<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub13rv3raner7hu6npy7vxxvdswdapae65pnw8jjs4c80wtp2nmg4xq9cy5l4</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub13rv3raner7hu6npy7vxxvdswdapae65pnw8jjs4c80wtp2nmg4xq9cy5l4</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2015-08-06&#xA;📝 Original message:How many nodes are necessary to ensure sufficient network reliability? Ten,&#xA;a hundred, a thousand? At what point do we hit the point of diminishing&#xA;returns, where adding extra nodes starts to have negligible impact on the&#xA;overall reliability of the system?&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev &lt;&#xA;bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&gt; wrote:&#xA;&#xA;&gt; On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Gavin Andresen &lt;gavinandresen at gmail.com&gt;&#xA;&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Pieter Wuille &lt;pieter.wuille at gmail.com&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; So if we would have 8 MB blocks, and there is a sudden influx of users&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; (or settlement systems, who serve much more users) who want to pay high&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; fees (let&#39;s say 20 transactions per second) making the block chain&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; inaccessible for low fee transactions, and unreliable for medium fee&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; transactions (for any value of low, medium, and high), would you be ok with&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; that?&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; Yes, that&#39;s fine. If the network cannot handle the transaction volume&#xA;&gt;&gt; that people want to pay for, then the marginal transactions are priced out.&#xA;&gt;&gt; That is true today (otherwise ChangeTip would be operating on-blockchain),&#xA;&gt;&gt; and will be true forever.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; The network can &#34;handle&#34; any size. I believe that if a majority of miners&#xA;&gt; forms SPV mining agreements, then they are no longer affected by the block&#xA;&gt; size, and benefit from making their blocks slow to validate for others (as&#xA;&gt; long as the fee is negligable compared to the subsidy). I&#39;ll try to find&#xA;&gt; the time to implement that in my simulator. Some hardware for full nodes&#xA;&gt; will always be able to validate and index the chain, so nobody needs to run&#xA;&gt; a pesky full node anymore and they can just use a web API to validate&#xA;&gt; payments.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Being able the &#34;handle&#34; a particular rate is not a boolean question. It&#39;s&#xA;&gt; a question of how much security, centralization, and risk for systemic&#xA;&gt; error we&#39;re willing to tolerate. These are not things you can just observe,&#xA;&gt; so let&#39;s keep talking about the risks, and find a solution that we agree on.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; If so, why is 8 MB good but 1 MB not? To me, they&#39;re a small constant&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; factor that does not fundamentally improve the scale of the system.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; &#34;better is better&#34; -- I applaud efforts to fundamentally improve the&#xA;&gt;&gt; scalability of the system, but I am an old, cranky, pragmatic engineer who&#xA;&gt;&gt; has seen that successful companies tackle problems that arise and are&#xA;&gt;&gt; willing to deploy not-so-perfect solutions if they help whatever short-term&#xA;&gt;&gt; problem they&#39;re facing.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; I don&#39;t believe there is a short-term problem. If there is one now, there&#xA;&gt; will be one too at 8 MB blocks (or whatever actual size blocks are&#xA;&gt; produced).&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; I dislike the outlook of &#34;being forever locked at the same scale&#34; while&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; technology evolves, so my proposal tries to address that part. It&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; intentionally does not try to improve a small factor, because I don&#39;t think&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; it is valuable.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; I think consensus is against you on that point.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Maybe. But I believe that it is essential to not take unnecessary risks,&#xA;&gt; and find a non-controversial solution.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; --&#xA;&gt; Pieter&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; _______________________________________________&#xA;&gt; bitcoin-dev mailing list&#xA;&gt; bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&#xA;&gt; https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150806/067e62ee/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>