The Decentralist Perspective, or Why Bitcoin Might Need Small Blocks

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 &quot;signal&quot; and effectively decreasing the SNR when all you&#x27;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 <i>at some sharper rate that I won&#x27;t just pull from my ass</i>.<p>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 <i>should</i> be expensive, because you hurt every other eardrum.

Love this response in the comment section by Jacob Eliosoff:<p>&gt; My point isn&#x27;t who&#x27;s right and who&#x27;s wrong. It&#x27;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<p>Here&#x27;s one way the article is wrong:<p>&gt; The main (though not only) reason bigger blocks favor bigger miners has to do with latency.<p>Gregory Maxwell (a small block advocate) himself has said this is not true:<p>&gt;The technical&#x2F;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).<p>Also calling Small Block advocates &quot;Decentralists&quot; is really silly in my opinion. Both sides want increased decentralization.

So the main argument is that large blocks take longer to propagate, giving an advantage to the miners that find them.<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;gavinandresen&#x2F;e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;gavinandresen&#x2F;e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.i-programmer.info&#x2F;programming&#x2F;theory&#x2F;4641-the-invertible-bloom-filter.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.i-programmer.info&#x2F;programming&#x2F;theory&#x2F;4641-the-inv...</a>

Instead of changing block size, why don&#x27;t they change block time? 10&#x2F;8 min instead of 10min, no latency issue, faster transactions, space for everyone, seems like a win-win?<p>Just need to adapt block reward and halving, it doesn&#x27;t seem to be a big deal since every others altcoins plays with these parameters.<p>Or am I missing something?

&gt;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.<p>&gt;“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…”<p>Is it just me or was this article generated by a markov bot?