Blockchain size debate

This move came largely as a surprise as it comes off the heels of a successful Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP to resolve short-term scaling issues and was thought to have largely satisfied community stakeholders. The tumultuous and contentious history of Bitcoin since its inception exposes a flaw or feature! By governance I am referring to the decision-making process within the protocol that defines how rules are agreed-upon, created, and changed. While we have heard Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum compared to the physical, real-world assets of gold, silver, and oil respectively, we would do well to remember that these cryptocurrencies are ultimately software projects with developers and other stakeholders who influence their direction. In my article on cryptoeconomics , I write about how incentive systems play a key role in the design of blockchain protocols. How can we satisfy our hunger for progress and revolution when the very premise of blockchain — a set of rigid rules dependent on consensus — rebels against those very urges?

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Content:

• Buy bitcoin or gold? The hottest debate in global markets
• The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
• Can The Blockchain Scale?
• Thoughts on Bitcoin Block Size Economics
• The Block Size Debate: 5 Years Later
• The esoteric debate that's tearing the Bitcoin world apart, explained
• Block size limit controversy
• International Journal of Networked and Distributed Computing

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: Why is Block Size 1MB

Buy bitcoin or gold? The hottest debate in global markets

I've already made some posts on this topic; there is currently a schism in the Bitcoin community - although most Bitcoiners have common visions , there is much hostility on how to deal with the current capacity crisis.

Currently the community is divided, I call one camp the "small-blockers" and the other block the "big-blockers". Although I'm trying to keep this objective, it will probably shine through that I'm a moderate big-blocker with a preference for the SegWit2X "compromise". After the SegWit2X-initiative was dropped, the propaganda efforts from the small-blockers have mostly been targeting "BCash".

To me, it seems fairly obvious that Bitcoin has failed. Rather than supporting it, we should try to agree on what crypto currency hold the most potential as a successor leading crypto currency and unite on it. I'm not at all sure Bitcoin Cash is the right solution. Would suggest a few edits tho:. Maybe more solid examples? We remember Coinbase founders favored XT and didn't win, but who are they in all this?

Makes us wonder which things Szabo supported. It's past it's "earning" date, but our article "did Nick Szabo Anyway, check out our article, as we are birds of a feather who like crypto-history.

Or is he legitimately pulling for BCH out of goodness of his heart? Charles Lee also never admitted how much bitcoin he owns, and now that he's sold all his Litecoin that becomes more important for his overall integrity, no?

Re 1 above, the "small-blockers" vs the "big-blockers" are a quite central thing going through all of it. I have tried explaining this concept a bit better at the top. I think this phrasing is the most objective and accurate. I haven't seen writings from Szabo hinting on where he would have been in this debate, but that doesn't mean such writings doesn't exist. The coinbase CEO is a moderate big-blocker I believe. UASF is just mentioned in a bullet point, I've tried explaining better in that bullet point what it is and why it's dangerousl.

On one of my laptops I have a very sensitive touchpad, while typing normally on the keyboard it often registers a "click", and my text ends up somewhere completely else than where it should be. I've tried to fix up..

Most of my customers still wants Bitcoins, but the typical questions of the day is "can you transfer it to binance? People buy bitcoin just because it's the most common "jump coin" for buying other cryptos. My ether trading volume is increasing for every day, that's the second crypto people ask for, and it seems like it will soon be number one. It's used mostly for the same purpose, moving funds to binance I thought Bitcoin Cash would take over, but, no, I have very little trading activity on Bitcoin Cash.

Regarding Charlie Lee, I haven't checked him out. My perspective is that the true vision of Litecoin was "let's get rich". As I see it, Litecoin was just a clone of Bitcoin with no real value proposition, some parameters were tweaked, but no big deal. In reality the crypto currency space got inflated - and I'd say we're experiencing a real run-away crypto currency inflation now, there are thousands on thousands of different crypto currency projects each having their own token, and people spreading their money all over the board.

In the Bitcoin space, Charlie Lee is a strong small-blocker - and that's of course the best strategy ever for promoting Litecoin as a "silver". He also sold all of his litecoins to avoid a "conflict of interest" recently, while it may seem like an admirable move Of course he also cashed out at the all time high UASF and "small blockers" sorta comes out of nowhere, but maybe we need to go back and read one of your earlier posts.

Still think it best to edit some explanations for each term. BCH becomes the medium of exchange, especially small sizes. This can come about bc the miners will be drawn back to BTC anytime the price is high, and then they can collect not only high fees but high payouts for mining. Large institutions will likely continue to favor BTC as the transactions costs are negligible, whereas the minnows will put money into BCH and whatever coin doesn't "mining-fee-to-death" their balance.

So THEN the question becomes, who's bigger? In the end, crypto currencies which can climb high without high mining fees, will win. Which ones are those? Knock, Knock Who's there? Bitcoin Cash Informative and also the style of writing is simply awesome, it seems like you reading a story. Thanks for commenting on my comment, it led me to your blog to find this fantastic article.

All posts. Newcomers' Community. Steem Venezuela. Steem SEA. Explore communities…. A brief history of the Bitcoin block size war. Here is a brief history of the attempts on getting the block size limit increased: Early history In Satoshi introduced a 1 MB block size limit.

The biggest blocks at that time was some few kilobytes big. There exists no official documentation on why the limit was introduced, no comments in the code explaining the rationale, and this limit was committed together with a batch of other changes. Gavin Andresen has explained it was to prevent miners from performing a DoS-attack and only meant to be a temporary measure.

During the recent years, people like Gregory Maxwell has suggested it was meant to be a permanent limit preventing the blockchain from becoming too big. Jeff Garzik proposed to lift the limit already in , claiming the low limit was a "marketing issue". Theymos correctly identified the risk of a chain fork as non-upgraded software would still reject big blocks.

Satoshi wrote that the time wasn't ripe for an increase, but that it could be done by hard coding the change to apply from some future in his example, timestamp or block height, giving people sufficient time to upgrade. During there was much discussions; some people where annoyed having to carry the cost of storing gigabytes of gambling spam forever. The concepts of "soft fork" and "hard fork" was introduced. See also my forks for dummies article The notion "hard forks are inherently unsafe and we need absolutely full consensus to implement that" came into existence.

Sidechains and Lightning was hailed as the solutions to scaling in , and Lightning is still hailed as the silver bullet today. After discussions with miners, the proposed limit was decreased to 8 MB. Lots of improvements were made after this, making block sizes of 8 MB perfectly safe. He got vilified by the Core community, and many found his road map for future upgrades to be far too aggressive.

In hindsight, opting for a long-term road map with very big blocks in the future was probably one of his biggest mistakes, the other big mistake was underestimating how much the community would balk at such a "takeover attempt". It was said that Mike wanted to claim the role as the "benevolent dictator" of Bitcoin. This was probably the biggest reason why the environment got so divided; if free discussions had been allowed we would most likely agree on some compromise already in An upgrade to 8 MB block size without any road map for future upgrades were preferred by many of the miners.

There was an attempt to revive BIP later. It was shown that block size limits at 4 MB and above probably would give the Chinese miners an unacceptable advantage. Those research reports are still used in the argument as of today - but they are mostly obsoleted due to various software optimizations and methods for reducing the orphan rate. It was also rejected. Situation was for a long time stalemated due to the many different different proposals out there. In hindsight, had the "big-blockers" joined forces earlier and worked together for one proposal, we'd probably had bigger blocks today.

Only technical talks was allowed, no "politics", no decisions was to be made; any calls for increasing the block size limit was specifically off-topic. Peter R Rizun was allowed to hold a speech at the Montreal conference September telling that the block size limit could safely be removed, but he was not invited to the follow-up Hong Kong conference in December Peter R Rizun and Andrew Stone started working on Bitcoin Unlimited initial release January Peter Wuille presented SegWit at the Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong workshop in December , and it was at first branded as a "4X block size increase through a softfork" - though this did not hold up to scrutiny, and in the slides the capacity increase for a normal transaction is given to be 1.

Some people considered the agreement void already days after it was made. With Core denying to support a block size increase, and miners denying to implement SegWit before being promised a block size increase, it was efficiently a long-lasting stale-mate. Gavin was thoroughly vilified after this. BIP never got much traction, but it got more traction than XT.

Apparently, a smear campaign against SegWit was launched - the hostility against SegWit started becoming intense at the big-blocker side of things. Hence we got into a situation where the smallblockers as always were more obsessed with keeping the 1 MB block size limit than to push through SegWit, and where the bigblockers were more obsessed with blocking SegWit than with getting the block size limit increased.

It would be a real mess. The really ironic thing is that most of those people supporting UASF had been arguing heavy against "dangerous hard forks" just months earlier. It was revealed that the biggest mining operator Bitmain was using some patented "covert asic boost"-method for mining faster, thus having an edge over other miners. The method is incompatible with SegWit, hence this may be the explanation why they were blocking SegWit. Quite some people switched side over to the small-blockers after learning this news.

This was basically a revival of the Hong Kong roundtable agreement. Miners and other major industry actors got together and promised to support the SegWit2X initiative and use alternative software in the unlikely event that Core wouldn't support the 2MB upgrade.

In a surprise move, it forked off as "Bitcoin Cash" at the 1st of August. Perhaps this was wrong, perhaps we would have been united around a compromise if all the energy put down into the Bitcoin Cash project would have been spent on supporting the Segwit2X compromise. The "small blockers" invented the short-form "BCash" and actively started on a rebranding-effort. In mid-August it seemed obvious that Core and its supporters would find themselves voluntarily marooned on a desolated island where virtually no on-chain-transactions would go through after the 2X hardfork.

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

If you've been in crypto for a while, you've heard of the block size and the everlasting debate that surrounds it. This debate has plagued the community for years and it has pretty much torn it apart into two groups: Those in favor of a blocksize increase and those against it. But maybe you haven't been around long enough to know what the block size and the block size limit mean and why it's so heavily debated in the crypto sphere. The block size issue is much more than just a curiosity or technicality and it could indeed define the future of Bitcoin as a mainstream currency. So, what is the block size and why does it matter?

Can The Blockchain Scale?

More than million people use cryptocurrencies, according to a July Crypto. Here's a recap of the year's biggest shifts within the financial crypto landscape, and what to watch for in Major financial firms began to adopt crypto, driven by the millions of customers demanding it. One by one, the nation's largest banks announced different ways they would integrate digital currencies into their offerings, in many cases also adopting technologies to provide them the computing power to record and validate huge volumes of transactions on a blockchain. Morgan Stanley now offers wealth management clients bitcoin exposure; Goldman Sachs now posts digital asset prices on its Marquee platform for large clients and, full disclosure, has made an investment in my own blockchain infrastructure firm. Even though JPMorgan's chief executive has voiced skepticism, the bank has veered toward crypto at the behest of clients. And it's not just the megabanks — Pennsylvania-based Customers Bank just started onboarding its first cryptocurrency businesses and its own internal digital fiat token. The evolution has begun, but the attitude shift is far from complete.

Thoughts on Bitcoin Block Size Economics

How many transactions can a blockchain actually handle? Truth be told, this is a trick question, since any and all blockchains try very different solutions to the scaling problem. Imagine a bus stop with multiple passengers waiting for it - will it not make sense to just send bigger buses? This will definitely help to noticeably cut down the queue.

The Block Size Debate: 5 Years Later

I've already made some posts on this topic; there is currently a schism in the Bitcoin community - although most Bitcoiners have common visions , there is much hostility on how to deal with the current capacity crisis. Currently the community is divided, I call one camp the "small-blockers" and the other block the "big-blockers". Although I'm trying to keep this objective, it will probably shine through that I'm a moderate big-blocker with a preference for the SegWit2X "compromise". After the SegWit2X-initiative was dropped, the propaganda efforts from the small-blockers have mostly been targeting "BCash". To me, it seems fairly obvious that Bitcoin has failed.

The esoteric debate that's tearing the Bitcoin world apart, explained

Blocks size in blockchain is limited to 1MB. Miners can mine blocks up to the 1MB fixed limit, but any block larger than 1MB is invalid. This limit cannot be modified without a hard fork. To prevent Bitcoin from temporarily or permanently splitting into separate payment networks "altcoins" , hard forks require adoption by nearly all economically active full nodes. No issue in the history of cryptocurrencies has been debated as passionately, as often, or as forcefully as the bitcoin block size.

Block size limit controversy

I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. So have other well known developers like Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik. But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards.

International Journal of Networked and Distributed Computing

RELATED VIDEO: Bitcoin Blocksize Wars: Who won? - Nic Carter and Lex Fridman

The Bitcoin block size limit is a parameter in the Bitcoin protocol that limits the size of Bitcoin blocks, and, therefore, the number of transactions that can be confirmed on the network approximately every 10 minutes. Although Bitcoin launched without this parameter, Satoshi Nakamoto added a 1 megabyte block size limit back when he was still the lead developer of the project. This translated into about three to seven transactions per second, depending on the size of transactions. Further Reading: Who Created Bitcoin? Perhaps more importantly, it also represented an effective block size limit increase: Bitcoin blocks now have a theoretical maximum size of 4 megabytes and a more realistic maximum size of 2 megabytes.

If cryptocurrencies can achieve scale and increase speed, they will challenge traditional banking structures. Source: Shutterstock. By Joe Green 19 October, While the PayPal infrastructure processes around transactions each second, and nearly transactions pass via Visa per second, Bitcoin averages just seven transactions per second. And the more widely-owned Ethereum manages around Like any system that has no overarching regulatory control, opinions vary, even on the issue of whether scalability is desirable! Others have proposed measures see below to make the currencies scalable.

Efficiently operating the blockchain requires both speed and security. But Bitcoin is hardly able to fulfill these attributes because of its limited 1MB block size. Therefore, this post will discuss ongoing debates on the Bitcoin block size and how each proposed scalability solution could impact the network. Taken together, there are 3 characteristics that hype the blockchain system — speed, decentralization, and security.