Stress Test Recap: Bitcoin

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37ub2k/stress_test_recap/

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

63 76 11 years ago

tedunangst• 11 years ago

Doesn't this kind of put a dent in the whole micro transaction argument? Once we hit peak Bitcoin, if I want to tip you a penny for your HN comment, I'm not going to pay a nickel in transaction fees to do so.

Ellipsis753• 11 years ago

Yes. Although they're been quite high before. At the moment they're still in the pennies.

biturd• 11 years ago

I have never bought btc, there is a fee? This is a function the wallet provides? Who gets the fee? I have bought dogecoins as a joke, and I have a wallet for that, which I send a few coins here and there to others, which cost me nothing. Not quite following what I thought was the basic principles of how this works now.

nkuttler• 11 years ago

Bitcoin was not designed for microtransactions. Whoever told you that was wrong.

davidgerard8• 11 years ago

Red herring: Bitcoin was not particularly designed for any use case at all. The thing in the white paper is the cardboard-and-string proof of concept that something like Bitcoin could exist at all, and the white paper talks about improving the protocol in due course. Of course, nobody did.

It is, however, true that microtransactions were heavily touted by Bitcoin advocates, until of course it became blindingly obvious that Bitcoin didn't scale.

tveita2• 11 years ago

It's a frequently touted feature by Bitcoin supporters - e.g. the Winklewoss twins have focused a lot on micropayments in their pitch.

I agree with you that they are wrong, though.

brighton364• 11 years ago

It does do micropayments fairly well via bonding. It wasn't designed for micropayments, but look into the hub and spoke payment channels for some fun reading on the matter

themgt• 11 years ago

It's become beyond obvious that existing Bitcoin blockchain technology has no real ability to scale, function as a long-term store of value, or withstand even moderate attacks by bad actors.

The hype has gotten in the way of building something that makes sense, and the continued belief in "Bitcoin" as the answer rather than some mew - perhaps maybe with a lot of further innovation - blockchain inspired tech, seems mostly tied up in the "investors" left who spent real dollars for the bits they're now watching depreciate, and can't bring themselves to admit an interesting, failed technology's digital coins are worth about as much as old Pokemon trading cards.

javert3• 11 years ago

some mew - perhaps maybe with a lot of further innovation - blockchain inspired tech

There is no other way to get a decentralized global ledger. Well, if there is, it would be a huge discovery, just like bitcoin was.

It's become beyond obvious that existing Bitcoin blockchain technology has no real ability to scale

Once you have the ledger, you don't need to put every transaction on it. Lots of them can happen off the chain.

So yeah, your "obvious" is another word for "wrong".

aliakhtar16• 11 years ago

Once you have the ledger

We've had ledgers for quite a while, bitcoin wasn't the first digital ledger. I still don't understand the use case of a decentralized ledger, other than for illegal uses.

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

I use bitcoin, a lot. I use it primarily to move money between countries quickly, and inexpensively. Doing a bank transfer takes 3 days, and a $20 cable fee. Using Bitcoin is pretty much instant, and costs a few pennies.

I've been using it for about 9 months, and I've yet to run into any snags. If Bitcoin performed exactly as it does today, from now on, I couldn't be any happier.

cherioo• 11 years ago

How do you do that? Last time I checked major bitcoin exchanges takes several to withdraw money. Coinbase has a instant buy/sell but I thought that only works in US. Also, does it really cost pennies? Do you really lose nothing going from fiat to bitcoin to fiat?

wsxcde• 11 years ago

What do you do with your bitcoins after you "move them to another country"? It would seem you still have to convert to normal currency and that is by no means instant. What about the volatility? If you really want quick transfers you have to "hodl" bitcoins and that means you have lost something like 40% in the last 9 months.

brighton364• 11 years ago

Because blockchains work, there is an incentive to join the longest chain. Since Bitcoin was first, all other competing blockchains merely exist for miners to sell tokens to greater fools. Thus, Bitcoin FTW. If you need immutability for your app, you'll be getting it by building on top of bitcoin. The transaction counts, market cap, and energy consumption of the Blockchain market reflect this view

davidgerard8• 11 years ago

Since Bitcoin was first, all other competing blockchains merely exist for miners to sell tokens to greater fools.

Please explain how this argument does not also apply to Bitcoin, 'cos as far as I can tell at present it does. That altcoins are even scammier does not somehow mean Bitcoin is free of the same problems despite being first.

colordrops4• 11 years ago

You haven't really said anything at all to support your comment. You merely trash bitcoin then leave it at that without any explanation or facts.

patio11• 11 years ago

Quick mental math: 2.5k transactions or so in a block, 3 cents each for transaction fee means that it costs $75 or so to fill up a block with economically irrelevant transactions (i.e. moving money from one of your pockets to the other). This means you can degrade the performance of the Bitcoin network for about $10k per day.

You can probably optimize that down to $3~4k or so by being smarter about the transactions you're DDOSing with. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

stream_fusion• 11 years ago

An argument behind not increasing the block size, is that miners can price-ration the inclusion of transactions in blocks.

During periods of high network contention, an ordinary user can include a higher-fee to prioritize their transactions.

Correspondingly, the cost for attacking the network using spurious transactions will increase.

sarahj• 11 years ago

I remember reading about Bitcoin a couple of years ago and expressing disbelief that many of the major advantages being heralded were little more than fantasy, these were:

* Micro-transactions.

* Replacing practically everything related to money in developing countries.

From this thread it is clear that many of those dreams are still very much dreams - the ever growing energy and resource requirements to participate significantly in the network is staggering, the amount of storage required for the blockchain is a burden to even tech-aware users (unless of course one would want to trust a third party...), and now it would seem that there are minimum bandwidth requirements which sit outside what is possible in even modest parts of the USA - impossible to achieve in places where the main link to the internet is a satellite.

If I was feeling particularly optimistic I would say that Bitcoin has been shown to be unscalable in it's current form. Further, the network itself tends towards centralization because of the ever growing storage, processing and bandwidth requirements.

I look forward to seeing where the future of crypocurrencies leads us- there is so much promise.

brighton364• 11 years ago

You wouldn't believe how clunky the Internet was when it first started. This stress test is fairly minor compared to the problems bitcoin had in 2011 and 2012. With time, the blockchain will improve. Just like the Internet. You should look into the Lightning Network paper, there's no shortages of solutions in bitcoin. Meanwhile, traditional financial platforms have been stagnant for decades.

kaoD• 11 years ago

The internet got better as time went by. The blockchain is getting worse.

aliakhtar16• 11 years ago

In 2000, about 5-6 years after the internet was easily available to public, I had a dial up connection, email, IM, a web browser, etc in the middle-of-nowhere town in Pakistan where I was born. Bitcoin has been out for close to 6-7 years and does not even come close to the maturity / adoption of internet.

colordrops4• 11 years ago

I've seen this argument several times. The flaw with it though is that it confuses growing resource needs with centralization. Even if a large percentage of people are no longer capable of easily hosting a full node, the benefits of decentralization are there. The resources required are not insane, so "normal" people (read: not power elite) are capable of running a node, and so there is still enough decentralization so that no entity can corrupt the blockchain. Besides that, the rate of transaction growth is slower than growth in bandwidth and disk space costs, so things will likely get better.

juliangregorian• 11 years ago

Even if a large percentage of people are no longer capable of easily hosting a full node, the benefits of decentralization are there.

How exactly? If you don't host a full node, you can only participate by going through someone who does.

The resources required are not insane, so "normal" people (read: not power elite) are capable of running a node

The resources are formidable, and those in developing economies (except for the "power elite") have no hope of running a node.

there is still enough decentralization so that no entity can corrupt the blockchain

Except that mining syndicates control huge swaths of the blockchain and it would only take the collusion of a few to control an absolute majority.

the rate of transaction growth is slower than growth in bandwidth and disk space costs, so things will likely get better

Please explain the math on this. My understanding of network effects means that the problem will probably only get worse.

davidgerard8• 11 years ago

The flaw with it though is that it confuses growing resource needs with centralization.

And yet, we observe centralisation.

natrius3• 11 years ago

There are lots of uninformed claims here about Bitcoin's scalability. If it's a topic you're interested in, you should do some reading on your own. In particular, the Lightning Network proposal is a promising approach to dramatically increase the number of transactions that can occur trustlessly, but without having to put each transaction on the blockchain.

http://lightning.network/

davidgerard8• 11 years ago

It has the unfortunate problem that, like sidechains, it doesn't exist.

We already have altcoins. This might be an actually innovative altcoin. But it's not really going to be Bitcoin.

dogecoinbase• 11 years ago

The logical next step, of course, is miners themselves flooding the network in order to drive up transaction fees.

kanzure• 11 years ago

The logical next step, of course, is miners themselves flooding the network in order to drive up transaction fees.

That's unnecessary. Miners can choose to include no transactions in blocks. They can also choose to include only transactions paying higher-than-average transaction fees if they want to make it more obvious to others that they are going for high fees.

Stress Test Recap: Bitcoin

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