First bolded part:
okay you're just playing dumb to try to argue with me here. I was obviously talking about blocksize increase. As I mentioned optimizing what can be fit into current blocks plenty of times. Bitcoin core IS against onchain scaling by increasing the blocksize. Segwit is not an example of that, it just optimizes what can be fit into that 1mb block.
Second bolded part:
The block size is not 4mb, it is 1mb. It would take a hard fork to increase this. Segwit did not increase the block size one bit (or byte
), it is still 1mb. Segwit moved stuff around so more txs can be put into that 1mb. It's block weight is 4mb I believe, but block size is still 1mb just as its always been.
Segwit doesn't optimize anything. If anything, it actually makes transactions physically larger if you use P2SH-P2WPKH. Segwit redefined what block size meant by removing it entirely. The actual size of a block message that is received over the wire can be up to 4 MB. Of course you can (and yo are) argue that the block size hasn't changed because the MAX_BLOCK_SIZE variable did not change, but at the same time, that variable also no longer exists in the code.
Third bolded part:
This whole idea that increasing the size a bit would lead to unimaginable problems takes the assumption that Satoshi had some divine knowledge that 1MB was the perfect blocksize and anything larger would lead to the network unraveling.
No one ever claimed that.
If Satoshi had chosen 500KB instead of 1MB you'd be arguing how an increase to 1MB would be disastrous since 1MB means more centralization than 500KB.
We would be, because 1 MB means more centralization than 500 KB. In fact, some people (luke-jr) argue that we should decrease the size of blocks because that will lead to greater decentralization and that the status quo is too centralized. But the number itself doesn't matter. What matters is the current status quo and how that would be changed. If Satoshi had chosen 2 MB and people were trying to increase that, then the same argument would be happening whenever that limit was hit.
The developers of Bitcoin Core are not arguing for a specific magic block size. What we are arguing for is a block size that is no worse than the status quo. The baseline is what we currently have. Whatever we do in the future cannot be any worse than what we have. If the cost to increase the block to some size were negligible, then we would be for it. However the cost to increase the block size limit to some size greater than what it is now is considered to be non-negligible and thus we are not for increasing the block size yet. Once computing power, network bandwidth, etc. have increased to the point that an increase has negligible cost, then it will probably happen. The current size of blocks are already what is believed to be the most that the network can currently handle if all blocks were absolutely full. While we wait for that day, we will continue to think of other solutions that allow more transactions to be shoved into the same amount of space.
I'm more interesting in what solutions outside of LN have been proposed or do people think are possible to make bitcoin scale, because segwit and LN alone don't even come close. Blocksize increase is absolutely necessary but it too is only one solution that alone doesn't come close to solving things. I've heard of MAST and Schnorr but I don't really know what they do. I've heard of side chains which seems like a great solution but I don't know how practical or feasible they are. Anyone have details or opinions about these things or know of other solutions? The bottom line is we need as many solutions as possible implemented (absolutely including blocksize increase) if bitcoin has any chance of scaling to keep up with the growing demand in the long term.
There are currently known transaction capacitiy increases that are being worked on. The three most active ones are Key and Signature aggregation (previously known as Schnorr signatures), MAST, and Sidechains. Key and Signature aggregation and MAST both make the size of transactions smaller while retaining Bitcoin's security and with the added benefit of additional privacy. Sidechains are more similar to the Lightning Network (but sidechains are not the Lightning Network nor is the Lightning Network a sidechain) in that it moves transactions off of the main blockcahin.
Key and Signature Aggregation allows for one signature to be the combined signature for several different public keys and messages. This means that a transaction with many inputs only needs to provide one signature that covers all inputs instead of a signature for each input. Furthermore, multisig transactions can then have one signature and possibly even just one public key while still allowing for a threshold of signatures (combined into the one signature) be required. In the case of multisig, key aggregation hides how many participants were in the multisig and how many were required to sign the transaction. With only one signature, transactions with many inputs will be smaller.
MAST allows for large scripts to be compressed. The branches of a contract that are not relevant are compressed down into a hash when such a script is spent from. The ideas of Graftroot and Taproot expand this further. All of these also provide additional privacy by hiding information (in the form of a hash) that is otherwise unnecessary for validating a transaction. While MAST, Graftroot, and Taproot can make transactions smaller, they are only really effective with large complex scripts which are not all that frequent. Their primary purpose is privacy. However they are also useful in the Lightning Network because the Lightning Network uses large complex scripts in commitment transactions so these three can be used to shrink those scripts.
Sidechains move transactions off of the main blockchain into individual blockchains that are connected to the Bitcoin blockchain but not everyone needs to know about them. They are similar to the Lightning Network in that transactions occur off of the main blockchain and thus free up space on the main blockchain for other transactions.
And of course there will be solutions that have yet to be discovered. Like the Lightning Network, these solutions are not the end all be all of solutions to Bitcoin's transaction capacity issues. There will certainly be more, people just need to think of them and design them. Those solutions have not yet been discovered.
