rich1.0npub1vtwuk4rjyj6zrq3tv2z9lvdm6a7g8zujf0gz9q2vljlztdaqw36sjjsjpghttps://nostr.ae/npub1vtwuk4rjyj6zrq3tv2z9lvdm6a7g8zujf0gz9q2vljlztdaqw36sjjsjpgnjumphttps://nostr.ae📅 Original date posted:2015-05-06 📝 Original message:On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 5:12 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list at bluematt.me> wrote: > the maximum block size. However, there hasnt been any discussion on this > mailing list in several years as far as I can tell. Well, there has been significant public discussion in #bitcoin-wizards on irc.freenode.net which is available in public logs, specifically about why increasing the max block size is kicking the can down the road while possibly compromising blockchain security. There were many excellent objections that were raised that, sadly, I see are not referenced at all in the recent media blitz. Frankly I can't help but feel that if contributions, like those from #bitcoin-wizards, have been ignored in lieu of technical analysis, and the absence of discussion on this mailing list, that I feel perhaps there are other subtle and extremely important technical details that are completely absent from this--and other-- proposals. I have some rather general thoughts to offer. Secured decentralization is the most important and most interesting property of bitcoin. Everything else is rather trivial and could be achieved millions of times more efficiently with conventional technology. Our technical work should be informed by the technical nature of the system we have constructed. I suspect that as bitcoin continues to grow in all dimensions and metrics, that we will see an unending wave of those who are excited by the idea of Something Different in the face of archaic, crumbling software and procedures in the rest of the financial world. Money has found its way into every aspect of human life. There's no doubt in my mind that bitcoin will always see the most extreme campaigns and the most extreme misunderstandings. Like moths to a flame or water in the desert, almost everyone is excited by ANY status quo change whatsoever. This is something that we have to be vigilante about, because their excitement is motivation to do excellent work, not simply any work. For some who are excited about general status quo changes that bitcoin represents, they may not mind if bitcoin decentralization disappears and is replaced with just a handful of centralized nodes. Whereas for development purposes we must hold ourselves to extremely high standards before proposing changes, especially to the public, that have the potential to be unsafe and economically unsafe. We have examples from NASA about how to engineer extremely fault tolerant systems, and we have examples from Linux about how to have high standards in open-source projects. Safety is absolutely critical, even in the face of seemingly irrational excuberance of others who want to scale to trillions of daily coffee transactions individually stored forever in the blockchain. When designing bitcoin or even some other system, an important design target is what the system should be capable of. How many transactions should the system perform? What is the correct number of transactions for a healthy, modern civilization to perform every day? And how fast should that (not) grow? Should we allow for 2 billion trillion coffee transactions every day, or what about 100 trillion transactions per second? I suspect that these sorts of questions are entirely unanswerable and boring. So in the absence of technical targets to reach during the design phase, I suspect that Jeff Garzik was right when he pointed out a few months ago that bitcoin is good at settlement and clearing. There are many potential technical solutions for aggregating millions (trillions?) of transactions into tiny bundles. As a small proof-of-concept, imagine two parties sending transactions back and forth 100 million times. Instead of recording every transaction, you could record the start state and the end state, and end up with two transactions or less. That's a 100 million fold, without modifying max block size and without potentially compromising secured decentralization. The MIT group should listen up and get to work figuring out how to measure decentralization and its security :-). Maybe we should be collectively pestering Andrew Miller to do this, too. No pressure, dude. Getting this measurement right would be really beneficial because we would have a more academic and technical understanding to work with. I would also characterize this as high priority next to the "formally verified correctness proofs for Script and libbitcoinconsensus". Also, I think that getting this out in the open on this mailing list is an excellent step forward. - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507