[bitcoin-dev] Block size following technological growth

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 7:27 AM, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > I would say that things already demonstrately got terrible. The mining > landscape is very centralized, with apparently a majority depending on > agreements to trust each other's announced blocks without validation. > And that is a problem... why? As far as I can tell, nobody besides miners running old and/or buggy software lost money due to outsourced mining validation (please correct me if I'm wrong-- I'm looking forward to Greg's post-mortem). The operators of bitcoin.org seem to have freaked out and pushed the panic button (with dire warnings of not trusting transactions until 20 confirmations), but theymos was well known for using an old, patched version of Core for blockexplorer.com so maybe that's not surprising. As Bitcoin grows, pieces of the ecosystem will specialize. Satoshi's original code did everything: hashing, block assembly, wallet, consensus, network. That is changing, and that is OK. I understand there are parts of the ecosystem you'd rather not see specialized, like transaction selection / block assembly or validation. I see it as a natural maturation. The only danger I see is if some unnatural barriers to competition spring up. > Full node count is at its historically lowest value in years, and outsourcing of full validation keeps growing. Both side effects of increasing specialization, in my opinion. Many companies quite reasonably would rather hire somebody who specializes in running nodes, keeping keys secure, etc rather than develop that expertise themselves. Again, not a problem UNLESS some unnatural barriers to competition spring up. > I believe that if the above would have happened overnight, people would > have cried wolf. But somehow it happened slow enough, and "things kept > working". > > I don't think that this is a good criterion. Bitcoin can "work" with > gigabyte blocks today, if everyone uses the same few blockchain validation > services, the same few online wallets, and mining is done by a cartel that > only allows joining after signing a contract so they can sue you if you > create an invalid block. Do you think people will then agree that "things > got demonstratebly worse"? > > Don't turn Bitcoin into something uninteresting, please. > > Why is what you, personally, find interesting relevant? I understand you want to build an extremely decentralized system, where everybody participating trusts nothing except the genesis block hash. I think it is more interesting to build a system that works for hundreds of millions of people, with no central point of control and the opportunity for ANYBODY to participate at any level. Permission-less innovation is what I find interesting. And I think the current "demonstrably terrible" Bitcoin system is still INCREDIBLY interesting. -- -- Gavin Andresen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150804/10def7f8/attachment-0001.html>