On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Eric Lombrozo via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Eric Lombrozo <elombr...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Mainstream usage of cryptocurrency will be enabled primarily by direct >> party-to-party contract negotiation…with the use of the blockchain primarily >> as a dispute resolution mechanism. The block size isn’t about scaling but >> about supply and demand of finite resources. As demand for block space >> increases, we can address it either by increasing computational resources >> (block size) or by increasing fees. But to do the former we need a way to >> offset the increase in cost by making sure that those who contribute said >> resources have incentive to do so.’ > > > I should also point out, improvements in hardware and network infrastructure > can also reduce costs…and we could very well have a model where resource > requirements can be increased as technology improves. However, currently, > the computational cost of validation is clearly growing far more quickly > than the cost of computational resources is going down. There are > 7,000,000,000 people in the world. Payment networks in the developed world > already regularly handle thousands of transactions a second. Even with > highly optimized block propagation, pruning, and signature validation, we’re > still many orders shy of being able to satisfy demand. To achieve mainstream > adoption, we’ll have to pass through a period of quasi-exponential growth in > userbase (until the market saturates…or until the network resources run > out). Unless we’re able to achieve a validation complexity of O(polylog n) > or better, it’s not a matter of having a negative attitude about the > prospects…it’s just math. Whether we have 2MB or 20MB or 100MB blocks (even > assuming the above mentioned optimizations and that the computational > resources exist and are willing to handle it) we will not be able to satisfy > demand if we insist on requiring global validation for all transactions. >
Scaling the network will come in the form of a combination of many optimizations. Just because we do not know for sure how to eventually serve 7 billion people does not mean we should make decisions on global validation that impact our ability to serve the current set of users. Also, blocking a change because it's "more important to address issues such as..." other improvements will further slow down the discussion. I believe an increase will not prevent the development of other improvements that we need - in contrast, the sooner we can get over the limit (which, as you agree, needs to be changed at some point), the sooner we can get back to work. > > On Jul 23, 2015, at 1:26 PM, Jorge Timón <jti...@jtimon.cc> wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 9:52 PM, Jameson Lopp via bitcoin-dev > <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > > Running a node certainly has real-world costs that shouldn't be ignored. > There are plenty of advocates who argue that Bitcoin should strive to keep > it feasible for the average user to run their own node (as opposed to > Satoshi's vision of beefy servers in data centers.) My impression is that > even most of these advocates agree that it will be acceptable to eventually > increase block sizes as resources become faster and cheaper because it won't > be 'pricing out' the average user from running their own node. If this is > the case, it seems to me that we have a problem given that there is no > established baseline for the acceptable performance / hardware cost > requirements to run a node. I'd really like to see further clarification > from these advocates around the acceptable cost of running a node and how we > can measure the global reduction in hardware and bandwidth costs in order to > establish a baseline that we can use to justify additional resource usage by > nodes. > > > Although I don't have a concrete proposals myself, I agree that > without having any common notion of what the "minimal target hardware" > looks like, it is very difficult to discuss other things that depend > on that. > If there's data that shows that a 100 usd raspberry pi with a 1 MB > connection in say, India (I actually have no idea about internet > speeds there) size X is a viable full node, then I don't think anybody > can reasonably oppose to rising the block size to X, and such a > hardfork can perfectly be uncontroversial. > I'm exaggerating ultra-low specifications, but it's just an example to > illustrate your point. > There was a thread about formalizing such "minimum hardware > requirements", but I think the discussion simply finished there: > - Let's do this > - Yeah, let's do it > - +1, let's have concrete values, I generally agree. > > > > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
