Posts made by richard

@burst1 said in Implications of the Bitcoin's block size debate in Burst:

Thing is everyone keeps mentioning this is a big problem for BTC yet it's at a 13 billion plus market cap and still growing. Supply and demand is what it is. Ok, a solution certainly helps BTC grow another 2x, 3x, etc... but it hasn't been hurt yet.

Well, the simple fact that a solution would have helped Bitcoin to grow more (or faster) means that the situation "no solutions" led Bitcoin to decreased growing speed, that is, the lack of a solution in some way damaged Bitcoin.

As it applies to BURST... I know you can't really look at it this way but to make an apples to apples comparison to where BTC is today... when would it (roughly) start to be a "problem" for BURST? When BURST reaches a 500 million market cap? A billion? More? Point is, isn't it a long ways away before this is a true concern?

It is more insidious than that. There's no need to reach the critical point: many potentially attracted people could consider unsafe this coin because of serious technical troubles, troubles that wouldn't allow it to easily grow without future problems (soft fork, or, even worse, hard fork). This translates to uncertainty, and its the next logic consequence is fear to invest. Who wants to invest or buy a coin which seems to be too limited to have a future?

Among what Bitcoin can teach us is the following: Fix what could be a problem in the future: fixing later can be very, very hard. And the proof is the difficulty to apply a solution to this widely discussed problem.

@Gibsalot said in Implications of the Bitcoin's block size debate in Burst:

convo was taken up in a few threads both hear and on nation forums, i believe the devs have been discussing it on discord , you might have better luck asking in general chat in discord https://discord.gg/Wem7W

Unfortunately, that link does not work

@HiDevin You actually shouldn't design a cryptocurrency by assuming that it won't be popular. Cryptocurrencies should work even if they spread

@Hyzi0 Could you please post the link of the original discussion?

Hi everyone,

I think most of us are aware of the problem Bitcoin is having with the maximum block size, and of the scalability debate. The current maximum block size for Bitcoin is 1,000,000 bytes (1 MB), and blocks of that size typically contain about 2500 transactions. Although this may seem enough, it actually isn't: mempool is often full of unconfirmed transaction (sometimes 75000+), transaction fees raised due to the competition for inclusion in blocks and a proposal (SegWit) aims also to increase the maximun number of transactions that can be added in the blockchain per time unit, by changing the way the size of a block is calculated.

The fact is that Burstcoin network can't include more than 255 transactions in a block, which is not good: if Burstcoin were to be as popular as Bitcoin is nowadays, transaction fees would become very high and ultimately it would be very difficult for transactions to get inside Burst blockchain. This is also totally absurd, considering that Burst gives also more incentive to do transactions (a lot of transaction types exist, such as setting an account's name, sending messages and so on) by offering features that Bitcoin doesn't natively offer.

This can NEVER allow a widespread adoption of Burst, neither it allows Burst to attract as much interest as it could otherwise, since it does not fix one of the current major problems of Bitcoin: the scalability problem.

Increasing maximum block size should be a priority: ideally, Burstcoin should be much faster than Bitcoin, so that it could offer itself as a good alternative which doesn't crash as soon as user base starts growing.

To better understand the point, here's a comparison between Bitcoin's and Burst's average speed in including transactions in new blocks:

Bitcoin

Average block time: 600 seconds
Maximum block size: 1,000,000 bytes
Maximum number of transactions of 400 bytes (approximately, it seems to be the average transaction size): 2500

That is, Bitcoin is roughly able to confirm 2500 transactions every 600 seconds, leading to a confirmation speed of 4.166667 tx/sec.
Now, let's have a look at what Burst can do:

Burst (source: constants defined at https://github.com/burst-team/burstcoin/blob/master/src/java/nxt/Constants.java)

We'll initially consider only the transactions per block limit of 255, assuming all the transactions are of the lowest size possible.

Average block time: 240 seconds
Maximum transaction count: 255

Therefore, Burst is able to include about 255 tx/(240 sec) = 1.0625 tx/sec, that is its speed is as little as just 25% that of Bitcoin. This is the best case scenario, where each transaction is as little as possible.

But it seems to be another limit on the network speed: maximum payload length is 44800 bytes. This further reduces network's ability to put transactions into the blockchain: transactions allow for the inclusion of extra information (such as messages or notes up to 1000 characters), and this could strongly decrease network speed. In case of a large adoption of Burst, it wouldn't even be easy to just do a simple transaction. Who could be crazy enough to chat with another Burst user by sending messages into the blockchain? Or who could be interested in paying high fees for just setting the account's name?

If we also think about the other offered functions, such as Marketplace, it becomes even clearer that this limit is very badly chosen.

If we want Burst to have a future, we have to make it as competitive as possible. And, as of today, it isn't. Instead, it actually worsen the problem of the block size that Bitcoin, the most used cryptocurrency nowadays, is facing just now.

What do you think about this problem? Do you really think this is not important, and everything will just work fine, even if we close our eyes and pretend not to see what clearly is a problem of great concern?

Richard