Very reasonable question that even Satoshi thought would work
However we already know blockchains don't scale, doesn't matter if it's 4mb or 32mb or a GB
Increasing block size is basically just kicking the can down the road, eventually we need layer 2 scaling solutions
So keep the blocks small to make node running as cheap and simple as possible and focus all scaling ideation on L2
My two sats
before you decide if you need a new thing, decide first if you can push more into your existing thing
it's really not rocket science
in economics it's called "marginal utility"
It's so obvious that I can't believe we are still talking about it in 2024 just before the 4th halving
How good will LN and other L2s be, and how will people own their bitcoin if onchain fees are 500 usd for eg.
Very likely will have to do a trust trade off and use federations instead of using on-chain if they aren't willing to pay for that degree of security
If most people won't be able to own bitcoin because of high fees and have to use custodial solutions, then what are we doing? Because if people can't own bitcoin, they also won't run nodes. This is highly centralizing. Things are not as black or white, we will need both approaches imo, scale L1 and L2.
I think considering even at 1 sat/vB most people still gravitate towards custodians and not node running, the proportion of people node running and self custodying will remain constant over time. But that's all that's needed to have a sound currency system, because most people (normies) actually want a custodian
Speculation though, I see merit in your points 🫂
They scale if you don't keep all transaction history back to inception. Anything longer than 30days isn't needed.
Beef the size, shrink the time, scrap the unneeded excess.
How is your node supposed to find your transactions from last year? Or verify that someone else's old coins you received aren't double spent?
You're constrained to Bitcoin. I'm talking a fresh protocol.
Drive Chains are that new protocol. Bitcoin is too well established, and the non-Bitcoin crypto space is too filled with 💩🪙's to establish anything new and legitimate. It just can't happen.
It’s already verified it. It’s just trusting itself
New nodes still need to sync. Multi-TB per year will get quite unwieldy, especially as we run into physical limits to data transfer and processing speeds when we're decades into this.
Besides, you need a way to keep track of UTXOs to verify txs. Imagine when we're into the multi-deca-billions of UTXOs to track and verify. No go.
No you don't need to track UTXO's because UTXO's are stupid. Them and blockchain are the constraint of the whole system.
The distributed ledger is all that matters. You don't need to know "who sent what". You only need to know "who owns what". That's it. The ledger.
The logic is simple: Has key? Has balance? Send approved.
What if we embed another DLT into Bitcoin as a L2? Such as a Merkel tree balance proof protocol like MINA? Bitcoin can host the top-level proof of balance, and wallets will hold branch proofs.
This is kind of the idea pushed even farther with MimbleWimble on things like Grin, Beam, and LitcoinMWEB
Only ~18500 nodes accessible worldwide. I run 3 of those, and 2 of them are pruned. 99% of people will never run their own node, which to me largely invalidates the argument against larger block sizes. I would rather have larger blocks and smaller fees. If I truly want to be my own bank, I would have no problem adding hard drives to a server.
It matters how fast your node communicates with all other nodes globally. Consensus on the network takes time. Not to mention the storage problem.
Interestingly that's less than accessible Monero nodes.
Bigger blocks: Run LTC or BCH nodes
Private bigger blocks: Run XMR node
I suspect people running XMR nodes care more about privacy than the average Bitcoiner. Sad, but probably true.
So many maxis have never even downloaded Bitcoin core.
You need a node to maximise privacy and for
CPU mining.
I'd say that incentives are better aligned for Monero node operators than for Bitcoin.
Amd Monero is 99% price insensitive cypherpunks. While Bitcoin has 1% cypherpunks.
Considering privacy is the whole point of xmr, I would expect you're right about that.
Not to mention that when a miner broadcasts a block they have an advantage over all other miners if they find a hash with a high enough difficulty.
They broadcast that new block and are already working on the next block before the rest of the world knows. That's why you see alot of pools win multiple blocks in a row.
Exactly nostr:npub180x9vv4yuagf2w3qzmuertvv46ccee6n0wp0yh3zcz7nhyqrmzuqzjmehq At the crux, you're arguing more volume, lower fees. To achieve the same income as less volume, higher fees.
Higher throughput. That benefits the network and users. Efficiency.
sometimes kicking the can down the road *is* the solution!
Before I became a maxi, I really liked the idea of MINA protocol. You've got a Merkel tree of account balances, and the top-level zero-knowledge proof gets updated across the network. The knowledgeable proof for each account is then held by the wallets individually.
There may be a way to build this into Bitcoin non-custodially, such as publishing the top-level zk-proof on-chain and a manner to move in, out, and across L2 instances via an LN-like protocol.
Then why not 100Kb blocks? 1 or 2 Mb way too big. 100Kb is even cheaper and simpler.
Small blocks centralize who can afford to transact on chain. People not transacting on chain won't run nodes. This also centralizes Bitcoin.
There is surely a conservative way to increase blocksize without going crazy. Consider lower end of global latency, bandwidth, and storage based on current tech and go from there. Even Lightning eventually fails to work without ~100x increase in blocksize.
Keep blocks small and activate OP_CTV.
