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Can someone give a quick point by point list, what arguments the proponents and opponents of increased blocksize have for their case?
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Please note, this answer was written in Februar 2015. The debate has significantly evolved since then, but I haven't gotten around to updating this answer, yet.
I'm sorry, this kinda turned out less brief than it started.
TL;DR: Very briefly, it is an issue of opposing ideologies:
Proponents wish to provide a common good to everyone and believe the increase in blocksize to be necessary to that end.
Opponents feel that a) it is impossible to introduce a change of that magnitude to Bitcoin at this stage, b) bigger blocks will mess up mining dynamics, or c) the increase changes properties of Bitcoin that shouldn't be changed.
What happened before
Originally, there was no blocksize limit. In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto was envisioning . The blocksize limit was introduced later, when people where starting to play around with bitcoin, but before the value picked up significantly, when a worry came up that people might bloat the blockchain with cheap "spam transactions".?
The problem is that 1MiB of transactions provides such a small capacity that, we'd be limited to seven transactions per second at minimal transaction size, or extrapolating from current transaction sizes, around four transactions per second. The block limit has not been encountered yet, and is therefore not yet a serious restriction, however this is significantly less than competing global payment networks can handle.
The thing is, that Bitcoin has become fairly valuable, and people want different things out of Bitcoin. The "apolitical money" is very political suddenly (as it always has been).
Arguments against increasing
There are quite a few different concerns here:
Bigger blocks will destroy the market for transaction fees
Increasing blocksize will make more room for transactions, which could reduce competition to be included in a block, in turn lowering transaction fees. In the long run, the block reward will dwindle, therefore less money would go towards mining, and the security of the Bitcoin network would wither with the lower income.
Bandwidth requirements are too much for full nodes
At 20MB per block, full nodes would have to download 2.8GB transaction data per day. This will be not only challenging data storage, but might actually be beyond the bandwidth capacity/datacap of some full node maintainers. One must consider especially that full nodes also serve the requests of thin-clients, so upload capacity might be more important than download capacity. However, on internet contracts for home-users upload speed is often significantly lower than download speed.
It has been suggested that a larger blocksize would quickly lead to a large increase of transaction numbers due to .
"Bigger blocks will lead to centralization."
Consensus may not be achievable
Once the first block larger than the 1MiB limit will be mined, a hardfork will occur between the network participants that refuse blocks greater than the limit, and network participants that accept it.
Blocks mined on the old network remain compatible to the new network, but not the other way around. Some voices have announced that they would use the fork as an opportunity to double-spend all their Bitcoins, spending them to themselves on the 1MiB-chain, and selling them on the 20MiB-chain, to profit and drive the new chain in the ground.
Some users suggest that this supporters of that proposal have sufficient Bitcoin holdings and support that they can essentially force failure of the blocksize increase, they presume that exchanges would land on different sides in the discussion, but all users would quickly flock to the "safe old chain", once the "civil war" starts.
Bitcoin is destroying viability of altcoins
An increased Bitcoin blocksize would decrease demand for other blockchains, hurting investors of altcoins.
Bitcoin is not meant for every person on the planet to pay for their every cup of coffee
Some people feel that Bitcoin should be an exclusive privilege for settling between companies and the super-rich. A bigger blocksize would dilute the exclusiveness. They argue that something that is useful, but universally available is worthless. Bitcoin instead is meant to "".
People are feeling that something is being decided without them being consulted
"There is only one proposal, we have no choice."
"We cannot predict how quickly bandwidth will grow, the proposed increase it too much."
"There is no consensus, forking without community support is a dead-end."
"There will be huge problems if we do this."
"Why haven't the miners been asked?"
I have trouble relating to these last statements, as the discussion about the blocksize limit has been going on for years.
Arguments for increasing
The transaction capacity is too low to support a global payment network
4.4 tps (transaction per second) are too few to support a global payment network.
At current network capacity, a bigger demand for transactions would cause regular users to be priced out of the blockchain. One would have to wait forever to have a transaction included in a block, and Bitcoin would eventually only get used to settle between banks, mayor corporations, and the super-rich. The blockchain instead should be accessible to everyone, and therefore the blocksize must be increased. Often, this is followed by the , that the blocksize limit was always meant to be temporary, and the fork being necessary to achieve the vision Satoshi outlined in the .
Greater blocksize will increase total transaction fees
Even in a bigger block, transactions are not a free resource, as they cost bandwidth, data storage, and cause slower block propagation. Already, miners are not always including all transactions. Therefore, a market for transaction fees would exist even with bigger blocks, and more transactions would cause a higher total of transaction fees.
Effective blocksize will not increase over night
The blockchain of the past six years is smaller than 30GiB. It is wrong to assume that with the introduction of a larger limit, the blocks would suddenly fill up quickly, when they haven't done so before.
Consensus will be achieved before the hardfork is initiated
Major payment providers, exchanges, and mining pools will side with the hardfork supporters, causing the opponents to find themselves to be such a small minority that they will be stuck on an irrelevant alternative chain.
Technical issues will be fixed
Slower block propagation due to bigger blocks will be mitigated by Header-first synchronization and . Internet connections will speed up sufficiently in parallel to increasing traffic demands on the network. Datastorage issues will be solved by introduction of a pruned blockchain, where most "full nodes" only keep a limited number of the last blocks, and few full nodes maintain the complete blockchain.
Conclusion
Personally, I think it is the natural progression of Bitcoin to increase the blocksize, as I see potential for Bitcoin to serve a broader audience. However, I do get some points of the contrarians, especially that it is hard to make predictions about how this will all play out.
Further reading is found here (and in a million other places):
About discussion:
Pro increase:
Contra increase:?
? Does anyone have links to the discussion on the introduction of the blocksize limit? I was looking for that.
? I'm still looking for more representative contra-positions. Wading through a few threads of some forums gave me a skin rash, but hardly anything useful.
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How do you get users to fall in love with your product on their first visit? How you do avoid losing visitors on their first visit? Short answer.. you get them to the AHA moment..
There’s a lot of talk and literature about finding the AHA moment.
from Ooga Labs (10 years, 10 companies with at least 10 million users each) and a personal hero of mine recommends spending 50% of technical resources on
or on what he calls the “first user experience”.
You’ll never have more attention from visitors than in that first visit to your website.
It’s up to you to onboard them step by step until they reach what has been dubbed this “AHA moment” also known as the “WOW moment”.
Here are some . It’s only when they have reached that point that visitors will understand the value you offer, will fall in love with you and will be able to explain your value to others.
Sounds perfect right?
The only problem is, it’s often really difficult to know what your AHA moment actually is. Sure you could rely on your assumptions and run with your gut feeling. But as a data obsessed growth hacker I’ve seen too often how our assumptions and gut feeling turned out to be wrong. In this article I’ll try to address how we did this for our team collaboration tool Twoodo . How we were able to discover our AHA moment even though we didn’t have many visitors and little hard data or metrics to rely on.
The Hard truth about Hard Data
Over the years I’ve had countless discussions with other co-founders and growth hackers about finding the AHA moment. I’ve always found that companies with large amounts of visitors and data have an easier time of finding that moment than companies who have very little to work with. If you’re a successful company with millions of daily users of tens of thousands of customers then you can tap into your hard data to find what your AHA moment is. I would recommend hire a rockstar data scientist, give him access to all your logs and ask him to run correlation analysis on each of your features to determine which website events will most highly predict an activated user or a super user.
Unfortunately that’s a luxury that some of us don’t have. So how do you find the AHA moment when you don’t have a data rocket scientist at your disposal or enough data to feed his genius with.
So we did it by hand..
It doesn’t take 100000 users to find your AHA moment. However you do need to have a few who really love you. If you’re at a point where you have 30 or more users/customers who truly love your product, come back to it at the right frequency, who you know are totally addicted, I will argue that you can find your AHA moment. Here’s how:
1. Identify the users:
At Twoodo we’re
addicts. Mixpanel is a user-centric events based analytics tools that can give you invaluable information on what your users are doing on your website (you can also check out ). Basically it shows you what people are doing once they’ve arrived on your site.
Using a simple filtering query on Mixpanel’s Explore tab we were able to identify some “power users”. In this case I’m searching for all our visitors who signed up to our website, did this less than 4 weeks ago and who have already made at least 200 posts on Twoodo. In our experience this is a clear sign of an activated user who understands the value and is being retained by it
I was also careful to exclude all users who had been invited to Twoodo by a friend or colleague as their perception of our value would be positively biased.
I won’t show the results as there are some email addresses in there but the results came back with 42 profiles.
I consider these users to be “very activated” and I now want to find out if they have anything in common with their first visit.
2. Find out what’s happening on a user’s first journey
In the early days we used to do a raw dump of our logs and started analyzing these user’s first Twoodo visit step by step. This is what it looked like..it wasn’t fun.
After a few days of reading these we started planning to parse the logs into excel files to make the process less painful but Mixpanel saved us from having to do that. Another problem with this method is that it only tracked server-side events and couldn’t track browser events. But the idea in both cases is the same:
Recreate a visitor’s first journey step by step.
It’s a long and painful task but if done correctly you will start to see a pattern.
Thanks to tools like Mixpanel and Kissmetrics though the visualization of these events is much clearer. The events have color codes and drop down menus with all the event characteristics. In this example you can see the intensity of usage of an activated user’s first day. This is a screenshot of the visitor flow of a new user in his first minutes and hours. By looking into each event you can understand the visitor’s first user journey.
3. Re-create the journeys
So the next step is to extract the important steps and log them somewhere. After re-creating his journey I found this :
He signed up from the web version (not mobile)
He added his first and last name
He uploaded a profile image
He completed the walkthrough
He created a company and uploaded a company logo
He posted 17 messages
9 of these messages included a task
He viewed the calendar view
He viewed the task view
He added tasks to his calendar
He customized his theme
He logged back in 6 times in 3 days after his 1st visit.
And there.. I have one customer activation journey of a user that got to the AHA moment!!
I then proceeded to do the same thing for the 42 other “super activated users”. I opened a google doc spreadsheet and ran all these events into dedicated columns. Each column = 1 event. Here’s what part of it looked like:
4. Run this on visitors who didn’t get the AHA moment
After running through all 42 profiles I started to find patterns on events that kept coming back up. We found 7 events that almost all our super users had in common. Some of these, like customizing the theme or inviting other people on the first visit, were contrary to our assumptions. We then had a big talk which included a debate over .
This lead us to do the exact same steps but with 50 users who were not activated at all.
We searched for users who had signed up but never came back or visitors who had used us for few days never to come back again. The idea is to compare the ”super activated users” with the lost “non-activated users” and see what the main differences are.
5. Spot the difference
So what had the super users done that the “never to be seen again” visitors hadn’t?
We quickly had a precise picture of events that had been taken by activated visitors and left out by non-activated visitors.
1. They all invited at least 2 people on their first visit even before testing the tool (this was contrary to our assumptions).
2. They input their first and last name.
3. They uploaded a profile picture.
4. They almost all uploaded a company logo.
5. They created at least 5 tasks on their first visit.
6. They came back to the app 7 days consecutively at least.
7. They viewed the task and/or calendar view.
6. Build it into your website
Based on this information we created a B version of our onboarding that would guide new visitors through this journey, step by step and removing all the fluff and friction. They basically HAD to go through these steps.
We put the “invite people to your company” much higher in the funnel.
We made sure visitors would input their first and last name
We created a gamified step by step task list once they arrived on the platform
7. A/B Test
We then ran a careful AB test to verify that we weren’t making a huge mistake. We let the test run for 3 weeks.
The results were quite astounding. With the B version we have an increase in activated visitors of 75%. Not only that but new users were inviting 112% more people to the platform than before. They were also posting 139% more messages and tasks on their first visit. We later also found that activated users were also being retained longer*.
*Of course we were careful to run these stats through a statistical significance calculator. Luckily enough A and B has such a difference in conversions that we didn’t need to run the test too long (2.5 weeks) to reach a significant test.
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