In actual news instead of dick measuring and elite trolling-

Gavin's proposal for increasing the block size is the biggest threat I see. Mostly because there are enough people who don't like the proposal that they will continue on a hard fork if it is increased. Not sure how significant that number will be, but it will be trivially easy to double-spend coins so that you end up with your own coins on the 1MB network and someone else has them on the other network. Split of value in the network is a real concern, and both parts will be less than the whole. It will be interesting to see how this proposal goes down. It's not as simple as miners agreeing to increase it, as users could reject these bigger blocks. There's no way to "measure" voting for the new block size.

Really the way to handle this is something like a side-chain and move people who want to have bigger blocks to a sidechain and move back if they see fit. But sidechains have their own can of worms.

I think it's the exchanges and payment processors that have the power in this case, if they are united. And I would think they should be, if they want to grow their business.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

In the end, it all comes down to those that hold coins, and what they prefer. And there will be some that prefer each system, which will divide the network.

There are plenty of ways to scale without increasing the block size.

The issue is implementation without compromising the existing and new ledger from bad actors. I think most people generally agree that if bitcoin is to scale, we need the changes that Gavin is proposing sooner or later.

If the chain forks, everyone who had coins will have them on both chains. The coins with value will be on the chain used by the infrastructure providers, assuming a large majority of them prefers one side over the other.

I did a quick search, but bitcointalk is down and there's just some scattered info elsewhere. What problems would increasing the blocksize create? Obv there's a reason people don't want to do it.

who owns bitnplay? http://www.bitnplay.eu

in the 'about' tab it mentioned that the tables were 'designed by poker players by poker players.'

just wondering who...

Appeal to majority.

There are solutions without worrying about bad actors, especially for low value transactions.

But there is this misconception that Bitcoin is all about being able to send pennies for free on the internet, which is missing the point.

There will be value on both sides as long as it isn't unanimous. The issue is, there is no cost to spending so that you still have coins on the smaller side, but someone accepts the coins on the other side.

Value will matter based on what people view Bitcoin as. If it's just some knockoff of a credit card processor, then perhaps they'll go to the centralized bigger version. If they view Bitcoin as a P2P decentralized version, they'll go to the smaller version. But no one runs a full node anyway, so the game may already be over.

Proposal is like once 80% of the last 1000 blocks has newest version it will start to allow 20MB. Once the first 1MB+ block is created the last 20% will have to switch or they will just lose their mining profit, users will just use the longest chain. Miners will have plenty of time to see that 80% happening... I for one will not lose sleep over this.

lmao

hy guys, i would like to change my Bitcoins to stars ore skrill. Anybody intrested ?

Wrong thread for that. Try here instead.

thx man

there are ~6900 full nodes running
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

the 1 MB limit is arbitrary and should be raised slowly. this will help compensate miners for decreasing block rewards in the future, while keeping tx fees low for the users. It will not affect anyone that wants to/needs to be a full node. Hardware will be able keep up and software improvements (pruning, checkpoints, etc...) are planned and in the works. i have no problem with Gavin's plan.

To celebrate the QE in Europe today I bought 2.7 BTC.

The only thing that does is tells you what miners are doing. That doesn't tell you anything about value for each fork.

This is why hard forks are harder than soft forks.

There was a huge drop in nodes in the past, not sure if that's recovered. I stopped running a full node, it was too much of a resource hog.

Yes, the limit is arbitrary, but any limit is. 25 coins is arbitrary, 21M coins is arbitrary.

I'm also a bit concerned if this logic prevails how easy it will be to change the reward or change the coin limit. It's opening a can of worms. Rather than let the ecosystem evolve around the limitations in place, the whole experiment is something that could be broken.

And even if I was convinced it absolutely was the best thing to do from a technical perspective, it's extremely risky from a value perspective as there are plenty who will fight this by only honoring the 1MB limit chain. They'll be able to spend on the unlimited chain, and double spend to themselves on the smaller chain.

Anything that requires a hard fork should be without any controversy. One of the selling points of bitcoin is that changes to the protocol can only be made with almost complete consensus. The moment that is no longer the case you handover the control of bitcoin to a small group of developers and the big miners. For a lot of people that will look too much like how it works with fiat, the banks and governments.

Haven't followed the technical discussions for a while but I thought that increasing the block size was not controversial and has always been planned. The current size is just not enough for bitcoin to scale in any meaningful way.

the 1 MB limit was put in place well after things got running. it served as an early anti spam mechanism when tx fees were really cheap. the bitcoin ecosystem has been running under the assumption of no block size limit since inception. to assume it should be left in place and evolve around the limitation is ridiculous imo. let's let this thing grow and evolve as designed. nobody, especially satoshi, expected every user to be running a full node. SPV was described in the white paper clearly and we knew this day was coming.

i also don't think 2.1 quadrillion base units was arbitrary (if thats what you meant)

Why do people prefer the smaller sized blocks.

That's the trouble, there won't be, as there is a hardcore group of supporters who absolutely don't want this limit raised. Gavin pushes onward. This will be the real test- how does the community revolt. I'm going to follow this closely, and if it is merged, I'm going to likely sell and wait for the fallout.

There are plenty of ways for Bitcoin to scale without increasing the block size. It just involves off-chain transactions, payment channels, etc...

2.1 quadrillion absolutely is arbitrary, why not 2.0 or 2.2? It's just a number. If anything, the 1MB number was less arbitrary, as that represents real amounts of space.

The fallback of "go to Satoshi's vision, as he is perfect" is highly flawed. Satoshi had a number of problems in his design and they had to be corrected. Unlimited block size certainly was one, as the costs are passed on to the users who have no say (other than a consensus rejection of big blocks!), and miners don't bear the cost (other than risk of an orphan).

The blockchain is huge and requires a pretty large amount of resources to keep up with. Just to download the blockchain, you have 1MB/10 minutes. Then you have transactions being passed on the network, and you have nodes connecting. If that number goes up, bandwidth requirements increase, storage increases, and fewer people are able to reasonably run nodes. This leads to centralization, where you end up trusting centralized entities.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/deal...Body&referrer=

In there any actual news on this? It's been awaiting regulatory approval for ages. I'm buying a ton of bitcoin on the first confirmation that the ETF is approved.