Discussion of Infinity patches for Core 0.12.1, 0.13.2, 0.14.0

[freetrader]

This looks very interesting:

https://github.com/whitslack/bitcoin-infinity

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/60ycww/infinity_patch_for_bitcoin_core_v0121_v0132_v0140/

Added a Slack channel (#infinity) on BTCfork slack.

 

[torusJKL]

I think it is a good thing for the tech savvy who do not want to switch to BU or Classic yet.

But I hope it does not give Core too much power to continue dictating bitcoin rules. BU, Classic and others should have an equal voice in how to continue with bitcoin.

 

[JAFO]

I think it causes splintering in cores user-base. Giving core people the option of also supporting a blocksize increase is a good way of divide and conquer of core.

Also I see this (which is similar but has a BU style GUI): https://github.com/AllanDoensen/UnifiedBitcoin

 

[7queue]

I got as far as applying the patch to 0.14.0 and building but haven't run any tests (didn't see that is changed line 18 in policy.h if that even matters)

 

[freetrader]

@7queue : I only had a brief look at the patches when they came out, but I noticed no modification to tests.

However, a patch that supports bigger blocks would need to be tested at higher block sizes.
So I'm not sure the existing tests would automatically cover any of those cases - in fact I doubt it.

One would have to be tech savvy to test it, really.

I would recommend someone take those patches, add support for a big block test network like BU's NOL (no-limits) network, and then jump on that network and try remain on the chain. That might be a useful smoke test of Infinity.

I did notice no Infinity nodes have appeared on mainnet yet. Maybe the tech savvy are holding off, or running with Satoshi user agents. (https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=Infinity)

 

[7queue]

I guess I should have said benchmark with a local sandbox setup and not the provided sanity checks. Is there any info on BU's NOL network somewhere here? It's just finding time to get to these things that's the problem I have.


Edit: this type of information is what I've been looking for; http://fc16.ifca.ai/bitcoin/papers/CDE+16.pdf

 

[SanchoPanza]

Yeah, I agree with @7queue - a sandbox setup would be good too.

The paper you link is one of my favorites, but has its limitations due to being a little out of date with tech advancement, both generally and in Bitcoin. Sirer, one of the co-authors, wrote this a few days ago:

I'm one of the co-authors of that study. I'd be the first to agree with your conclusion and argue that the 4MB size suggested in that paper should not be used without compensation for two important changes to the network.

Our recent measurements of the Bitcoin P2P network show that network speeds have improved tremendously. From February 2016 to February 2017, the average provisioned bandwidth of a reachable Bitcoin node went up by approximately 70%. And that's just in the last year.

Further, the emergence of high-speed block relay networks, like Falcon (http://www.falcon-net.org) and FIBRE, as well as block compression, e.g. BIP152 and xthin, change the picture dramatically.

So, the 4MB limit mentioned in our paper should not be used as a protocol limit today.

Source: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-March/013848.html

I searched for NOL, and found this post. Maybe that can help you @7queue ?