Nostr Web Client

shit just gets more and more complex and more and more trust in third parties is needed. Increasing the blocksize regularly and adapting to technological progress seems like such an easy and elegant solution in comparison...

Jeff Swann 1y ago

It's not easy or elegant.

It's a hard fork that most of us aren't willing to support because we understand the long term costs. If you make it considerably more costly to run a node, say 10x, then you get significantly fewer nodes, more centralization, less resistance to future hostile changes, & you create a compounding risk of future network fragility if some significant portion of nodes get eliminated & have to resync from zero in order to secure the network. And for what?! 10x txn capacity does nothing in terms of the problem of putting everyone's coffee purchases on chain.

This debate has been had 1000 times & was already settled during the blocksize war. It's ridiculous how often these basic things have to be repeated.

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Chuck Langstrumpf 1y ago

Repeating things does not make them true though. Also nothing was settled, we never voted for a "forever 1 mb limit" in 2017. And a lot was promised in 2017 but very little was delivered.

The 1mb limit is ridiculous, a 12TB hdd costs around $100, if one wants to run a node and does not want to spend a few hundred bucks for that, he should not run one.

The result of that limit is that fewer people can afford onchain fees, self hosted lightning also gets unattractive due to high fees and most people are pushed into custodial lightning wallets, which offer zero privacy, zero sovereignty, full dependency from a third party and soon KYC and AML.

Without offering sovereignty and privacy, BTC gets integrated into the banking system and we win nothing

Jeff Swann 1y ago

Transactions rarely cost more than a few dollars. We need better ways to trustlessly share UTXOs so that they can cost $1000+ because they probably will at some point.

The ~4mb limit has nothing to do with the cost of a harddrive.

It already costs a couple hundred dollars to buy the hardware needed to run a node. Storage & computational demands have grown & will continue to do so.

Lopp has written about past efforts to sync an ETH node from zero, which took weeks when everything went right & it repeatedly failed. Do you understand how fragile the network becomes if downloading & verifying everything takes that long & any significant number of nodes gets wiped out?

If only Google & Visa can run nodes then we have just recreated the Fed banks. They can change the rules & the supply however they see fit.

The cost of running a node gets exponentially larger as the number of nodes shrinks. Everyone who uses bitcoin has to connect to a node, what happens when the number of leechers massively outweighs the number of seeders? What does that do to the cost of seeding info?

Chuck Langstrumpf 1y ago

When only BTC rich people can use it in a self sovereign way, we just recreated the banking system.

Why should everybody suffer high transaction fees, even for lighning onboarding, because some dude with a shitty internet connection wants to run a full node out of his moms basement on a raspberry pie?

What does that do to the cost of a transaction?

Jeff Swann 1y ago

It's a provably honest court system for ownership of wealth. It's not for everyday transactions. The base layer offers millions of dollars worth of security with just a couple of confirmations. Nothing you do where you would throw away the receipt should ever be done onchain.

Pi hardware already isn't great for running a node. My node was $1500. How much do you think it should cost?