Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Yes, but on Reddit many users who are not (yet) familiar with BU seem to believe that his 'point of view' is indeed 'skeptical' (sic!) but not septical.

Yep. Sadly, but yes.

 

[freetrader]

"Altcoin" discussions now accepted on /r/Bitcoin, as long as you're Greg Maxwell:
The self-contradictory nature of Core blossoming in front of our eyes.

 

[albin]

So what the heck ever happened to Liquid?

It's been over a year now since it was officially announced.

 

[Inca]

I read somewhere that Blockstream has 39 employees. WTF?

 

[Dusty]

New So what the heck ever happened to Liquid?

That's a good question. What I know is that it's not yet live for customers.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

I read somewhere that Blockstream has 39 employees. WTF?

https://blockstream.com/team/

39..

 

[Norway]

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Greg agrees, that core is reducing miner income by crippling the blocksize:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5fb6lk/dr_gregory_maxwell_more_onchain_transactions_more/

 

[lunar]

if you haven't listened to these two yet, they are like breath of fresh air.

Thank you @Rogerver, you restore my faith in humanity and common sense.



I was beginning to get frustrated with LTB, they seemed to have drunk the coolaid, they've started to correct that wrong. Well done.

 

[Norway]

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Seems like BU is growing exponentially.

But you should really request, that people sign their membership application as a first test.
This will end very confusing if you don't have definite public keys for each member.

Sorry, if you already do that and I overlooked that.

 

[adamstgbit]

if you haven't listened to these two yet, they are like breath of fresh air.

Thank you @Rogerver, you restore my faith in humanity and common sense.



I was beginning to get frustrated with LTB, they seemed to have drunk the coolaid, they've started to correct that wrong. Well done.

that was gr8! ( just listen to 315 )
Roger Ver, has always had the right idea.
side note... Is it just me or are poeple (mostly small blockers) now referring to him as "Ver" since he became more vocal about all this. just say'n
anyway, once again Ver is the voice of reason.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Roger Ver says an interesting thing near the end of LTB episode #316: "mining pool operators get to keep the tx fees for themselves themselves so they have been quiet about raising the limit because they pocket the extra fees without passing them on to their hashers, but those that have their own hashing power have been vocal about raising the limit because they don't get to pull that trick." (Paraphased)

Now of course bigger blocks *ultimately* lead to higher total fee revenue (by the low-margin-high-volume model most major retailers use), but at the moment the blocksize cap does make for more total miners' fees because users are dependent - just McDonald's would temporarily make more money if the raised their prices, especially if there were no other fast food joints (though there soon would be).

This suggests a strategy: get the word out to hashers to demand those mining pools pass on the fee revenue to them (or boycott pools that don't). Especially in Chinese.

Either that or go directly to the mining pool operators and make the economic case above, that they are eating their seed corn and would make far more money in fees if they allowed bigger blocks. (Fee market exists without a blocksize cap!)

 

[adamstgbit]

another though, i found it slightly-disturbing ( but not unexpected) how the hosts of LTB reacted to all of Ver's answers.
You can tell they have been talking to a lot of "second layer poeple" ,and or, they haven't heard much from the "Big Blocks poeple" side.
I think they learnt somthing valuable from Ver. pointing out what seems like the obvious to us.

 

[adamstgbit]

...
Now of course bigger blocks *ultimately* lead to higher total fee revenue (by the low-margin-high-volume model most major retailers use)...

This bring me to another aspect of block size which is "self limiting"
As we all know, minners can't make 8Gb blocks today even if they wanted to, because orphen risk ( this determines a MAX_SAFE_BLOCK_SIZE). but there's another incentive, which is more subtle but very real. the idea of finding the "optimal fee price" to maximize profit.

how do you price your good/service?
cheap as can be and hope for lots and lots of sales OR hope to sell a few for a very expensive price.
this is a tricky question....

generally the rule of thumb is to price your good/service at a price point were 10-20% would find it to expensive. at that point you're not selling your service for less than you could be And ( more importantly ) you're not losing too many potential users/sells.

miners can use the block size limit to have some control over fees.
1MB blocks were at one point, very positive for them, they raked in slightly more fee then they would have simply because there was SOME fee pressure building. of course at some point when fee pressure is to high, they are losing out, they could deal more vol at a lower fee per TX per KB, and rake in more fees in total. ( this determines " MAX_OPTIAMAL_BLOCK_SIZE___FOR_MAX_FEE_REVUNE ")

Conclusion,
so what i'm saying is, its in the minners best interest to keep block size such that there is some fee pressure. if we jumped to 1.5MB today, i believe there would still be some fee pressure, Cost per TX will go lower for users but miners would get more fees in total. if we jumped to 20MB today, i think fee pressure would be non existent, and everyone could get in a block with 0.0000001BTC fee....
block size is economically and technologically self limiting.

now i dont know how much fee pressure is to much or not enough, but i know for damn sure that if you leave it to the free market you'll get a MUCH better number then if you have a few devs take a guess.

this is why i love BU, it gives miners a very powerful way to collectively decide on blocksize. EVERY( or most? wtv) miner has to agree on the MAX size, so only a few minners need to see the value in keeping blocks "fit just right" to create yet another limiting factor on MAX_BLOCK_SIZE

 

[lunar]

This suggests a strategy: get the word out to hashers to demand those mining pools pass on the fee revenue to them

Just spread the word Bitcoin.com 3%-6% better than other top pools. Greed will do the rest.

 

[Norway]

Sign up for free for the online OnChain Scaling Conference now!

The conference starts tomorrow with:
Roger Ver: Economic Factors leading to Bitcoin’s Success
Tom Zander: Bitcoin Classic and Flexible Transactions
Amaury Sechet: A Journey to the Moon, Bitcoin as a World Currency
Tom Harding: Scalable Payment Verification Network
Andrew Clifford: Emergent Consensus

Sign up for free now at:
http://www.onchainscaling.com/

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

block size is economically and technologically self limiting.

This is a very interesting new angle, as far as I know. I wonder whether it figures in, over and above the orphan risk factor. Let's see...

If there were no hardcoded blocksize limit, or one that is very high above the usual volume, basically a miner would look at the mempool and decide how many of those tx to stuff into a block. Up to now they basically stuffed all fee-paying tx in, but that's because anything up to 1MB has very little chance of being orphaned due to its size.

But when miners are free to build as big as they want to, again fee pressure falls to zero...or does it? If there were only one mining pool, it could choose to limit its blocksize to optimize price like you mentioned. However, with there being many pools they would have to have a cartel agreement, and there would be temptation to build bigger blocks to collect those last 10-20% of paying fees, if we go with your rule of thumb. From the perspective of the miners keen on price-optimizing, it's a tragedy of the commons: some other miner can come in and sweep the fees that they worked hard to keep high.

If the miner who would mine a block were predetermined, this price-setting could work. But since that isn't the case, I think maybe this leads back to @Peter R's thesis about economic blocksize limits due to orphaning rate.

Fees will then likely go back to near-zero for a while until orphaning becomes a quickly ramping issue for miners, which is roughly around the same time that decentralization would start to be affected (right?). But if fees are near zero, transactions increase again until they fill the void, at least once demand increases enough for people to seriously want to pay the (still very small) fee on all those transactions.

Fees will only increase substantially once there is so much demand as to fill blocks so big that the network starts to feel the strain and orphan risk goes hockey-stick, thus miners will self-limit or die. Fees then represent real load on the network, not Gmax's finger on the scale. Miners make the amount of money Satoshi planned for: the free market rate based on marginal cost of tx inclusion.

In other words, it's a completely self-solving "problem," but the Core devs can't see it because this kind of multivariable economic reasoning is several levels too complicated for them, and also is by cultural convention never discussed and sort of looked down upon. They say, "Github or GTFO!" They say, "Political [sic] discussion is off-topic on the mailing list." They say, "The experts [of computer programming, not economics] have determined that on-chain scaling is not scaling."

The nerds fail to understand that which they have [co-opted].

Devs gonna dev.

You are missed, @cypherdoc!

 

[albin]

I think Flexcap is going to be the biggest danger here, because they're basically going to try to sell it to us the permanent solution that allows the market to drive blocksize with no more human intervention, in order to obscure the fact that they will just be indirectly setting prices at the margin.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Another danger, which Core is probably playing to some good effect for their support: