
The Decentralist Perspective, or Why Bitcoin Might Need Small Blocks - dtawfik1
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21919/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks/
======
Adlai
My favorite perspective on this Tragedy analogizes the Commons in question to
a cavern whose acoustics preserve any sound shouted within. We could allow
more people to shout at once, but that would increase the number of echos,
increasing the total amount of "signal" and effectively decreasing the SNR
when all you're interested in is a single signal out of the whole cacophony.
As the permitted transmission bandwidth rises, the complexity of making sense
out of the received data increases _at some sharper rate that I won 't just
pull from my ass_.

The fundamental right that must be preserved - the action that must be kept
accessible at minimum price to anybody wishing to perform it - is not that of
adding data, but rather verifying and interpreting that which is already
present. Shouting _should_ be expensive, because you hurt every other eardrum.

~~~
kang
But that leaves out the poor, because there is no alternative to shouting.

------
qopp
Love this response in the comment section by Jacob Eliosoff:

> My point isn't who's right and who's wrong. It's that well-informed
> publications like Bitcoin Magazine have an important role to play here in
> spelling out the specific technical questions and their pros and cons, and
> that requires interviewing more than one side

Here's one way the article is wrong:

> The main (though not only) reason bigger blocks favor bigger miners has to
> do with latency.

Gregory Maxwell (a small block advocate) himself has said this is not true:

>The technical/security implications of larger blocks are related to other
things than propagation time, if you assume people are using the available
efficient relay protocol (or better).

Also calling Small Block advocates "Decentralists" is really silly in my
opinion. Both sides want increased decentralization.

~~~
stingraycharles
Yes, and they even acknowledge in the article that several mining pools are
already sharing the block header with each other before propagating the entire
block. They completely ignore that when talking about the latency issues with
increasing block size, which makes me extremely skeptical whether or not this
article is biased.

Myself, attempting to write an application on top of the blockchain that would
store extra information in the blockchain, have met a huge resistance from
that community, that came along with a lot of name-calling and not
understanding the implications of "filling the blockchain with garbage". I
came to the conclusion that this is a really, really fragile issue within the
Bitcoin community that many people feel extremely strongly about, and that the
core issue is that every member with commit access can veto a decision out,
effectively making the project come to a halt.

Many organizations now have a huge financial stake in the success of Bitcoin,
which for some is reason enough to be against it. I think the XT fork is an
extremely interesting strategy, because it caters directly to those
institutions that have the most financial stake in Bitcoin. I wouldn't be
surprised if this problem will escalate even further in the future, and it
will be very interesting to watch.

------
DennisP
So the main argument is that large blocks take longer to propagate, giving an
advantage to the miners that find them.

This completely ignores IBLT, which propagates a small fixed-size data
structure instead. It takes advantage of the fact that miners have most of the
transactions already, so sending complete copies of them is redundant.

[https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2](https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2)

[http://www.i-programmer.info/programming/theory/4641-the-
inv...](http://www.i-programmer.info/programming/theory/4641-the-invertible-
bloom-filter.html)

~~~
kang
But the 'O(1) block propagation time proposal' essentially merges the
consensus and networking layer.

Notable problems:

1\. Engineering would like to keep the networking layer and consensus layer
separate because of architectural decisions for eg; difficult to push
networking upgrades

2\. Syncing unordered data in a trustless distributed system is a hard
problem. Some propose ordering them, but that promotes censorship and
centralization.

~~~
DennisP
I don't see how it merges the layers. It's essentially a form of compression.

I also don't see how deterministic ordering, perhaps based on hashing the
transaction, would promote censorship or centralization.

~~~
kang
Because it does not work on it's own. The IBLT compression is just a way to
check whether a data (transaction) is part of a dataset (transactions in
mempool) when collision is low.

For this to work, the mempools must be almost same. Like I said, syncing
unordered trustless distributed system is a difficult problem. Suppose,
engineering implements a method to do so among nodes, it will by definition be
a part of the way they network but concept-wise are a part of the consensus
layer.

------
nurb
Instead of changing block size, why don't they change block time? 10/8 min
instead of 10min, no latency issue, faster transactions, space for everyone,
seems like a win-win?

Just need to adapt block reward and halving, it doesn't seem to be a big deal
since every others altcoins plays with these parameters.

Or am I missing something?

~~~
qopp
That raises orphan rates:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3jziu5/satoshi_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3jziu5/satoshi_chose_the_average_block_time_as_a/)

For "faster transactions", even a 10/8 min is too long and people would still
have to rely on mempool transactions. It doesn't raise the security because
the proof of work is still the same.

------
ryanlol
>And while it has been suggested that miners can connect to a VPS if they
prefer to remain anonymous rather than connect through Tor, this is not quite
satisfying for decentralists either. Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, hashcash
inventor and Blockstream CEO Dr. Adam Back explained why.

>“It is technically possible to mine using a VPS (Virtual Private Server), but
miners who do so are not choosing their own transactions,” Back emphasized.
“Instead, they connect to a server that does this for them. It’s another form
of centralization, at the extreme. And we already see this happening due to
bad connectivity in some countries, where miners use VPS services set up in
another country to win some time and increase profits…”

Is it just me or was this article generated by a markov bot?

