We are out of time

[Matthew Light]

We are going to start seeing terrible performance on the Bitcoin network very shortly. It's January 4th and we are running strings of 1MB blocks now periodically during different times of the day.

Is anyone with a vested interest in the future of Bitcoin going to go around to the key important players and get a larger block solution of some kind up and running on their hardware?

 

[theZerg]

Of course if any of these players are considering BU I would be happy to answer any questions and help them deploy.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Just note that there may be an unexpectedly large range for fees to climb before most people even notice (it may be that only the heaviest transacters will notice, and probably just curtail/consolidate their usage).

Despite the rightness of all the big blocksize cap arguments, this could still draw out for another year. Let's not set ourselves up for a smackdown on that point by claiming slightly higher fees ("slightly" from an average user pain perspective may be a lot from a percentage perspective, since they're so low now) are going to cause users to leave in droves and transactions to be stuck left and right. It may, but I see the main risk as being if we have a sudden adoption spike, or a price rally.

Beware the Peter Schiff syndrome of calling the disaster way too early because of not seeing all the little adjustments people can make to hold down the fort.

 

[Matthew Light]

The problem is, we need Bitcoin to work this year as we are heading into another recession / economic meltdown. That's when we could easily see another 10x user / price spike.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Yep, I'm expecting it. Though I'm also expecting the Core/Blockstream party to get crashed when that happens unless they have some serious kung fu prepared for us (and tested, working, ready to go).

 

[cypherdoc]

Just note that there may be an unexpectedly large range for fees to climb before most people even notice (it may be that only the heaviest transacters will notice, and probably just curtail/consolidate their usage).

Despite the rightness of all the big blocksize cap arguments, this could still draw out for another year. Let's not set ourselves up for a smackdown on that point by claiming slightly higher fees ("slightly" from an average user pain perspective may be a lot from a percentage perspective, since they're so low now) are going to cause users to leave in droves and transactions to be stuck left and right. It may, but I see the main risk as being if we have a sudden adoption spike, or a price rally.

Beware the Peter Schiff syndrome of calling the disaster way too early because of not seeing all the little adjustments people can make to hold down the fort.

don't forget that no matter how high fees get, 1.1MB worth of real tx's won't fit into 1MB of block size.

 

[Erdogan]

Yep, I'm expecting it. Though I'm also expecting the Core/Blockstream party to get crashed when that happens unless they have some serious kung fu prepared for us (and tested, working, ready to go).

.. And @Matthew Light

To respond quickly to a sudden rush to bitcoin, the miners should prepare by having software that can handle big blocks, and prepare to be able to build on the first bigblock. (When they think that building on the big block means less risk of orphaning his block, than continue mining based on the previous smallblock). Deciding when to actually build a large block, can be left for later, after calculating the risk/reward. We only need one adventurous entrepreneur to make the first one.

I don't worry much about bitcoins future, but a sudden rise in demand which is not timely met, could be annoying, lot's of negative waves and desperate short-sighted attempts on workarounds in the form of services where the users have to trust companies with their coins.

On the other hand, things could be learned from handling a demand shock, growing the antifragility of the whole.

Back to the sofa.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

don't forget that no matter how high fees get, 1.1MB worth of real tx's won't fit into 1MB of block size.

While that's definitely true, the trouble is if we actually only have 0.1MB of "real" tx now. Then a 10x adoption surge might be fine-ish. Very hard to really know, as people aren't really economizing now.

Still I agree we don't want to be in the position of guessing with the next adoption surge on the line. Just want to keep the small block side from gloating that "the fee market is no problem, big blockers were full of it" for many months to come. There would be a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome.

 

[cypherdoc]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

it's probably reasonable to assume we have around 600kB worth of real tx's as this seems to be the avg during quiet periods of non-stress attacks and price ramps:

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

personally, i think we've had full blocks for a while now. it's only 600kB b/c new and existing adopters have been turned off and turned away by unconf tx's, delays, and high fees. i think we'd be well beyond 1MB blocks routinely if not for the blocksize debate/debacle/bad press.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@cypherdoc

That's true too, but they can still gloat as long as there are no complaints because people will miss the unseen (all those businesses and transactions that didn't happen and therefore aren't around to complain, because of the Fidelity Effect). I'm thinking of PR here.

 

[CryptoStar19]

Seems like bitcoin is well today and we are long past this debate. The same is going to come and pass when it comes to the FUD of the day which happens to be China's crackdown on mining and the environmental FUD with bitcoin mining.