In just over a week, a lot of people have come together to discuss how we can make a "simple" change so that bitcoin blocks aren't full anymore.
I think what we should be bothered with is not whether blocks are full, but whether normal txs are served.
As capacity grows, fee requirements drop (no need to use high fees / you try to get your tx in with near zero cost due to overabundance of space).
So as fee requirements drop, one can broadcast millions of txs for peanuts (in terms of tx fees) in order to increase bloat. And he will be able to do that by paying the least amount possible.
The more space you give, the lower the fees will go and the cheaper it will be for the bloat-attacker to perform the attack.
I think the concept of non-full blocks with higher block capacities can work only if it is coupled with a minimum-fee policy that prevents spamming/bloating attacks. Otherwise we are always at the mercy of attackers on whether the blockchain will be bloated or the blocks will be full.
Monero / XMR had an adaptive block size that grows with demand, but when it came under a bloat attack they realized the blockchain would be killed pretty fast. They had to raise the fees immediately to prevent that scenario from happening.
overabundance of space???
currently the majority of blocks are totally full. We are not talking about making giant blocksizes, just about fixing having always full blocks. Clearly keeping things at 1MB is no solution at all
if it is needed to increase mininum fees to reach equilibrium then so be it
Even at 10mb they could be full without increasing fees to prevent abuse. Check this out: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
In the last 24 hours,
325 txs were 0-fee.
42500 txs were damn-near-zero at 1-9 satoshi/byte
Naturally "blocks are full"... because tens of thousands of txs are included that cost less than 0.01 USD.
It's only natural that if abuse costs near zero, then abuse potential tends to infinity.
Monero found it out the hard way.
It does seem that a lot of tx are being sent using lowest priority with very low fees, which i guess for non-urgent things might be ok. What confuses me is that tx with .0001 txfee (about 40 sats per byte) are often delayed, why are lower fee tx taking priority?
So it seems 20% of space can be freed up with better selection of the tx, but things are clearly too close to full. the chart shows the vast majority of tx are not getting a free ride and with just another 30% of organic growth of these paying tx, there wouldnt be room
How long until things grow 30%?
My guess is old node software heuristics (?) that prioritize differently.
As for the 30%, I think early-to-mid 2017 probably. But by then it'll be 1.65mb effective due to segwit. Even if half the mining nodes use it, the bump will keep it ok. Hopefully segwit doesn't have some major clusterf*** in it. I have a bad feeling about it.
(end of nested replies, lol)
segwit is so complicated, it is essentially an entirely new blockchain in parallel. what could possibly go wrong? old nodes that dont update become SPV level security, but there wont be any hacks against it, right?
using segwit to get a capacity increase is not anything that makes sense. if you need more space, change the blocksize limit. I know it has to be a hardfork and you cant force the upgrade on people.
maybe that is a good thing? people actually choosing
now segwit has some very useful things, but it is also quite the dangerous thing where script opcode's meaning can change. and who controls all that? where is the consensus on it?