The little-blockians want the block sizes of Bitcoin to remain
small, and thus for it to be a pure decentralised currency that
can be used by anyone with a computer. This would maintain it as a
peer-to-peer currency, but would limit its growth.
By comparison, the big-blockians believe Bitcoin should grow into
a universal currency, expanding the block size to accommodate
absolutely every transaction. The downside is that this is beyond
the computational limits of domestic machines, thereby meaning
that Bitcoin could only be regulated by banks, governments, and
other large organisations: thereby moving it away from a
libertarian idyll into something more akin to a regular currency.
And I'm not sure there's a lot of merit to this specific aspect. From what I can tell[0], the "computational limit" is primarily in increased bandwidth and storage requirements in running a full node (2.8 GB per day for a block size of 20 MB).
While that's not trivial, it hardly limits adoption to institutions like banks. 2.8 GB is about 45 minutes of 1080p video, which people seem to manage even on domestic connections. At the same time, even with the current block size, very few people (less than 1%?) currently run a full node; so maybe it's not the "computational limits" stopping people?
[0] A better, if outdated, list of pros and cons: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36085/what-are-th...
But the actual bandwidth exceeds that significantly. Both transactions that never make it into actual blocks (like bad transactions or double spends) and blocks that are orphaned are part of the bandwidth too.
More importantly, even if you were just sending and receiving the transactions that end up in the final longest blockchain, you're communicating hopefully not with 1 other node, as that'd mostly defeat the purpose, but rather tens of nodes, meaning you're perhaps seeding yourself the new blockchain data to tens of other nodes.
In fact, if you look at nodes today, the average daily bandwidth is pretty much the 2.8gb you mentioned for blocks 20x the current size. e.g. http://213.165.91.169/
So if we'd go 20x, you're talking about 50gb a day, or 1500gb a month. And that just doesn't fly with most consumer ISPs. It's something we could certainly move towards in 2020 or 2025 though.
Now you can limit your node of course, but that limits the utility, too few connections means you're just receiving data and not passing through actually hurting the health of the network. This node transmits only about 20% more than it receives, so it's not some kind of super node that delivers data to lots of others. There are nodes like that which today rack up 800gb of monthly data already, this one is closer to 100gb per month, which already is a lot just 'on the side', in countries with shitty bandwidth caps. (US) Plus, a lot of the traffic is burst traffic, so it's not like we're talking about 3gb daily = 35kb/s (which sounds fine) 24/7. For example, he's had days reaching 30gb of traffic, and again this isn't some industrial node. You have to be able to deal with that as well. If you cut your node when the going get's though on days like these, then it defeats the point and means the blocks are too big to handle.
So I think we can go a lot bigger with nodes, but we shouldn't downplay the traffic increases too much, 20mb blocks for example aren't trivial and can't just be compared to some 1080p video (although I make similar comparisons from time to time). At some point, you have to give away autonomy if you increase blocks too much. We already see with 1mb blocks today that lots of peeps run nodes on a VPS, so they can offload the hassle of a home setup. But this means lots of nodes already are being run by commercial providers, which are susceptible to government influence. Now I'm in no way anti-government, but the whole point of bitcoin is decentralisation, gateless, disintermediated, resistant to power etc... removing this leaves you a database that can be manipulated by those with power, just like an ordinary financial system we already have.
Tricky debate this!
edit: just to add for others who are interested... If the blockchain has value, people will use it, and keeping blocks small just forces transactions off-chain. And these can themselves be controlled by various gatekeepers and intermediaries. So on both sides you're losing out. A balance is necessary, everyone agrees there. Where the balance is, they don't. And it's made difficult by the need to 'get it right' right away, as changing the protocol in 5 years becomes way harder. Every day that goes by, more actors move in, making change a political process. So simply making blocks 2mb and saying 'let's get back to it in two years when blocks are getting full again' could actually be worse than delaying it shortly now and forcing a good permanent solution. While at the same time, every single day, bitcoin is treading uncharted waters, none of this has been done before in this particular context, so the foresight for a long-term solution is incredibly hard and already incredibly political.
The only reason things don't change is that miners don't change. The control lays with miners, full stop. IIRC, they agreed to some change by signalling a flag in mined blocks. The idea was that at a certain amount of consensus, the new behaviour would activate. Instead, the miners set the flag, then ignored it when the consensus threshold was passed.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was just an issue of some miners having some minor difficulty in increasing the blocksize, and deciding its not worth the hassle/lost profits.
Big blocks wanted limited growth that still works on domestic machines. Big blockers believe in using Bitcoin as-is; small blockers want to "spam filter" (i.e. control) some transactions or use some third-party thing like Lightning.
There are definitely solutions to this problem.
For one thing, we don't need to be storing the entire blockchain.
Note that the antepenultimate line says ‘signiture’ instead
of ‘signature’, so the script doesn’t do what is claimed. In
particular, it reads the signature from the environment
variable ‘signiture’ rather than from the command-line
argument. Hence, if you populate the environment variable
with your own public-key, rather than Satoshi’s, you can
cause the test to pass!
Edit: to be clear, I'm inclined to believe Kaminsky et al that this is a ruse. I just don't think it's that ruse.
So what is his motive other than completely fucking up his reputation?
One freaky, and completely unfounded, hypothesis is that Wright is Satoshi, and was pressured by government to have experts prove he was satoshi (for tax reasons), but is willingly playing stupid publicly and releasing a blatantly foolish post to keep his anonymity and let the world think he's not Satoshi.
Yes I know, I have a very creative mind :)
I have no idea (or care really) about who is right but there's clearly epic trolling going on here.
It fails the sniff test for me.
Wright, on the other hand, spends 5 paragraphs giving a repetitive and incorrect summary of hash functions, specifically SHA-256.
I don't know how anyone in the world can look at that and think these are the same person or even colleagues.
"I have my drivers license in my pocket, but there's no reason for me to show you. I showed Steve my license 10 minutes ago, and Steve will vouch for my identity"
If you think that's fishy, and don't think this is fishy... consider that in this metaphor, the person pulled over spent a great deal of his life advocating for the use of physical licenses to prove identity rather than social authority.
1. Digital Gold. Pseudo anonymous value storage that can't be tampered with by third parties.
2. A payment network with transaction levels that match Visa.
It appears the 2 are not compatible.
For 1 we need more nodes, and node counts from my understanding are on the way down.
For 2 we need to increase the blocksize, but this might decrease the number of people willing to run nodes.
I think we have to look at the way we use Bitcoin today, after all the experiment has been running for a few years now. I don't know anyone who is using Bitcoin for day to day spending. But I do know people who are using it as an investment or for value storage.
So in my view the market has decided.
The miners have also decided. They were offered a solution with increased blocksize and they voted no.
That's consensus.
Is it possible the use of "!" was used in an English sense, indicating an exclamation and not factorial?