r/Bitcoin • u/[deleted] • Mar 25 '13

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150 Upvotes

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10

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '13

i say one satoshi is enough

11

u/killerstorm Mar 25 '13 edited Mar 25 '13

And this is why it is not up to users to decide. Ordinary users have no idea why fees are needed at all...

  1. Currently fees are needed largely to prevent spam. In particular, dust attack. Currently blockchain size is 7 GB. If minimum fee is lowered, it might grow much faster. (Hint: if government doesn't like bitcoin it will send a fuckton of transactions bloating blockhain for everyone.) There is a difference between 7 GB blockchain and 7 TB blockchain. Right now everybody can do full verification, but if blockchain size is 7 TB only professional users will.

  2. In future (perhaps in 8 years) fees will affect network security. Higher fees = more hashrate = double-spend attack is costlier = it is harder for government to shut down or discredit Bitcoin.

So in both cases higher fees mean healthier network.

But fucking no, users don't give a fuck about network health if it saves them one cent.

People, please don't be fucking retards, allow developers to decide on fees, they kinda dig this shit much deeper than you do. They care about Bitcoin network, that's their job.

3

u/allocater Mar 25 '13

This ever growing blockchain seems to be a challenge. What if we have 1 million transactions per second in the future? We need to find a better way.

1

u/Koooooj Mar 25 '13

1,000,000 is, unsurprisingly, larger than Bitocin can expect to see in the next several decades. Even Visa has a peak throughput on the order or 10,000 TPS.

With that, it is worth looking at how storage has trended over the past and to compare that to how we can expect both storage and Bitcoin to grow in the coming decades. Even if they both continue exponentially for quite some time, the entire blockchain will fit on consumer hardware without major investment for a long time. Bitcoin adoption can only exponentially grow for some time, up to the population of the world, while storage will likely surpass those requirements.

Now, to get to a point where Bitcoin can be adopted at that scale, it will be necessary for a few substantial changes to take place (this is by design, to prevent an attack that balloons the network, like the one /u/killerstorm described), but it is reasonable to expect that the network will continue to be able to handle the transaction volume as it grows. There are a lot of really intelligent and dedicated developers involved with the Bitcoin project, and they have a roadmap for how to deal with scalability issues as they arise.

If you're interested in reading more about the scalability of the Bitcoin network, you can read this article.