Anonobread

What part of "they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin" didn't you understand? What kind of person lambasts another for giving primary sourced, direct quotes to counter a misconception?

BTW, this too is a misconception: "and what we learned from that was that the nodes in datacenters are the only ones which can't be trivially knocked off the internet"

Right, because you didn't learn to run Tor hidden service nodes. You also didn't learn to proxy your connection over SSH. No, that would make too much sense. What you learned was that you had to physically relocate your node to a datacenter. Golf clap.

> If you want resiliance, get nodes in as many datacenters of different sovereign jurisdictions as possible. The nodes running on home connections are an illusion.

Welcome to 2013?

> Your suggestions don't stop the address published to the p2p network from being flooded.

    bitcoind -?

    -externalip=<ip>
          Specify your own public address
    -onion=<ip:port>
          Use separate SOCKS5 proxy to reach peers via Tor hidden services
          (default: -proxy)
    -onlynet=<net>
          Only connect to nodes in network <net> (ipv4, ipv6 or onion)

> they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin.

Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote:

"Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1]

And Satoshi Nakamoto stated:

"Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2]

Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow:

Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3]

Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]

Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that."

Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6].

After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman.

Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it:

"Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7]

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...

[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289...

[3] https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0

[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35...

[5] http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/

[6] http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-...

[7] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...

Aaron Russo, award winning film producer, argues the opposite quite convincingly in an interview conducted with a former IRS Commissioner, here:

https://youtu.be/O6ayb02bwp0?t=33m

The IRS and Federal Reserve system is corrupt to its very core. The 15 minute interview linked should establish that.

Consumers don't buy 2% more chicken at the grocery store just because "inflation is 2%". That's total nonsense with no basis in reality. And investors will still make traditional investments in a deflationary environment, BTC denominated loan markets and "IPOs" are the case in point to that end.

Granted, in a deflationary environment, investments will be less profitable if the projects being invested in are dependent on consumers spending money frivolously.

> Investment is key to growth/innovation but there has to be some demand there. Demand creation is always overlooked, when wages aren't raised, when companies move out of the US etc. These things directly impact demand and purchasing power of consumers at all levels eventually.

Society gains purchasing power at large in a deflationary environment.

And note that, if the American economy grows 10% in a year, the Fed will still strive for inflation. If economic growth is 10% and inflation is 1%, the upper echelons of society will have skimmed 10% off the top, robbing society of that growth. Conversely, in a Bitcoin world, the 10% economic growth is returned to the savers in the form of more purchasing power.

> In a perfect game system you'd probably make labor income taxes less than capital gains on investment

Indeed you would [1]. According to some legal scholars, wages earned from labor were/are not supposed to be taxed at all in America. The tax code was designed to tax investment gains only. Just imagine if that were upheld

> The fact is lower/middle class labor income workers put more directly back into the economy than the wealthy "job creators"

By doing what? Consuming consumables marketed to them by Corporations? The same Corporations that would just as soon replace most of their menial labor with robots.

Also, I'd curb your exuberance towards believing the lower/middle class "puts more back into the economy", because to the extent the lower/middle class is increasingly replaced by robots or cheap foreign labor, if this is your true belief then we should institute a universal income. Because that's going to "put more back into the economy".

> Demand comes from people that spend

But for example, planned obsolescence encourages spending. But is planned obsolescence really a tangible benefit for the "people that spend"?

Also, imagine if "cash" was of fixed supply (Bitcoin) rather than inflationary. In which case, you could make paper gains over time by not spending it or investing it. Wouldn't this provide more people with financial security given the risks and complexity of investing money in general?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_statutory_argume...

Bitcoin and Ethereum investors who put a few thousands of their own money on the line years ago have seen it rocket up in value into a considerable fortune.

Naturally, to the extent an investment makes you "rich", the investment occupies a proportionately larger share of your net worth. And to the extent it's a major component of your net worth, especially if your net worth allows for you to retire early, this makes for a situation where you will justify doing and saying anything and everything possible to promote your own interests, which are now dominated by, in our case Bitcoin or Ethereum.

This is why distinguished readers can practically see the greed pouring out of people's eye balls as they discuss these "technologies". Pro tip: call it a "technology" when you're invested in it, but call it an "investment" when you're not.

As you've noted, this gets incredibly frustrating to deal with in the cryptocurrency world. Not just because it applies to so many people, but because cryptocurrency itself is all just a confidence game of trying to get people to buy into a particular unit of account.

For example, I doubt if any of the Ethereum people actually use smart contracts, like ever. They're only using that as an angle to poach investment capital off Bitcoin. We all can see this is true because no one is making any money on "smart contracts". Ironically, the only people who have ever made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by selling other people on the idea of smart contracts. Buy smart contracts now!

> With blockchains, only the user has write access to the database with their cryptographic identity. Users are in full control.

That trait is far from being unique to blockchains.

But no, users aren't in full control of cloud software.

> Users can run a node of the peer-to-peer component if they want. Anyone can. They just don't have to.

After 18 months of block size debate, this is deja vu. No, anyone can't run a node if you make it cost $5k/mo

My point is running all the nodes in the cloud means that the users of those nodes don't own them.

> the user's choice to use the application in the first place.

Right, but if none of the users can even run the so called "peer-to-peer" component, what's the difference between that and run-of-the-mill centralized DB software? Either way nobody but the chosen few can directly access the DB.

Users don't control cloud software.

> Ethereum is a world computer. As in, it acts like a single public computer that can perform computations for anyone who is willing to pay for them, but instead of this computer being run by a third party, it's run by the network as a whole.

Compared to actual Python code, or Ruby code, or any code that you can imagine, Ethereum VM code is a hobbled down child's toy. Think: Gameboy from 1995. The memory is scant. The performance, abysmal.

> This is useful for any situation where you would usually need a trusted third party to perform some computations or enforce one side of a bargain - for example ecommerce/escrow, trading, voting, bets, issuing stock/currency, plus other things that probably have not even been thought of yet.

You can do all of those things with Bitcoin. We don't promote it much because no one has cared to use any of it for years. It's always hooked in investors, though. Lots and lots of investors.

> and now think that without a leader it's doomed to design by committee and stalemate on key decisions

As a regular in the cryptocurrency world, it's evident that no matter what you do, someone is going to find a reason to criticize you. One day these people are criticising Bitcoin for being run by a cabal of closely knit developers, the next you see this guy saying Bitcoin doesn't have a leader and is instead being designed by an apparently leaderless committee. They seem to alter their concerns and their approach to criticising Bitcoin depending on which way the wind is blowing.

BTW, I'm going to assume something and you should too: adrianmacneil here is almost assuredly long ETH. He probably albeit less assuredly so doesn't own any BTC. In any case you can assume I have the opposite portfolio.

First and foremost, Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn't possibly be more different. Bitcoin is a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin places a higher value on securing the cash. It places tamper resistance above all else, and generally takes no chances on that. That's a feature, not a bug.

Because if that core unit fails, then the entire cash system collapses. You can't exactly have a global currency that fails mid voyage. Modern financial systems don't do that very often and neither should Bitcoin.

Conversely, Ethereum is a smart contracts platform through and through. It has 15 second block times. It has its own VM. This VM has had critical vulnerabilities in the recent past, and is less than 1 year into production.

Notice how Bitcoin could never be about smart contracts like Ethereum does, at its core, since Bitcoin could only do that by taking on existential risk?

However, that doesn't mean Bitcoin can't better manage its risk by making what is essentially a "unikernel" for Ethereum functionality on top of the Bitcoin network. Sure it won't be totally perfect, but it will do everything Ethereum does, without exception, and will do so without compromising the core of Bitcoin's network, when doing so would jeopardize the cash system.

And this is what the poster I'm responding to completely misses when he says:

> [Ethereum] offers a "bytecode" type language which can be created by compiling contracts in >=2 languages already. Bitcoin currently lets you define contracts in the equivalent of assembly code, with no higher level languages available. So this statment seems to apply more to Bitcoin than Ethereum.

The point is, once you have the unikernel model down, who cares if it's Ethereum? Ethereum's VM is very first generational, highly unproven, highly unstable, has God knows how many vulnerabilities not to mention competitors who develop competing languages and competing VMs. We don't want to be in that business. We want to be in the business of running the best of it as a unikernel without even remotely jeopardizing the entire system all at once, though I understand Ethereum kind of had to do that in order to raise money. Turns out if you don't raise a bunch of money from a bunch of investors, you don't get people to voluntarily promote you on HN and Reddit.

> That's basically what Rootstock[0] is supposed to be. Although at present, it seems to be vaporware.

Speaking of Ethereum promoters, they do have a knack for reminding you how the unikernels of cryptocurrency will surely never exist. Nothing to see here.

You'll have to excuse me for this, but what you've just written has been said so many times in the past 18 months it's basically a cliche.

If you're willing to put the entire system into the cloud and hand over the backbone of Bitcoin to big banks and megacorps, you end up with a system no different from fiat currency over time. It ends up being a State controlled fiat money, because all of the infrastructure providers are Corporations - creatures of the State.

Inflation? No problem, we'll just have the usual suspects update the code. Freezing accounts? Narcoturrerism? No problem, we'll update the code. Etc. Having a P2P electronic cash system means accepting that the system is going to be different than government scrip.

The blockchain was never meant to be PayPal. It was meant to bootstrap a cryptoeconomic system outside the bounds of politics and the law. It's completely irresponsible to give that vision up for the ability globally broadcast low value, meaningless consumer payments - especially since you can achieve that by building higher layers of abstraction.

Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills.

Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.

> If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.

But since we're talking about "decentralized systems", the question is who owns the blockchain infrastructure. Is the blockchain going to be serviceable on home desktop PCs, or are you going to need a datacenter?

To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion. And it isn't even remotely feasible to acquire that sort of infrastructure anonymously.

Yet that's what it's going to take to hit 56,000 tps on a blockchain any time this decade or perhaps even after [1]:

> Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.

A common mistake is confusing "popularity" with decentralization. BitTorrent is both popular and decentralized. It doesn't take a datacenter and a 10-machine cluster to participate in a BT swarm as a full-on peer. As an aside, it's no surprise the creator of BitTorrent is staunchly against scaling Bitcoin in datacenters [2].

[1]: http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-la...

[1]: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=417

[2]: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a...

Global electronic cash is a zero sum game. Money is pure network effect and only one unit of account can have 90% global market share at a time. I want that to be BTC. You want that to be ETH. Let's just agree to disagree?

But you can port any and all features to sidechains or Enigma [1], and in doing so make them accessible to a much bigger market, denominated in BTC which is a more stable and proven unit of account.

Or at least that's how the story is supposed to go. In theory, porting nice-to-have features to a larger audience results in more revenue and more overall societal benefit than starting a new scarcity race, which Ethereum has done, pitting investors against each other.

[1]: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/

Gavin is no longer lead developer and hasn't been for years now.

> I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log

You're coming at this backwards. Once you have the most valuable cryptocurrency unit of account, you have the most security and the highest availability log in the world. On that basis, you can do just about anything, e.g. sidechains or payment channels.

A "highly replicated log" is a prerequisite of that, and Bitcoin is currently winning that battle due to first mover advantage. Hence, anything can be built on top of that basis.

If you have small competitor to Bitcoin that aims to do more, it's more valuable for the majority to snipe the features from the small competitor and make those features available denominated in the majority owned asset.

The throughput capacity of Bitcoin, being programmable money, isn't a user limit. We can just as soon put billions of users with BTC-denominated accounts at higher layers of abstraction, and in fact this is exactly what Bitcoin's core developers aim to achieve. It doesn't make any sense to globally broadcast every last Starbucks coffee and permanently etch it into an immutable database at enormous cost.

> The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)

Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction.

> It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!".

But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.

What block size for Ethereum's blockchain would be required to hit 56,000 tps? I'm really getting some deja vu in having to write this out for the millionth time in a 18 month period.

None of your talking points magically address the extreme costs of prerequisite physical infrastructure needed to hit 56,000 tps.

Bottom line, it's impossible to match the throughput capacity of just a single credit card company on any blockchain, be it Bitcoin or Ethereum or BBQCoin, without incurring enormous costs in terms of CPU and bandwidth. This is to say nothing of doing decentralized exchanges, order matching, and option contracts - all of which Ethereum has been advertised as doing on a blockchain. For that you'd need hundreds of thousands of tps.

But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain".

VISA does 56,000 tps.

So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer?

And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethereum: "everything goes on the blockchain". You're telling me after 18 months of debate, the best you've got to say about that is: "an account based architecture"?

What is it about widgets fully encapsulated in a blockchain-native smart contract on Ethereum that makes it so much more scaleable than a similar widget on Bitcoin's blockchain?

Gosh, you almost had me for a second there.

But no, I'm afraid you'll have to do a bit more than merely allude to (non-)solutions, or point out how paper gains are enough motivation to keep experts who could otherwise be earning 6 figure incomes, to instead work full time on difficult solutions for free.

That you've taken absolutely no effort to spell out any of this magic success formula and instead chosen to allude to altcoins is sadly typical.

Bottom line: nobody has figured out how to sustainably support open source projects with money, period. In the best case, it's the blind leading the blind. You do what works. And whose to say what works? It's ridiculously subjective.

The performance test data shows 32MB blocks are the absolute maximum block size that can be handled on desktop PCs today [1]:

> After simulating the creation of blocks up to 32 MB in size, we have arrived at some interesting conclusions:

- a 32 MB block, when filled with simple P2PKH transactions, can hold approximately 167,000 transactions, which, assuming a block is mined every 10 minutes, translates to approximately 270 tps

- a single machine acting as a full node takes approximately 10 minutes to verify and process a 32 MB block, meaning that a 32 MB block size is near the maximum one could expect to handle with 1 machine acting as a full node

- a CPU profile of the time spent processing a 32 MB block by a full node is dominated by ECDSA signature verification, meaning that with the current infrastructure and computer hardware, scaling above 300 tps would require a clustered full node where ECDSA signature checking is load balanced across multiple machines.

In addition:

> Aside from the obvious network and storage constraints of running a full Bitcoin node at large block sizes, it appears the Bitcoin network is capable of handling a substantially higher transaction volume than it does currently. The CPU time being dominated by ECDSA signature checks at high transaction rates suggests a clustered full node architecture could process credit-card-like transaction rates by using a load balancing / offload approach to ECDSA signature checking, e.g. a full node with a 10 machine cluster would top out at >2,000 tps.

> The resources and know-how required to run a clustered node like this may impose a significant centralizing force on Bitcoin. Backpressure against the centralization of Bitcoin may well drive alternative solutions to having all transactions on-chain. Alternatively, it may end up that Bitcoin adoption grows slowly enough that the computing power of a single node grows quickly enough to avoid requiring a clustered full node architecture.

Under Gavin Andresen's original plan, the 32MB limit could've been crossed in Jan 2018 when the size doubled to 40MB. Importantly, Gavin has since dropped the idea for a block size of 2MB. Hence you really can't claim that your own preferred plan for block size won't result in "a high-fee, low-transaction network". It's 2MB - that's a very far cry from VISA and it's only 0.4MB more than the scaling roadmap - that's a difference of at worst 3 tps out of VISA's 56,000.

Unless your intent is to quite literally put 100% of Bitcoin full nodes in datacenters, it's as clear as day that raising and re-raising block size ad infinitum doesn't work, as it usurps control of full nodes from individuals. It effectively turns Bitcoin into an enterprise database only accessible to the rest of us through garbage proprietary SaaS platforms. Clearly this isn't a benefit and we should be pulling out every possible stop to avoid it from happening. Look, if your vision for Bitcoin is that it should be like Parse.com for credit cards, I'm sorry but we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

What outsiders don't seem to understand is the people shouting "Bitcoin is or should be a democracy" the loudest are the ones who stand to benefit the most from seizing power from the current core developers.

As if those people have any intention whatsoever to listen to the opinions of billions of poor people when making technical protocol decisions. They don't want real democracy - they want their democracy where they're in control. And for anyone wondering what that control looks like, here are some direct quotes from the "democracy" crew:

Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [1]

Gavin Andresen: "I think long-term the chain will not be secured purely by proof-of-work. I think when the Bitcoin network was tiny running solely on people's home computers proof-of-work was the right way to secure the chain" [2]

Gavin Andresen: "bitcoin is already more decentralised than it needs to be" [3]

Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]

Gavin Andresen: No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that.

[1]: https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0

[2]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015...

[3]: http://www.bitcoin.kn/2015/09/adam-back-gavin-andresen-block...

[4]: https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35...

IOW, the goal of their democracy is to usurp control of full nodes from individual hands and make that into a Corporate-dominated service. It would basically turn Bitcoin into an enterprise database that most people are stuck accessing as a proprietary SaaS.

> There are better ways to handle governance in OSS and cryptocurrency then founding a private enterprise

First, only one core developer with commit access, Pieter Wuille, is affiliated with Blockstream. Yes - the fact that founders of Blockstream are PhDs in distributed systems and cryptography, and the fact that many of them have authored essential elements of the Bitcoin system like libsecp256k1 gives them a purely meritocratic sway over developer mindshare, and for good reason.

Second, according to your words here you've done the impossible - you've finally figured out how to handle all money issues in open source projects. Gosh, that's really something. Don't just leave us hanging like that, do divulge what you think is the optimum way to ensure highly skilled developers and researchers work on open source projects for free.

> It’s like a Visa payment network that’s controlled not by Visa, but by the people—one that is open to all and that can move money more cheaply and efficiently. That’s something we should all care about.

The USD doesn't compete against VISA. Gold doesn't compete against VISA. BTC doesn't compete against VISA.

Please, will someone inform these poor journalists that it's sheer folly to pit a currency or a commodity against a Corporation? American Express isn't competing against gold bullion, and VISA isn't competing against BTC. VISA is competing against Coinbase and Xapo.

> In any case, fixing the blocksize limit will be good

This presumes the blocksize limit is being fixed, which is an incorrect assumption. Originally, the proponents of Classic wanted to boost block size limits to 20MB effective January 2016 [1], and used bombastic and divisive language, inventing their own crisis even, to get people to take them seriously.

Interestingly, those same people are now contending for just 2MB, which is only 0.4MB higher than that proposed by Core.

Performance test data shows 32MB is the absolute maximum block size you can handle on a modern desktop PC today [2]. And by this I mean you could validate no more than one block per 10 minutes, hence realistically you actually couldn't run a full node on a desktop at 32MB. You'd need a clustered full node just to keep up, which is unprecedented in Bitcoin.

To make matters worse, 32MB blocks gets Bitcoin to 300 tps which is less than 1% of VISA's current capacity.

[1]: http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessaril...

[2]: https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bit...

First, it would behoove you to run a full node on your desktop PC.

What you will surely find is that maxing out your CPU at 100% for hours on end isn't very fun and isn't necessarily conducive to getting other work done at the same time. This is again to say nothing of the bandwidth requirements, streaming videos or playing games for example may become out of the question depending on the quality of your network connection.

This is to say, at 1MB blocks, full nodes on the desktop are already becoming problematic for some users. The warning signs are as clear as day. What's more, to even get the performance of full nodes on desktop to this level has been a monumental feat and one largely spearheaded by the so called "small blockists" - th efforts of Dr. Adam Back, Gregory Maxwell and Dr. Pieter Wuille have been absolutely essential to making Bitcoin full nodes at least runnable on consumer hardware. For example, Greg Maxwell claims testing an original version 0.1 full node would take upwards of _20 weeks_ to sync fully.

Second, Gavin Andresen originally proposed 20MB blocks starting January 2016, and doubling every two years [1]:

> CPU and storage are cheap these days; one moderately fast CPU can easily keep up with 20 megabytes worth of transactions every ten minutes. > > Twenty megabytes downloaded plus twenty megabytes uploaded every ten minutes is about 170 gigabytes bandwidth usage per month – well within the 4 terabytes/month limit of even the least expensive ChunkHost plan. > > Disk space shouldn’t be an issue very soon– now that blockchain pruning has been implemented, you don’t have to dedicate 30+ gigabytes to store the entire blockchain. > > So it looks to me like the actual out-of-pocket cost of running a full node in a datacenter won’t change with a 20 megabyte maximum block size; it will be on the order of $5 or $10 per month. > > I chose 20MB as a reasonable block size to target because 170 gigabytes per month comfortably fits into the typical 250-300 gigabytes per month data cap– so you can run a full node from home on a “pretty good” broadband plan.

That we now see Gavin entertaining a much lesser fork - to 2MB instead of his previously claimed "safe" 20MB - speaks volumes about the severity of this issue.

Now, the Bitcoin core team has proposed a similar increase to 1.6MB effective through SegWit. Hence, the divisiveness of this issue isn't just about the numbers, but it is regretably devolved into a political power struggle with one side apparently wanting to demote the other side. "Big blockists" have long seen no harm in putting full nodes datacenters, backing their logic up with such gems as "Satoshi said this was fine 8 years ago therefore it's fine now". Meanwhile the "small blockists" - who are comprised of the very people who optimized Bitcoin full nodes to the point where we can now have this very debate - believe you need desktop PC users of full nodes to have a truly P2P network.

[1]: http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessaril...

> Hasn't signature verification speed been improved significantly since 2014

Pieter Wuille's work in libsecp256k1 promises to improve verification speeds on 64-bit CPUs by as much as 700%, and it's set to be deployed on the network as early as February.

This will hopefully be enough of a boost to reasonably process 2MB blocks on a desktop PC. This desktop processing goes very underappreciated by most onlookers. Imagine if you couldn't run a BitTorrent client on a home PC? To put it mildly, I would have an issue calling BitTorrent "peer-to-peer" in that case. For example, it would be absurd to out-and-out need a remote compute cluster to seed or leech torrents.

> And what year would 32MB blocks be needed in and what processors would be available in that year?

The "big blockist" proponents actually contended Bitcoin dies without 20MB blocks starting this month, January 2016, and doubling every two years. Going by their original propositions, we would have >32MB block capacity by around this time in 2018. How much do you think desktop PC performance will have improved by then? And this is to say nothing of the bandwidth costs [1].

[1]: http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/bandwidth-usage