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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

>They also posit that any increase in the block size will make running a full node more difficult, meaning Bitcoin will become more and more centralized and consolidated around the big mining pools that have the hardware to handle bigger block sizes.

With a bigger block size what hardware constraints begin to appear?

> This is a big problem for miners who have poured lots of money into their rigs, because now the blockchain would be little more than a settlement network. There would be far more transactions occurring off the network, meaning less money for miners.

So the motivation is strictly monetary?

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> With a bigger block size what hardware constraints begin to appear?

Mostly it is an issue of disk space and network bandwidth. right now a 1 MB block is produced every 10 minutes. That has to be transferred over the network to every node and each so called "full node" has to store that block. The total size of the Bitcoin block chain for all time is currently ~100GB and grows 1 MB every 10 minutes under current conditions. If the block size grew too big that you couldn't transfer a block within the 10 minute space between blocks then your connection is too slow to run a node. On the disk space front you can run what is called a "prunning" node which discards older parts of the block chain that are no longer relevant which reduces disk space requirements greatly.

There is also the issue of the initial blockchain download where when you are setting up a new node you have to download 100GB of historical block chain data to catch up to the current state of the network. These are all solvable problems though and Bitcoin's inventor envisioned that some day full nodes would be run out of data centers on heavy duty hardware. Small block supporters have argued that that hurts decentralization because some poor guy in Africa can't run a node on his Raspberry Pi and 3g internet if the block size gets much bigger. On the other hand if you are too poor to run a full node with a larger block size then you can hardly afford to pay huge transaction fees to transact on a network with a constricted block size so the whole argument that limiting the block size decreases centralization doesn't really hold water because in the end it limits user growth which is the ultimate decentralization mechanism.

> So the motivation is strictly monetary?

I think so. This whole stink started because some guy who happened to have a ton of BTC was upset that people running full nodes didn't get a cut of any of the transaction fees. Today, the main company that is pushing the Segwit / small block agenda hopes to push everyone to their off chain lightening network where they can collect the fees instead of the miners. Miners don't want to do anything that will jeopardize their profitability long term and keeping the block size too small limits their ability to control the supply of their product (block space).

> This whole stink started because some guy who happened to have a ton of BTC was upset that people running full nodes didn't get a cut of any of the transaction fees.

What? Who?

> Today, the main company that is pushing the Segwit / small block agenda hopes to push everyone to their off chain lightening network where they can collect the fees instead of the miners.

Lightning is open-source and was invented by Lighting Labs, a company that has nothing to do with Blockstream. Blockstream are merely working on one out of 6 Lightning implementations that exists in the market.

Also, Lightning is designed for peer-to-peer routing (and not a hub-and-spoke topology) and it is expected that everyone with some spare bitcoins would run lightning nodes to collect fees, so there should be plenty competition.

Finally, Bitcoin Core is an open-source community composed of tens of developers from all over the world and from different associations, plus hundreds of testers, reviewers and other contributors. Nearly all of them support SegWit very strongly, not only the ones associated with Blockstream.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627371

>it is expected that everyone with some spare bitcoins would run lightning nodes to collect fees, so there should be plenty competition.

Thanks for getting back to me in another comment and I find this assertion interesting. As I said earlier, currently there is no incetive for small players to run full nodes so the network tends towards centralisation over time. How do we know the fees involved in Lightening are sufficient that average users can be convinced to act as intermediataries?

>What? Who?

Mircea Popescu, He is the original guy who started promoting the idea that it was a mistake to raise the block size unless some incentive to run a full node was added to the system. I don't think he actually supports segwit either, he thinks soft forks are crap. He is the original voice in opposition to block size increases though and many people listen to him.

http://trilema.com/

A lot of people disagree with your characterization of how lightening networks will play out. Since they don't really exist in real world usage yet hard to prove one way or the other.

> He is the original voice in opposition to block size increases though and many people listen to him.

Many developers were opposed to reckless block size increases, I think you're giving that guy's voice too much weight. I personally never heard of him.

> A lot of people disagree with your characterization of how lightening networks will play out. Since they don't really exist in real world usage yet hard to prove one way or the other.

They sure do (early and still somewhat buggy alpha, but it does exists and does work):

http://lightning.community/release/software/lnd/lightning/20...

Without a blocksize limit then block space has unlimited supply so the price will be zero. Miners will get LOWER fees so if they think lightning is their enemy and Unlimited is their friend then they don't understand economics.

Those who want the security of on chain transactions will still pay the fees and those who accept the very slight risk of having to watch for channels being dropped for the benefit of lower fees will choose lightning transactions. There's no conflict and is the only way to get the store of value security and low transaction fees with high volume.

The standoff is the miners milking fees for as long as possible. They don't want larger blocks or segwit. This will be broken by having a less efficient lightning without segwit.

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