The Block Size Debate: The corruption of Bitcoin : Crypto | Torhoo darknet markets
The Block Size Debate: 5 Years Later
27 Aug 2020 Facebook Twitter cryptocurrency tech
Why it costs several dollars to send Bitcoin today, instead of being cheap as its creator Satoshi Nakamoto intended.
Bitcoin Evaporating Photo
The way the Bitcoin payment network currently works, it has a one megabyte “block size limit”, or speed limit, meaning that the network can only process between 3 and 7 transfers per second at max capacity. As more users try to use the network simultaneously, the network tops out, transaction fees shoot up, and the network becomes cost-prohibitive to use.
In 2017, transaction fees reached an obscene all-time high of $55 to send bitcoin. This is not a service you would want to use to send $5 to a buddy.
But it wasn’t always this way. At Bitcoin’s inception in 2009-2010, transactions were free and the network was nowhere close to running into this limit. When the limit was proposed early on in Bitcoin’s development as a temporary anti-spam measure, its hampering effect was a distant concern that would be years in the future. Yet Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was thinking ahead: According to original Bitcoin code auditor Cryddit, Satoshi was concerned about the limit, afraid that it could make it so that Bitcoin “wouldn’t scale”:
I’m the guy who went over the blockchain stuff in Satoshi’s first cut of the bitcoin code. Satoshi didn’t have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney’s idea. Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn’t scale at 1MB. Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed. The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched. But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.
[…]
Several attempted “abuses” of the blockchain under the 1MB limit have proved Hal right about needing the limit at least for launching purposes.
[…]
…at this point I think blockchain bloat as such is no longer likely to a problem, and the 1MB limit is no longer necessary.
Satoshi said that the removal of the limit could be “phased in” so that the network could scale properly, and that he would alert users so that they could upgrade:
It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don’t have it are already obsolete.
When we’re near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
Another user, caveden, explained that the limit made him “very uncomfortable”, because “it’s almost impossible to change once you have enough different softwares running the protocol”:
I’m very uncomfortable with this block size limit rule. This is a “protocol-rule” (not a “client-rule”), what makes it almost impossible to change once you have enough different softwares running the protocol. Take SMTP as an example… it’s unchangeable.
I think we should schedule a large increase in the block size limit right now while the protocol rules are easier to change.
In other words, in 2010 caveden expressed his fear of a future where the change was delayed, Bitcoin would begin to spread, and by that time, the change would be impossible to coordinate across so many different groups all running the Bitcoin protocol.
Fast forward to 2020. The change was delayed. Bitcoin began to spread. Eventually, the block size limit became impossible to coordinate because there were so many different groups all running the Bitcoin protocol.
But it wasn’t just that. There was an active disinformation campaign against removing the limit, including a company that privatized part of the Bitcoin development team, a cabal that owned and manufactured controversy on all three major Bitcoin communication forums, and a secret Dragon’s Den slack channel.
The anti-spam mechanism had turned into a violent ideological war, eventually devolving into a slew of DDoS attacks and anonymous death threats.
Enter Blockstream
In 2015, five years after Bitcoin’s inception, the for-profit company Blockstream hired some of the Bitcoin core developers to influence the direction of the Bitcoin project. Here is a short video infographic explaining how they began to extract profit by quietly crippling the Bitcoin protocol:
YouTube Thumbnail Image
Why Blockstream Destroyed Bitcoin
As a side note, the dev team also made Bitcoin transactions less reliable by kneecapping so-called “zero confirmation” transactions.
A 2017 comment by Reddit user singularity87 explains further. He describes how comments opposing the Bitcoin team’s protocol decisions were silenced on all popular Bitcoin discussion forums at the time (all the major Bitcoin discussion forums back then were run by the same moderation team). In particular, the /r/bitcoin forum began deleting comments and banning users who discussed the removal of the limit in a positive light, turning the discussions one-sided.
The full text of the original reddit comment is reproduced below. I’ve decided that it’s very important to archive it as part of Bitcoin’s history, as it’s only backed up in a small handful of places on the internet:
People should get the full story of r/bitcoin because it is probably one of the strangest of all reddit subs.
[...]
For full quote: maxlaumeister dot com/articles/the-block-size-debate-5-years-later/
For additional context, read A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, it looks like the new core development team got their way. There are no current proposals for raising the limit, so it’s likely that the Bitcoin network is never going to be able to process more than 3-7 transactions per second without middlemen. It’s part of why I have had my eyes on alternative Bitcoin protocols, and now have my eye on Ethereum. Neither of those chains have ideology and governance issues with regards to scaling.
It seems like I’m not the only one that thinks this way. In the last few months a sharply growing amount of bitcoins are moving off the Bitcoin network to the Ethereum network, not only for the increased network throughput, but also to take advantage of Ethereum’s smart contract features. Someday, we might even end up with a situation where Ethereum cannibalizes the Bitcoin network entirely.
In the mean time, Blockstream has also launched their Lightning Network product to try and ease transaction fees, but its design encourages large centralized hubs, it’s suffered from at least one major vulnerability, and it does not completely solve the transaction fee problem, requires nodes to be online to actively prevent theft, and is working uphill in terms of network effect.
Because of these issues, there is now six times more Bitcoin on Ethereum than on the Lightning Network, despite the Lightning Network being released (in 2018) before the Bitcoin-on-Ethereum bridges were built (in 2019).
Maybe when Ethereum scales by launching version 2.0, Bitcoin will see sub-penny transaction fees again thanks to the Ethereum network. But until then, we get to enjoy paying $3 every time we send bitcoins. If you’re going to send, do it now, because the next time the price runs up it’s going to cost $50 again.
Further Reading: The Great Bitcoin Scaling Debate — A Timeline
its early days for lightning, the growth has been epic. check out jack mallers app, Zapp. its really impressive.
bitcoin is currently a long term store of value.
eth is a horrible mess full of broken promises...they cant even validate how many there are in the wild.
If you've got steady nerves (it's highly volatile). Otherwise, I'd probably say to pick a stablecoin.
patience is key, it took gold thousands of years. its remarkable what bitcoin has done in just 12.
Bitcoin really hasn't done anything. The blockchain innovation behind it has potential. The currency itself is still very much up in the air. Good chance it's a bubble that will burst, even if it takes decades. As you said, gold was around a while, then bye-bye gold standard. Bitcoin may very well hang around for a while too before investors come to their senses and realize there's nothing there, except tons of electricity and computing power wasted to no end (though the Bitcoin millionaires and billionaires will be doing just fine cashed out of the crypto rush).
are you a bcasher?
"bitcoin hasnt really done anything" is really naive. i can securely send billions in value anywhere in the world for 10 bucks.
youll bend the knee eventually (:
My point exactly, this is the blockchain innovation behind it, and that has potential. The currency itself is questionable.
The mining of gold does great harm, but that's humans doing to the environment, not gold itself.
Bitcoin mining's voracious consumption of energy is fact, not opinion. The debate is how large (teraWatt scale), not whether it's large.
Hash rate is a qualified selling point. A high hash rate with 2 pools contributing 51% is not good since it potentially undermines decentralization. You want a high hash rate that correlates with decentralization (as, for example, Monero strives for).
now do the energy consumption of dollars. i'll wait.
Even crypto miners go in search of inexpensive electricity as a major factor in their revenue, but to you it's "opinion" that crypto mining consumes a lot of energy.
Even without the research, this would just be common sense to anyone with even just a vague idea about mining because it actually plays out in practice - in the lived experience of miners.
Anyway, this all just seems like trolling now.
But dollars and coins are paper and minerals and capital and labor inputs.
Even if the energy consumption of dollars was equal to that of mining, which it certainly cannot be, consider the amount of dollars in circulation and the amount of Bitcoin in circulation (which is capped at 21 million coins, but currently sits at almost 19 million).
The denominator would work in favor of dollars, all else being equal.
Of course, dollar production doesn't go in search of cheap electricity like Bitcoin, so all else isn't equal and this whole thought experiment is being too generous to Bitcoin in this comparison.
You love Bitcoin. Great. What you can do with it relies on blockchain - and that's the real achievement. The coin itself is just the modern-day equivalent of tulip mania.
your arguments against bitcoin read like a Roger Ver Spreadsheet. have you even looked at zack mallers' app? you'd hate it!
if you think all of the devs on btc are wrong, the institutions and corps that are hoarding it are wrong, if you dont see whats happening....
have fun regretting it. there are a million other ignorant ppl like you on Reddit, go chat to them.
And again, the denominator issue...way more dollars in circulation; way more transactions in dollars; but even without this...
"The 2020 currency operating budget is $877.2 million." (federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm)
Average US energy consumption for commercial use is 10c/kWh and for industrial is 6c/kWh. (eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a)
1TW=1 billion kW.
Going with the conservative 30 TWh, just the electricity on Bitcoin is 3 billion using commercial rates and 1.8 billion using industrial rates.
Of course, in China, miners probably pay less, but in Europe they pay more.
This is just electricity - NOT the cost of mining rigs and other operating budget costs.
Meanwhile, the entire US operating budget for currency is 900 million.
Strike is irrelevant to this discussion. Cash app, PayPal/Venmo, ... Yea, more will come I'm sure, or one of the big ones will buy out Strike. So what?
And here you are again confusing a platform for the coin: Strike has nothing to do with Bitcoin, its development or its mining - it's just a tool employing Bitcoin.
Institutions and corps gamble for profit. What about this inherently makes them right? Several institutions bet big on Tesla's stock price dropping and lost billions - they were wrong. The housing market crash, the dot-com crash - institutions, corps being wrong.
And as for the devs, they get paid to do what they do, right or wrong. And in the case of Bitcoin, there's definitely wrong going on, if you actually read this post.
You provide no links, no citations, nothing but words. I think you're the one who belongs on Reddit with the other ideologues who spout ideas with nothing to back it up.
https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitcoin-mining-economic-costs-comparison-to-gold-and-banks-fiat-currency/
Bitcoin will scale and you'll still be holding your bcash bags.
examples of green mining are also becoming more and more frequent -
https://twitter.com/denverbitcoin/status/1367746900955389952?s=20
this follows on - https://www.seetee.io/static/shareholder_letter-6ae7e85717c28831bf1c0eca1d632722.pdf
and
https://twitter.com/GAMdotAI/status/1365821543788462085?s=20
HFSP
The dollar hasn't been pegged to gold since Nixon.
Bcash is still crypto. I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up. Doesn't matter to me if it's btc, bcash or xmr. All the same - won't displace fiat.
Though in terms of dev and corruption (the point of the article in the post), bcash may very well be better than bitcoin - time will tell.
Green mining is nice and actually isn't new: it's well known that miners in China switch to renewables during summer season. But it's also still a cost (solar panels and wind turbines still cost something, as does the electricity generated from them).
Not to mention, green mining is still electricity that could've gone to more productive use, which Bitcoin isn't. That is until the day you can pay your taxes with crypto.
Energy intensity is quantity of energy per unit output. The value of a network hosting a trillion dollars is hundreds of billions per year, secured by energy that cost billions per year (e.g. 1%). As BTC increases & the network scales, energy intensity should improve to 0.10%
Since Bitcoin runs on stranded energy at the edge of the grid and acts as a global battery for otherwise idle generation facilities, it recycles wasted energy, mitigates capital destruction, & provides a mechanism to commercialize clean, renewable energy wherever we may find it.
https://twitter.com/btcinevitable/status/1372230303478075392
and read this - https://mdotbit.medium.com/addressing-concerns-about-bitcoins-electricity-use-378e0de4af42
look at this - https://twitter.com/Limburg3rt/status/1349855952758071296/photo/1
i could do this all day, open your eyes.
bye x
And if it does prove to be a bubble, which it most certainly is considering its volatility, it's without a doubt wasted energy - energy that, when in excess, can be stored in batteries for other uses.
There's Bitcoin and there's blockchain. Blockchain was pioneered with Bitcoin, but it doesn't need Bitcoin.
And as for blockchain, Bitcoin isn't even the most effficient - and now corruption is playing a role in making it even less so.
2020: some of the world's largest capital allocators start throwing their capital at BTC, which, comparatively speaking is still just as small
You: WHY STILL VOLATILITY!?
FYI - Bitcoin volatility will subside when there are no longer 100x gains to chase after and the capital inflows into the asset are comparatively small to the existing market capitalization & float that's being mm:ed on a daily basis at maturity
It's not hard
It's not rocket science.
We're still in rapid expansion stage, growing from billions to trillions atm. We're not always going to be mid-order-of-magnitude-expansion-stage.
You've had enough years to wrap your head around this now
"bubble wealth" - pahahah!
run along.
and bro, Bitcoin crashes upwards....its the best performing asset over the last 11 years. wake the fuck up, kid.
Bitcoiner 1
Shitcoiner 0
blockchain has a future. bitcoin, who knows? but better hope these big-money investors don't one day wake up and realize they cannot pay their taxes with it.
what a clown, anyways, whats stopping them from selling some for fiat and paying taxes? nothing, you tit.
im done replying, youre clueless.
got loads more on bitcoin scaling if you want to know?
shitcoiners gonna shitcoin though i guess, eyes wide shut
also, i enjoy Charles' chats and i hold 100,000 ADA that i bought in early 2017..currently staking in exodus for 7.06%...not bad.
the difference between you and i is i dont bury my head in the sand when something doesnt fit my narrative...its going to cost you.
And while he has ADA, it's Cardano that is truly the pride and joy - a blockchain platform that can scale, interoperate and sustain better than anything before it. You cannot even mention Bitcoin in this realm - you have to start with Ethereum - because Bitcoin was never built with a platform other than the cryptocurrency and its metadata in mind.
Give credit where credit is due. Satoshi did a wonderful thing, but Bitcoin is a proof of concept, and at this point a fad, especially now that big business is jumping on it.
The real revolution will come with the possibilities of blockchain that bitcoin pioneered. It was obvious before, but now I've heard Hoskinson talk, it's even more clear, as he and his team have the vision, drive, and talent to make this reality.
IQ....
for example failing to outline in your original biased bullshit shitpost, that the reason for bitcoins ridiculous fees in 2017 were down to Bcashers spamming the network to push their bullshit agenda on newbs...like you...and it clearly worked, congrats on that, seriously. LOL
Satoshi always said bitcoin would scale on layer 2, and its happening.
Your ignorance is pretty hilarious.
a fad...hahaha...a trillion dollar fad. ok
(:
i gagged at that.
Also, you want to talk ignorance? Read this post: BLOCK SIZE debate. And go watch more Hoskinson talks because he's said everything I've mentioned - from block size, to scalability problems, to energy consumption, to flawed platform, in spite of its pioneering, ingenious status.
But since you know so much better than experts in the field, maybe you should go start your own blockchain implementation.
You're stuck on numbers. So I'll keep repeating the same thing: dot-com bubble and housing market bubble - trillion dollar fads.
your'e the Peter Schiff of Dread.
i love it when plebs like you dont get it.
Not to mention the fact that it's not a proper platform and was NEVER meant to be a platform but for the coin. It can't handle much more than basic metadata about transactions - no smart contracts and other features blockchain will be especially useful for.
And btw, you've offered no evidence, except a single link to a page that quotes itself.
But since you love Bitcoin so much, I'll gladly take your ADA.
no smart contracts? fuck...you really dont know shit...youre incredibly ignorant.
also, your taxes nonsense....Malta became the first country to accept tax payments in Bitcoin today.
Thats another L...buddy.
like a lil ostrich buying his head in the sand because he missed cheap bitcoin....this only ever gets funnier for me (:
when does this "fad" pop? fucking hilarious....bitcoin crashes upwards.
youre just another wrong shitcoiner, like i said from the start...
Anyway, no surprise. You talk and can't back shit up but with the bullshitter you call your mouth. And you got got.
Next time you see news like that, try looking for official sources - like maybe the country's government press releases or official media.
Yea, embarrassing indeed.
youre down to "you cant pay taxes with bitcoin so its shit" thats it, thats all you got. hilarious.
this will annoy you, i live in Portugal and ive paid ZERO tax on a fortune...dont think i ever will either...im waiting til 100k to let a few more BTC go...your tears at 100k will be too funny.
and youre clearly the ignorant one. i have a rebuttal for all of your bullshit but you fail to acknowledge any of it.
bitcoin scales, youll never get over it and youve already paid the price (: lovely.
you know Charles shared a post earlier just because someone managed to spend some ADA....reach much?! eeesh....thats big apparently....how embarrassing...im thinking about selling. Bloody BNB is more useful...
now go fuck yourself. ill come say hi again at 100k
x