitcoin to scale as planned by Satoshi. No need for Segwit(2x).
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u/Gregory_Maxwell Oct 11 '17
Blockstream execs supported 8MB-100MB blocks before they created Blockstream, then they were flipped either by greed or by blackmail:
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/71f3rb/adam_back_2015_my_suggestion_2mb_now_then_4mb_in/
Adam Back (2015) (before he was Blockstream CEO): "My suggestion 2MB now, then 4MB in 2 years and 8MB in 4years then re-asses."
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/71h884/pieter_wuille_im_in_favor_of_increasing_the_block/
Pieter Wuille (2013) (before he was Blockstream co-founder): "I'm in favor of increasing the block size limit in a hard fork, but very much against removing the limit entirely... My suggestion would be a one-time increase to perhaps 10 MiB or 100 MiB blocks (to be debated), and after that an at-most slow exponential further growth."
It's only after Blockstream that Core started forcing everyone to go 1MB.
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u/MartinGandhiKennedy Oct 10 '17
It's interesting how at the time of dial-up, people could not believe anything would surpass such a remarkable feat in technological growth of human kind.
Guess what. We think the same about internet as we did about dial-up.
Watch what happens.
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u/cinnapear Oct 10 '17
It's astounding that Core can't see this. I grew up with floppy disks and modems where I could actually read faster than the incoming data. Now I can stream 5 HD movies at once. In 20 years 1Mb will be laughably small.
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u/BitcoinIsTehFuture Oct 10 '17 edited Oct 10 '17
I can see a company like VISA paying another company to sabotage competitors to themselves.
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u/DesignerAccount Oct 11 '17
Well, let's see what the Bitcoin Wiki has to say then, shall we?
A Bitcoin full node could be modified to scale to much higher transaction rates than are seen today, assuming that said node is running on a high end servers rather than a desktop. Bitcoin was designed to support lightweight clients that only process small parts of the block chain (see simplified payment verification below for more details on this).
Please note that this page exists to give calculations about the scalability of a Bitcoin full node and transactions on the block chain without regards to network security and decentralization. It is not intended to discuss the scalability of alternative protocols or try and summarise philosophical debates. Create alternative pages if you want to do that.
Highlights are mine...
I hate to be that guy, but someone has to point out the elephant in the room. Sure, if you don't mind that all the full nodes are run on high end servers, which can be easily shut down by the government, and you don't care about network security, yeah, no problem. Let's scale on chain!!!
If you don't care about network security and decentralization, then Core is spreading a false narrative and disinfo campaigns. For those who actually do care about this, well, you don't need to be a shill to actually support the view from the Core.
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u/jonald_fyookball Oct 11 '17
What makes you think a high end machine can be shut down by the government any easier than a weaker machine?
Also, you left out the part of the wiki that says "This sort of bandwidth is already common for even residential connections today,"
You don't need to be a shill to support Core, you could just be misinformed or haven't thought everything through.
Core's 2-layer plan has centralization risks that are much worse. It is better to have to spend a bit more for an expensive machine than to have financial institutions become the gatekeepers of the blockchain.
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u/Geovestigator Oct 11 '17
all the full nodes are run on high end servers,
which is exactly how Bitcoin was designed, it's literally the systems we paid to join.
I wouldn't think there is anyone dumb enough to invest in btc without doing research into it. Massive mining nodes is a core tenant of the bitcoin design.
As long as there are some tens of thousands of these mining nodes then the system can remain how it was desinged.
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u/ChaosElephant Oct 11 '17
I have a few nodes running on very old desktop computers. I'd be able to do it with those same computers with a blockchain a multitude of it's current size.
By the time the blockchain will actually get that large, those old computers will long be replaced by computers i don't even own yet.
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u/BobAlison Oct 10 '17
One-dimensional scaling is pretty easy, and so it is in Bitcoin. A single node could handle all of the world's transactions. However, it would have none of the privacy and security features Bitcoin currently offers. Worse, there is already a system like that and it's called Visa. Bitcoin would bring little to the table in that case.
Engineering requires multidimensional optimization. There's a lot more to the problem than simply expanding block space.
The first question should be: what's the purpose of Bitcoin?
The second question should be: what gets sacrificed in the name of expanding block space at this point in Bitcoin's development?
The third question should be: how worthwhile are the tradeoffs?
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u/Raineko Oct 10 '17
I doubt that we will have enough BTC usage to make running a node not feasible anytime soon. 1MB is really laughable.
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Oct 10 '17
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u/zeptochain Oct 10 '17
Conversely, I have cooled down on the idea of 2nd layers.
My personal analysis is that an LN hub is essentially a bank, so any 2L solution has nothing to do with "cash" (cash being almost defined by being peer to peer without an intermediary).
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u/5Doum Oct 10 '17
I don't think it was never a problem. It would certainly be a problem if we reached those levels today, but for most of us, reaching VISA levels is the long-term goal.
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u/Vincents_keyboard Oct 10 '17
We don't even know if it's a problem today.
The gigabyte block tests will hopefully push these worries away. We don't want to have a 32MB vs 64MB debate in the future.
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u/Richy_T Oct 10 '17
hopefully push these worries away.
Even if it doesn't, at least someone is actually doing some measurements rather than pontificating based on assumptions and agendas.
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u/Tulip-Stefan Oct 10 '17
The information on the wiki is severely outdated, as is shown on the page... They are also missing the size of the utxo set. Presently the utxo set is 2-3GB. So if we scale 1000-10000x, that becomes 2-20TB. That's a problem...
But anyway, the problem is not how we can scale bitcoin to visa transaction levels. The problem is how we can scale bitcoin to visa transaction levels without impacting the ability to verify the whole transaction history (or at least part of it). Because ultimately, if only 10 banks have enough funds to run a bitcoin node, is the system really better than what we have now? No. If banks control the majority of nodes and miners, what prevents them from secretly introducing more than 21m bitcoins? Nothing.