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Bitcoin Fork Divides Community
HughPickens.com writes: The Bitcoin community is facing one of the most momentous decisions in its six-year history. The Bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem. The technical issue is that a block, containing a record of recent transactions, currently has a 1MB limit. Increasing the block size would allow more transactions on the network at once, helping it to scale up to meet growing demand. But it would also make it more difficult for ordinary users to host full network "nodes" that validate new transactions on the network, potentially making the digital currency more centralized as a result. Now Rob Price writes that two high-profile developers have released a competing version of the codebase that risks splitting the digital currency in two.
Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required. Bitcoin users will now be forced to decide between "Bitcoin Core" and Bitcoin XT, raising the prospect of a "fork," where the digital currency divides into two competing versions. According to Price, Core and XT are compatible right now. However, if XT is adopted by 75% of users by January 2016, it will upgrade to a larger block size that will be incompatible with Core — meaning that if the other 25% don't then choose to convert, it will effectively split the currency into two. So far, 7.7% of the network has adopted XT, according to website XTnodes.com. "Ultimately, how the dispute is resolved may matter more than the specific decision that's reached," says Timothy B. Lee. "If the community is ultimately able to reach a consensus, the process could become a template for resolving future disagreements. On the other hand, if disagreements fester for months — or, worse, if a controversial software change splits the Bitcoin network into two warring camps — it could do real damage to Bitcoin's reputation."
Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required. Bitcoin users will now be forced to decide between "Bitcoin Core" and Bitcoin XT, raising the prospect of a "fork," where the digital currency divides into two competing versions. According to Price, Core and XT are compatible right now. However, if XT is adopted by 75% of users by January 2016, it will upgrade to a larger block size that will be incompatible with Core — meaning that if the other 25% don't then choose to convert, it will effectively split the currency into two. So far, 7.7% of the network has adopted XT, according to website XTnodes.com. "Ultimately, how the dispute is resolved may matter more than the specific decision that's reached," says Timothy B. Lee. "If the community is ultimately able to reach a consensus, the process could become a template for resolving future disagreements. On the other hand, if disagreements fester for months — or, worse, if a controversial software change splits the Bitcoin network into two warring camps — it could do real damage to Bitcoin's reputation."
...and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem.
Any bitcoiner worth his salt will tell you that any problem will be taken care of by the market!
There wasn't much left of a reputation before this new crisis...
HAHAHAHA what the hell, Bitcoin's reputation is fucking awful as a scammers paradise. How the hell can you damage something no sane person would touch?
This Week In Dunning-Kruggerands
One thing I don't understand about this, and that the articles never cover, is how much of a problem it is that the current block size is limited to 1MB in "core" Bitcoin. Is the situation that the Bitcoin network is coming dangerously close to having enough transactions to exceed that 1MB limit? Is it that Bitcoin has a problem like IPv4, where it has a set date at which it will likely exceed that 1MB limit and start having issues?
I would think that there must be some sort of issue, but then again it seems like the people behind Bitcoin XT stand to make a lot of money if the big Bitcoin exchanges switch over to their version of the currency, so I'm not so sure.
Yeah, but which one? Me, I'll wait for Bitcoin AT.
This will push Dogecoin north of USD$100.
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Governments can't inflate it, but everyone else can.
Some idiot made tools to make it easier to create more crypto-currencies and it was just downhill from there. I remember when the most known ones were bitcoin, litecoin, dogecoin, feathercoin, primecoin. That's about all that mattered.
The cost of you (a) sending a bitcoin is borne by: (b) miner, (c) users running nodes - who have to store and verify your transaction for all eternity.
The miner and sender arrive at a fair price in this free market. Neat, right?
But, you do see that that conclusion rests on (c) being negligible, right? And, that's where the block size debate comes in.
Already, people's hard drives (and backups) are filling up because Joe sent Jack some 0.0000001 bitcoin somewhere. Imagine your hard drive, and everyone's hard drive filling up every time one of the billion users sends another of the billion users one cent for a negligible cost (because cost above 0 is free extra money to the miner.)
If blocksizes are not limited, (a) and (b) together maximize their profit by externalizing their costs to (c) where the cost gets amplified manifold.
So I'm not sure I understand the issue.
The 1MB block, what does it store exactly? What happens when it fills up under the current implementation? Is Joe unable to send Jack the 0.0000001 bitcoin? Is it really laggy? Do the records of some old transactions get discarded?
I stole this Sig
People who received a play-money system from a mysterious unknown person and actually convinced themselves that it has value are now facing a schism over the money market failing to grow without bounds. Unless, that is, the software is modified in a way that might, over time, disincent people from playing the game.
I can't be the only one who is thinking that the only problem is that these folks believe bitcoins have value.
Hell, I thought that the fiat currency of nations was a bad deal. This is an order of magnitude worse.
Bruce Perens.
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Each transaction has a few KB worth of data.
You make a transaction of say 0.5 btc to an address. In a few seconds all nodes know about it, but it is not validated until it finds its way into a block
Miners choose a few of the unvalidated transactions to form a block and perform all the math needed to get a hash with the desirable characteristics (I wont expand on this here)
They are more likely to choose transactions that pay the fee (which is optional and can vary in generosity)
A new block is added to the blockchan network from the competing miners (whoever get the right hash faster). The difficulty of the right hash is adjusted every two weeks so that on average that happens every ten minutes
I had to say all that to explain the 1MB size. The way thigs are now, 1MB block size allows for about 7 transactions per second, so about 4200 per ten minute block. The size of the bitcoin quantities moved matters but does so relatively little so small transactions have relatively high cost in bandwidth (and bandwidth is what you pay for)
So imagine each block as a 4200 passenger seat train or plane. Thousands of passengers are waiting to get a seat. Some might get the next plane, other might get the next one or the one after. Naturaly, those that pay more will be guaranteed a seat while the freeloaders will be defered to the next one. As more candidate transactions appear all the time and paying ones get prioritized by the miners, some free or cheap ones will never get through and if a transaction doesnt get through in 48 hours (I think) it is simply dropped from the network like it never occured at all
So if nothing changes, people will simply avoid making pointless transactions of a few cents worth because the fees required to make them validated will not be worth it.
If the block size increases, fees might not have to but the blockchain will continue to get bloated and so will bandwidth costs for nodes.
I prefer the former. We can always use other coins for small transactions and keep btc as the standard for longer term store of value
If they can increase the maximum block size, they can also increase the maximum number of of bitcoins.
I can't believe that 30 years after it was first published,
When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory. — William Gates, chairman of Microsoft (April 1985)
That people are still thinking small-time even when we've known for a decade that data usage is increasing at an exponential rate.
1MB is half of a Intel Celeron CPU cache, and even the N720 Atom has 512kB.
And you expected to run a digital currency system from 2009 until the end of time?
Inexcusable to have a hard-coded limit.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Never any mod points when you need them! Someone vote this informative please!
Reputation?
I suppose since a pyramid scheme needs a fresh supply of suckers to function that would be a very major worry. If it isn't such a scam then it doesn't matter so much does it?
Either way, bit coin is massivly limited in the amount of transactions it can do. What they are talking about now is one group who want the limited transactions bid up, and another group who want to increase the number of transactions. Both groups are long term losers. Increasing transactions eventually well lead to so much data that it will be impractical to keep up - you will use up your entire internet bandwidth just keeping up with all the transactions. Bidding up transactions just results in the currency getting slower and slower except for the rich. You already have to wait 10 minutes just to conform a transaction, imagine waiting until midnight or Sunday afternoon for the off peak time, etc. Bit coin was never expected to take off like it did. It doesn't scale and it has to be continually patched and tweaked.
Transactions are already verified in seconds. Each node in the network looks at an incoming transaction, and performs a number of tests on it (is the digital signature valid, did they have sufficient funds to make the transaction, etc.). If it fails any test, the transaction is not relayed to other nodes. Verified transactions eventually reach miners, who attempt to find a checksum (hash) for a block of transactions. Finding a valid hash is computationally difficult, on purpose. That makes it hard to edit past transactions, since you also have to find a corresponding hash for the edited data.
So: verified = seconds, included in a block = 10 minutes on average. How long you wait depends on the nature of the transaction and how sure you want to be. You run a convenience store, and a customer is buying a snack? Seeing the transaction appear on a distant network node is enough, since it had to travel through 3-4 nodes to get there, and each one verified it. There is less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of the transaction being invalid. If you are using a payment processor, most of them guarantee the validity of the transaction, so there is no reason to wait once they OK it.
If you are selling a house, it would be wise to wait an hour or two for multiple blocks to appear *after* the one with your sale. Each block is chained to the one before it by including the previous block hash as part of the current block data. So they are time-ordered, and each one requires intense computation to create. Any attempt to change an old transaction requires re-doing all the computation for all following blocks, because all the hash values change. Since the vast majority of chips capable of doing the computation are working on *new* blocks, to win the bitcoin reward that comes with a block, there are not enough chips to *redo* the work, and your payment is secure. In the case of a house sale, the rest of the paperwork takes hours, and the escrow agent typically demands the funds be delivered the previous day anyway, so waiting a few hours for maximum security isn't a problem either.
> I haven't studied to know if the larger block size significantly addresses the speed of verification issue
Larger blocks don't change the network verification time. What they do is increase the number of transactions that can fit in a block afterwards. If transactions are not yet in a block, they are held in a "memory pool" of recently arrived transactions. When a block shows up, the included transactions are deleted from the memory pool. The pool prevents spending the same funds twice. As soon as one transaction spends it, any later transaction, even a second later, will be invalid. If there are too many transactions to fit into blocks, the memory pool would grow without bound, and eventually exceed the memory capacity of the node. Block data (older transactions) are typically stored on hard drives, which are much much larger capacity.
More transactions per second might eventually exceed the ability of a node to verify them as they arrive, or network bandwidth for the node, but the 8 MB block size has been tested and found not to do that yet. If bitcoin gets a lot more popular, and the blocks get much bigger, eventually nodes would need to be server-grade machines, rather than home hardware, but that's a long way off. A Raspberry Pi can handle current traffic.