> Decentralization refers to being able to use money electronically without any third party's permission.
Decentralization refers to many things, it depends on the discussion. I explained the scope of my statements in the parent.
> Non mining nodes...All they can do is relay blocks that the miner decide.
You are wrong here, they also do validation which is why its important for wallet owners and services to run their own nodes even if they dont mine.
>Do you ever stop to think about why other cryptocurrencies don't need a second layer?
Yes, it is because they are highly centralized chains that might as well run on sql and/or ghost chains with no users.
>Do you think the optimal throughput is a few kilobytes per second worth of transactions for the whole world?
Yes, offchain transaction batching is a good scaling strategy. Satoshi recommended it as a solution.
>Have you ever done the math on this?
Yes, bitcoin full nodes are much cheaper to host on a vps than ethereum full nodes for that reason. Larger blocks = more bandwidth and hd space = more time to download and fully validate. I assure you, running one costs a lot more than 10$/month. Perhaps you should check the math on your claim.
>Developer centralization is another important point. BTC arguably fails at this when a small group, combined with extensive propaganda campaigns, artificially constrains Bitcoin's throughput. There are no valid arguments against raising the blocksize to 2MB for example.
If a handful of people could effectively destroy a “currency” at any point... it’s not decentralized in any sense of the word that is important for trustworthyness or longevity.
A government could crash its own money, but there is a strong incentive to not do that. Bitcoin or Eth has nothing tied to it, it’s entitely at the whim of some programmers who as I understand it, aren’t economics experts.
That’s the point I made above. You want to say the blockchain and hashing is decentralized, great. But when people use that word, they’re talking about (imo) how it’s “safe” to put money into because “no one owns the crypto coin” and if anyone still believes that latter part, well, they probably aren’t paying attention.
>No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way.
elaborate?
>This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this?
It makes zero sense because I was trying to infer your argument. Let's try again then: what does having multiple chains have to do with scalability?
>That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.
Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.
>Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.
Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.
>These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it.
> If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else.
I don't get it which numbers are made up? The $90/year figure came from a sibling comment that was discussing the hypothetical storage requirement for bitcoin if it processed half of visa's transaction volume. That was surprisingly close to the annual electricity cost for the best selling refrigerator on bestbuy.com[1], so that's what I assumed you were talking about when it comes to costs. If you don't agree with these numbers, feel free to present your calculations.
> For running a full node, a VPS costing $12 - $15 USD
So your solution to centralization pressures is to use a centralized service for decentralization?
> You are talking about bandwidth and the numbers are simple to calculate and come out to trivial amounts.
I provided more evidence on the bandwidth requirements than your incomplete understanding of how bitcoin works multiplied by your flawed opinion.
> 2. Bitcoin is literally working right now with 0 hiccups except for full blocks and high fees.
No-one is forcing you to use it. There are a multitude of other options if you feel that bitcoin isn't meeting your use-case.
> You say hand waving while not backing up a single thing you've said
I provided evidence that backed up my opinion. You should try it.
> This is about how ridiculous the 1MB limitation is, you can try to divert from that, but lets see you confront it.
Nah. You can use another service if you feel that the 10's of thousands of nodes somehow don't have a better understanding of the constraints of running a node than you. No-one is holding a gun to your head. Ever heard of Bitcoin Cash? Perhaps that might better suit your needs.
>If you're a sockpuppet then nobody is buying it sorry, your coin is dead.
If you are concerned about sock-puppet shills, don't be: I have never owned BCH, BTC or any other bitcoin variant and I will attest to the parent comment's arguments. As a bitcoin outsider, it's pretty clear to me that the path BTC took has irreversibly doomed cryptocurrency. If you are a bitcoiner, your coin is dead also.
Bitcoin is the bigger scam. The problem with bitcoiners not taking the BCH/XT fork isn't that the block sizes aren't large enough. It's that the remaining bitcoin community is dedicated to never make a hard fork again. This is not sustainable in the long-run.
Good cryptocurrencies (like cryptonote, zerocoin, etc.) regularly agree on reasonable compromises to improve the security and efficiency of the network (including changes in block size, etc.). With BTC, reasonable discussion has gone out of the window. It completely defies satoshi's original intention. Your community is no longer a good steward of the network. You are just bagholders trying to protect your investements.
> I said it depends on how many people are connected and that it is such a trivial amount that it barely matters.
And I provided evidence that contradicts that unfounded belief.
> How is -one option- to running a full node by paying for a cheap VPS centralization in any respect?
If you have to explain that, you don't even have a concept of what decentralization means.
> why don't you explain how there is so much torrent traffic zipping
Because people don't care if their torrent takes a few hours to download, where in a multi-agent system with rigorous consensus rules, it's important that nodes are aligned as quickly as possible, because bitcoin block-propagation is an adversarial system that leads to orphaning, and potential loss of funds, when nodes aren't aligned. Yet again, to have to explain this O.o
You really don't understand this bitcoin thing at all. Like at all.
> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it?
Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable. It just means that power and responsibility is distriubted to many.
> I'm a total dilettante in crypto but if something is decentralized you can't make large-scale changes to it at the drop of a hat.
Exactly, you're correct. It's not easy for these changes to actually take effect. It takes a majority of miners to vote for and adopt any change/fork. The miners are the ones who are running the decentralized network. Even miners who vote for the change can choose to not upgrade their software to the new version.
> Imagine how much coordination effort it takes to change TCP/IP or HTTP
This is why I'm amazed at the skill of the Bitcoin & Ethereum team's ability to continue upgrading a platform that has no central control.
> I don't see at all, how you could claim there's something fundamental to the technology that will lead to more consumer power... Does Bitcoin decentralize control? Or does it hand that control to the tiny handful of Bitcoin miners and exchanges that handle practically all of the work?
This is probably one of the biggest misunderstandings in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin does decentralize control, and the miners and exchanges do not have power over Bitcoin. If you control your own keys and run your own full node, then you as the full node operator get to decide what rules you operate by, and therefore what network you participate in.
Efforts by miners to change Bitcoin's protocol rules can be outright ignored (and have been successfully in the past - see the BTC/BCH split), and exchanges can only exert power over entities that are directly dependent on the exchanges.
Blockchains are special because they give each individual user direct control over the exact ruleset of the protocols that they use. To the best of my knowledge, no other type of network is able to give this power to users.
> Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.
There is a lot of head room. Anyone can see this. Ten years of transactions has taken up $6 of hard drive space TOTAL while the average fee PER TRANSACTION is almost $9 right now.
> Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.
That's ridiculous. Decentralization is important and none of this has much effect on decentralization at all. You haven't actually explained why there would be any problem with decentralization because you can't. There is no barrier to entry for anyone who wants to sync with any chain so they can mine it or accept it.
> Specifically "Assume good faith".
Say something reasonable that isn't contradicted by grade school math. You haven't backed up anything you have said with anything that makes sense.
> I don't get it which numbers are made up?
Correct, you don't get it. Your idea that someone has to spend $450 on what would be 24TB is nonsense.
Why don't you explain to me what exactly you think will happen if throughput is more than a few transactions per second? Ethereum already exceeds bitcoin's volume. Bitcoin Cash tested huge blocks years ago, what exactly do you think will happen and why? Maybe you just don't want people to realize that there is no systemic reason for bitcoin being capped, because if they do it will become a relic.
> But to argue that it is anywhere close to 'centralized' today is disingenuous at best.
Ethereum devs have absolute power on ethereum. Things like EIP 1559, or Ethereum 2 illustrate this point really clearly: miners have zero power, neither do full nodes.
No matter what the algorithms (which can be patched anytime anyways) say, power is a social thing and in the case of Ethereum, the devs have literally complete power over it.
The storage is decentralized, the computation is decentralized, but power clearly isn't (and with PoS, it will become more centralized even on an algorithm point of view).
> I'm not too sure my understanding is accurate, feel free to correct me.
OK! :P
In a layer 2 or lightning network, there may be hubs operated by e.g. Coinbase that handle millions of users, but the hub will need an open payment channel with each of those users in order to minimize the required trust. That means that the scaling bottleneck described in the top post is still an issue.
It's useful to draw a distinction between decentralization of network topology and decentralization of power (the ability to decide who has how much money). If Coinbase runs a lightning network hub with millions of users, the network topology is centralized, but if the system has been designed correctly, Coinbase
cannot steal any of the lightning network funds (power is decentralized). They could require KYC and would be able to temporarily block a user's transactions. But if people aren't happy with how a hub is behaving, they can just stop using it, and switch over to a different one.
It's possible to hand complete custody of your coins over to a third party, and let them manage transactions internally. This scales really well, but then it's not really a lightning network anymore (power is centralized; they or people who hack them can run off with everyone's money).
Ethereum (not Bitcoin) has plans to scale their base chain via improvements from proof of stake, and eventually via sharding the base chain. Block size increases factor in as well. These improvements can each multiply with the large factor provided by lightning-network-like things (Ethereum's equivalent is http://raiden.network/). Much of this is still undergoing active research, so it's not all a given. I haven't estimated the numbers, but this all eventually could take us quite a bit beyond 20m users.
> Ethereum is already better-equipped to scale and the protocol is actively evolving
That is laughably false. Ethereum node decentralization is cratering, because it is becoming impossible to even synchronize a node anymore. I'd suggest you're not as technically inclined as you assert if you don't recognize this.
> In terms of transaction throughput, Bitcoin has a stupid hard limit of 1mb per 10mins of data
Bitcoin has a hard-limit in order to protect the decentralization of its nodes, and the consensus rules of the protocol. It's OK, I suppose, if you don't mind forking a supposedly immutable blockchain every time a few big investors lose money, but bitcoin is a slightly better value proposition than that.
> There isn't a scalability issue from a technical perspective. Block size limits were originally just to protect against spam.
> Ethereum and bitcoin cash already have more transaction throughput than bitcoin.
Sure, but consider the size of the blockchain of Ethereum. Right now, it is around 6.5 terabytes. It is a 'scalability problem' if you take the premise that everyone should be able to verify the blockchain with a normal residential computer. If you don't think that that is important, then there is indeed no issue.
> That is a mining method, transaction throughput is a matter of blocksize * block generation time.
I guess you are right. The mining method is orthogonal to the total transaction that can be validated.
> Like what?
I used the Lightning Network as an example. You can use for instant payments, but it can be hindered by liquidity shortages on the network and less clearance certainty. If you are okay with that, you can then proceed to use this network. If not, then another option may come up that satisfies your risk assessment.
> With any decentralized cryptocurrency you sign your transaction and wait for it to be included in a block. It is simple and there is no risk.
Sure, and that is indeed how bitcoin works. I think you are criticizing the fact that bitcoin does it very slowly, but then consider again that doing it quicker would increase the total blockchain size and possibly jeopardize the decentralization.
> What framework and what features are you talking about?
The idea that Bitcoin (as a network) will be composed of building blocks on top of the blockchain.
>Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff.
That wasn’t the tradeoff. The tradeoff was that increasing transaction throughput would also increase the risk to loss of decentralization and thus effectively the systemic catastrophic failure of Bitcoin. Without decentralization it’s just technological trash.
The most vocal big blockers were business guys prone to the same kind of risk-blind short-term thinking that led to the Global Financial Crisis less than a decade before - improve some easily measured metric now at the expense of introducing greater medium to long term total failure risk into the system.
Part of the problem is, systemic risk is difficult to measure and quantify, whereas other metrics like ROI or TPS are easy to measure and quantify. And thus we get more of what we measure, and less of what we don’t (systemic resilience, safety factor, redundancy, etc.). Everyone has a very strong bias for optimizing measurable metrics while being blind to the unmeasurable but important, and that’s what was happening here.
Thankfully the Bitcoin engineering community understood this and resisted making this tradeoff.
>There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints,
This is a fundamental and irreconcilable philosophical difference. You think third parties can be trusted indefinitely and safely integrated into a core role in a decentralized system. That kind of mindset is why Ethereum is being run almost entirely on Consensys’s centralized Infura database. But that mindset doesn’t fly in the Bitcoin community. Core and most others that prioritize decentralization and censorship resistance will, rightly, never agree.
> The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
No, UASF proved that wasn’t true at all. The majority of people actually running Bitcoin nodes preferred Segwit and no block increase. The “loud minority” was the cartel of highly visible large businesses that wanted to increase the blocksize, not the “vast majority of Bitcoin”.
> It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
No, it was wise, responsible, foresightful, and technologically savvy leadership that understood the potential butterfly effect here, small changes compounding the systemic catastrophic failure risk over time.
Even if that systemic risk to decentralization couldn’t be easily quantified, Core and small block advocates nevertheless acknowledged it, and integrated it into their analysis of the decision, and came to a very different conclusion from others who did not and who only focused on measurable metrics and short-term considerations.
It was the latter loud minority who proved to be irresponsible and almost forced Bitcoin into making the same category of error that Wall Street made in creating the GFC.
This is a vague notion that doesn't make any sense. The purpose of the design of Bitcoin was not to give equal representation to every CPU. It is to prevent undue interference in transactions by third parties. And by that measure Bitcoin is definitely decentralized enough.
To do anything nefarious you need at least 51% of hash power and to not care that you are damaging the integrity of the blockchain, and even then you can't steal from or rewrite the blockchain - you can only prevent future transactions from going through.
> I provided more evidence on the bandwidth requirements than your incomplete understanding of how bitcoin works multiplied by your flawed opinion.
No, you didn't. You didn't confront my numbers for syncing, you for some reason think the option to pay for a cheap VPS to run a node is centralization. You also seem to that a single node is uploading to 8 people at all times, no more, no less not to mention that your assertion revolves around thinking that 48KB/s to run a full node is a lot when hundreds of millions of people can do that now with their home internet connections, not to mention buisnesses. Kids are running around streaming live video from their phones, how can you cling to such nonsense and why won't you confront it directly?
> No-one is forcing you to use it. There are a multitude of other options if you feel that bitcoin isn't meeting your use-case.
So instead of confronting these absurd statements, you say 'then don't use it'. This is about whether what you are saying makes sense and so far I haven't seen anything more than trying to avoid the simple numbers that make the answer obvious.
> I provided evidence that backed up my opinion. You should try it.
I'm not really sure what you want or how you can say that. I've broken down the numbers for you in terms of bandwidth, people that have access to that bandwidth, previously running systems, and widespread use cases of other technology that already uses more resources.
> Nah. You can use another service if you feel that the 10's of thousands of nodes somehow don't have a better understanding of the constraints of running a node than you. No-one is holding a gun to your head. Ever heard of Bitcoin Cash? Perhaps that might better suit your needs.
So anyone who can do simple math and questions bizarre statements should 'go somewhere else' ?
> the larger block size does mean it has higher chance of being centralized.
That's actually false though. It really is that indisputably simple especially at the on chain throughput levels being discussed presently. The medium of exchange use case does not compromise the store of value use case, it actually is a necessary component of it. Non mining full nodes are not an essential aspect of the security model, and were never intended to be. The core client is just bad. And the only reasonable actual excuse for the limiting of on chain scaling to the level forced by bitcoin core is because it's in the business interests of blockstream.
> Even bitcoin suffers from the same centralization - the top 4 pools have over 50% hashrate (and so effectively control the blockchain).
In my limited understanding, this is not an issue because it is in the miners' best interest to actually do their job correctly. They wouldn't have an incentive to muck around.
For the other cases like smart contracts and such maybe it's a little different. And perhaps that is why Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake instead?
Decentralization refers to many things, it depends on the discussion. I explained the scope of my statements in the parent.
> Non mining nodes...All they can do is relay blocks that the miner decide.
You are wrong here, they also do validation which is why its important for wallet owners and services to run their own nodes even if they dont mine.
>Do you ever stop to think about why other cryptocurrencies don't need a second layer?
Yes, it is because they are highly centralized chains that might as well run on sql and/or ghost chains with no users.
>Do you think the optimal throughput is a few kilobytes per second worth of transactions for the whole world?
Yes, offchain transaction batching is a good scaling strategy. Satoshi recommended it as a solution.
>Have you ever done the math on this?
Yes, bitcoin full nodes are much cheaper to host on a vps than ethereum full nodes for that reason. Larger blocks = more bandwidth and hd space = more time to download and fully validate. I assure you, running one costs a lot more than 10$/month. Perhaps you should check the math on your claim.
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