This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups unwilling to compromise on the most basic points. I suspect that SegWit2x will end up taking over the network, but I'd rather see a pure large block faction like Bitcoin ABC. Either way the core developers are going to lose control of a 40 billion dollar network, possibly one of the biggest fails in modern technology. They will be left on a minority chain which will have little relevance going forward. I've said it before but anyone who put money into Blockstream has to seriously be wondering what the hell they are doing, there CEO should have been kicked out a long time ago, he has no relevant experience to actually running an organization and has royally messed it up.
> SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team
I disagree. SegWit2x is a misguided attempt to make Bitcoin "more efficient" without realizing that it puts at risk the core value proposition of Bitcoin: censorship resistance.
At the root of this debate is a disagreement about what the blockchain is for. On one side, you have all the developers working on the Core project and activists like Amir Taaki or "crypto-economists" like Paul Sztorc (creator of the decentralized prediction market which Augur is trying to re-implement), who believe the blockchain is for financial sovereignty. Bitcoin mining is a way to decentralize transaction validation, after all, such that no central authority can tell you which transaction is valid or not. Therefore, if you cannot run a full node and validate the mined blockchain yourself, Bitcoin is basically pointless because you have lost your ability to transact with censorship resistance. Increasing the size of blocks makes full blockchain validation more difficult. The risk then is miners mining a blockchain and you are not being able to contest it. The miners can decide not to include your transaction, they can require KYC for you to submit a transaction, etc., and you will have little leverage against this because you won't be able to validate the work they are doing.
On the other side, you have businesses and corporations (BitPay, BitMain, etc.) who believe that the blockchain can replace VISA, essentially, so they will do anything to make the system more efficient. This includes sacrificing decentralization and making it more difficult for users to validate the blockchain. They believe that being a full node doesn't matter and all that matters is replacing whatever current financial institutions are running with a blockchain.
What the second side of the debate is missing, however, is that the blockchain will never be as efficient as VISA. There is a reason why when over 70 of the world's largest banks got together at R3 and assessed how Bitcoin can help them transact, they came up with a distributed database called Corda and not a blockchain: blockchains are not efficient [1]. They are inefficient but they are useful because they are decentralized and enable permissionless transactions.
"I suspect that SegWit2x will end up taking over the network"
What? They had first release like yesterday, the project has released one tarball, no packaging, no very good marketing etc. The biggest marketers seem to be the tinfoil hat opponents who fear the fork so much that they speak about it everywhere.
I don't think it is at all likely that segwit2x client will gain support. Or if it will gain support, it will take years at this point for it to gain any considerable support.
The whole thins is totally exaggerated. People have nothing to talk about, so they will invent tinfoil hat scenarios and discuss those. Bitcoin protocol has staid fundamentally the same for many years and it is pretty likely that it will stay that way.
Core developers never had control in the first place. No one has control; it's weird to see so many people applying authoritarian concepts to an anti-authoritarian system.
You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are.
There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visible engineering expertise, and has has backed a series of code projects over the past two years all of which have been spectacular failures: BU, XT, Classic, ABC and BTC1-- all have had significant vulnerabilities.
Their goal: Very large blocks that cannot cross the Great Firewall of China easily, increasing Chinese centralization.
On the other side you have The Engineers: Hundreds of engineers who have contributed to Core, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto and going forward to the present day. They are called "corporate" because Blockstream hired some of them, but the blocksteram engineers are prominent only because of their contributions and smarts, not because they exercise any control.
These engineers for the past 8 years have delivered quality software and 2 years ago delivered Segwit-- a misnomer that covers a large number of improvements for bitcoin that require a soft fork to activate. Segwit enables scaling and so many more applications to be built on Bitcoin, including smart contracts and side chains.
However, Segwit also reveals an exploit. An exploit that Jihan Wu has been using to give him a competitive advantage and which is in part why he has been able to gain centralized control over bitcoin hashing. This exploit is called ASICBOOST and segwit would put a stop to it.
This is why Jihan has opposed it.
Worse the corporates have spent millions on a 50-cent army of shills to spread FUD and misinformation and conspiracy theories to discredit core.
At the end of the day-- its the engineers who know what they are doing vs the corporate shills who sneer and think it can't be that hard to deliver bitcoin software -- but have so far completely failed to deliver anything that wasn't unmitigated crap.
How it's going to play out:
Jihan Wu has declared he will hard fork his own coin (and remove Segwit) because the real bitcoin industry and core agreed on Segwit2X .... he has hash power, so he may be able to make his coin dominant... for awhile. But core has solutions to this, and at the end of the day we will likely see chain split with the hash power on one side and the engineering resources on the other. That hash power advantage can be fixed within a few weeks.... the lack of engineering talent can't be fixed for love nor money-- as any engineer worth a damn understands what is at stake and will never join Jihan's Jihad.
> I've said it before but anyone who put money into Blockstream has to seriously be wondering what the hell they are doing
Thank you!
As someone who has put money into Blockstream, I can assure you I'm following the situation very close.
Blockstream has few developers contributing to Core and associating with it is a very partial and poor view.
It is not a conventional company and the actual CEO (recently nominated) has the ability to keep such a group of talented minds together.
I humbly consider Blockstream the best investment I have done in my life under many aspects but the main one is the quality of the people working in it.
On the other hand, Bitcoin ABC puts a 40 billion dollar network in the hands of one developer. Nevermind the other dozen or so who have context and expertise from maintaining the codebase for years.
As someone who has put money into Blockstream I must say:
1. I follow the situation very close
2. The CEO was nominated not long ago
3. He has got the ability to keep such a group of talented minds together
4. Blockstream is not a conventional company
5. Core is an independent group of talented developers and FEW of Blockstream founders are part of it
6. I humbly admit that Blockstream is the best investments of my life under many aspects the main of which being the quality of the people working in it.
Core is one of the best managed team I know of: they stay true to the most important feature of bitcoin: decentralization. They do this on many levels. What most people don't realize is that Bitcoin is the best method for storing value even in it's current form, without any protocol update. Also value storage is the reason why Bitcoin is hyped so much, and why it's so emotional for people to talk about it.
Any update to the network that is able to take away from it's value storage characteristics is bad, and core deeply understands this, unlike many other teams.
Good luck with that, I for one will be dumping any bitcoin ABC or unlimited coins. If it by some miracle ends up as the dominant chain, I will walk away from bitcoin for good.
It isn't up to just the above parties, but also to the people who actually hold bitcoin. Those holders who prefer sound money will sell on the chain that isn't.
I completely agree with everything you've said. The only thing I'll add is that Blockstream's CEO was replaced. It was originally Austin Hill and the current CEO Adam Back replaced him. Not an improvement, but it was a change.
I always wonder how people external to an organisation can judge the work of an executive. Are you maybe solely looking at outcomes, that may only slightly be influenced by his decisions and dominated by randomness and other factors anyway?
The basic question is how to scale; off-chain or on-chain. The rest is just theatrics and typical nerdy hyperbole.
One side of the fight (Core / blockstream) wants to scale off-chain, pushing transactions to side-chains and/or lighting networks, and want to profit from off-chain solutions.
The other side of the fight (segwit2x / miners) wants to scale on-chain, making the blocks bigger, and profit from block fees.
Both sides have pros and cons.
Pros of off-chain solutions - more scalable, don't need expensive confirmations for each transaction, more long-term. Cons: the solutions don't exist yet and might be vaporware; segwit etc are just stepping stones.
Pros of on-chain solutions - making the blocks larger can be done now, no need to wait for new software and new networks. Cons - makes the blocks larger, which makes running bitcoin nodes harder. Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever).
The discussion about segwit is in reality just discussion about how to scale, and who profits.
As for me, I don't really care, Bitcoin is inefficient either way
> Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever).
The whitepaper itself mentions that the Merkle tree can be pruned so that doesn't need to be the case. Do you know why there hasn't been more effort towards implementing that yet?
I think you understate the cons of the on-chain solutions. This said as a big-blocker myself.
I think the size of the node is a consideration, but not a huge one -- before we started butting up against the limit, blocks were naturally much smaller than the 1MB limit -- the fear of spam and dust transactions never materialized, so there's no reason to expect that the economics are fundamentally different now.
The biggest con by far is the hard-forking nature of the change. Changing the limit means that clients will have to accept blocks that they currently don't accept. This applies to core, of course, but also to the innumerable other implementations of the bitcoin protocol. Don't make the mistake of thinking that core is the only player here -- a hard fork is trouble for everyone, miners included, and has a substantial risk of causing two viable chains to appear, which is much more of a disaster for Bitcoin (because of how long it takes to adjust difficulty) than it was for Ethereum. With sufficient consensus, this becomes less of a problem for the same reason -- the defunct 5% chain (with 95% consensus) will take 280 days to converge on a new difficulty, during which time that network will be extremely congested. But if miners are misconfigured, etc., even if there is consensus there may be an unintentional hard fork.
The second biggest problem is the rise in the risk of orphaned blocks. This, I think, is probably what holds most miners back -- the longer it takes to transmit and verify a block, the greater the chance of a block being orphaned is. Orphans hurt the security of the network by making it so that a smaller fraction of the net hashing power is actually being applied to the problem of securing the network. As much as people complain that the proof-of-work is "wasteful" in the ecological sense, wasting even that wasted work would make nobody happy.
Segwit, on the other side of the debate, has the attachment to off-chain scaling, but also offers a solution to transaction malleability, which is a huge problem for bitcoin businesses as it can be difficult to tell whether a transaction ever made it to the network, much less rely on features like child-pays-for-parent. Since the current version of segwit is a soft fork, it should, in theory, work with existing non-core clients, and the Litecoin adoption should give us some information on how that works in practice, but Litecoin doesn't have nearly the adoption that Bitcoin does, so it's hard to generalize.
> One side of the fight (Core / blockstream) wants to scale off-chain, pushing transactions to side-chains and/or lighting networks, and want to profit from off-chain solutions.
I think that gives the wrong impression. First off, Core != Blockstream.
Secondly, the consensus amongst Core developers, as I read it, is they want as much on-chain as possible. Their definition of possible is what can a Bitcoin client handle on the average user's PC. The problem is that, today, the answer is not much. Increasing the blocksize to allow more transactions requires an exponential increase in the computational requirements of the Bitcoin client. So it's not really feasible to just "scale on-chain", as of today.
SegWit accomplishes two things. 1) It's a stopgap. It's an effective blocksize increase to 2MB, and it enables lightning network which should hopefully reduce congestion on the Bitcoin network. 2) It's an optimization; SegWit transactions are cheaper than traditional transactions.
SegWit is just a stopgap while developers implement a series of optimizations to the Bitcoin network that allow it to handle more capacity, without increasing the computational resources to the point where average users can't run the software.
But those optimizations are going to take a long time.
The days are counting down to the "Segwit2X" rollout, the idea supported in the "New York Agreement" (NYA)[0].
There is a contingency plan in place should the Core-supported User Activated Soft Fork become activated.[1]
Segwit2X has working code, has been tested in beta, and is now in RC.[2]
Without commenting on the merits of the different approaches, the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator. To call it a "Civil War" is not an exaggeration.
After working in the space for about a year, after being a developer and enthusiast surrounding crypto since the early days of BTC this "bickering among core devs" is nothing new.
Any press or "talks" that say otherwise are either being influenced with serious bias or are simply reporting false information.
I like DLT tech, however, if bitcoin has shown us anything it's that once you solve the double-spend problem you're still left with an even more grotesque problem of governance.
People pick fun at ETH since it has a "single leader", but Vitalik is more of a back-seat conductor than a "grand leader". Also, most arguments of "bitcoin being a truly decentralized platform because our devs are decentralized" can easily be diffused by vaguely looking into how BlockStream operates...
The political shit-storm being paraded by BTC needs to end soon, we really don't need another 2-3 years of douchey BTC core devs arguing on the internet and bad-mouthing any project that isn't BTC.
Exactly! Could you imagine if we could watch a live twitter fueled debate about how to upgrade our central banking system? It's a beautiful sight. Flawed, but beautiful.
I'm starting to see a bit clearer on how a fork would pan out:
Miners: Hashing power has little influence. As long as there are miners, and two chains rejecting each other transactions will be processed. At first, transactions processing might take a while, but difficulty will adapt. This will create two legitimate currencies. Now everybody in possession of 1 BTC would have 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb.
Exchanges: Little power. They will trade both BTCa and BTCb, and accept commissions.
Trader of goods, in embedded devices: They might have to modify their client to accept both currencies, but they would have to follow the market rates. Otherwise they would have to suffer income loss from people using them to profit from arbitrating the markets.
BTC-rich individuals: They have now 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb. But there is transaction replayability. If they spend 1 BTCa, their BTCb can also get spend the same way. And they lose their BTCb. Chains have a strategic advantage to replay transactions getting to the other one because: 1) they get to keep the commission, 2) they ascertain themselves as more encompassing economically (not sure on this one maybe, they want to stay neutral).
Now, if BTC-holders can wallet-emptying-double-spend them to 2 different addresses they control on the 2 chains. And, compared to the ones who got their transaction replayed, they have kept both their BTCa and BTCb.
TL;DR: IMHO, come the technical fork, some BTC-holders will be tumbling until they irrevocably acquire their BTCa + BTCb, and use them to make runs on the markets, effectively materializing the economic fork.
----
I'd love the opinion of someone who lived through the ETH-ETC split, especially about the transaction replayability part.
I was there at the ETH/ETC split and replay was a thing. Someone put together a special smart contract that received 2 addresses (one for the ETH chain and one for the ETC chain), checked which chain you were in and wired ether to either address accordingly.
After doing that (and because valid transaction execution was contingent on the actual chain you were in) each wallet became independent and you were free to use funds in each as desired.
I'm not clear on what a BTC equivalent of this operation would be. Seems like smart contracts saved the day, as trying to move BTC to 2 different wallets on split chains by hand risks a race condition.
The scary thing is that the developers want to go from initial release of new code to wide deployment in a few days. This on something where any security flaw can be attacked anonymously and profitably. What could possibly go wrong?
99% of the code has been in testing for a long time. Also the guy leading Segwit2x, Jeff Garzik, is a pro with a ton of opensource experience. You probably run his code on your Linux box and don't even realize it. He wrote rngd for example.
What is Bitcoin and friends good for right now besides speculating with and trading for other currencies?
A while back there was a BTC marketplace where among other things, I spent 1 BTC on a steam key for the game Portal (a poor trade in hindsight).
But they shut down and the only other place that I can think of that accepts BTC is humblebundle.com - and presumably they convert it to USD right away.
Actually:
> Bitcoin payments have been disabled for the Humble Capcom Rising Bundle.
it is great for money laundering which is why it is so popular in china. You can buy btc in cash no questions asked and it is untraceble and then sell it at a legit exchange in another country and claim it as legit income or just move it from country to country bypassing currency controls in places like china where no bank will allow you to send more than 50k USD per year out of the country
I just moved ~20% of my crypto holdings from BTC to LTC. The rest I'll likely keep close to 40% of my cryptoholdings in BTC, but move it onto my own wallet. If a fork actually happens, I'd prefer to be in control of the private keys.
It's kind of odd that there is still so much FUD about segwit, as it has already activated on LTC. It hasn't appeared to open any security holes.
The arguments about Segwit are not about security holes. Segwit would enable off-chain transactions using systems that are patented and centralized, allowing others to control things on top of the bitcoin network. LTC isn't used for purchases, so Segwit hasn't had much of an effect there.
Has there even been a single Segwit transaction on the LTC network? No problems have appeared because no one uses it. More generally very few people use LTC
On one side you have Chinese miners and one developer gunning for segwit2x because it gives them a significant advantage related to their hardware.
On the other side you have the other dozen or so core developers who want a more conservative approach. As a side-effect this version levels the playing field for miners.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why not both? It doesn't appear that the two strategies are mutually exclusive. Is it just that SegWitX2 is considered too rushed? Is it just that miners have a vested interest in maintaining influence?
Personally it seems like smart contracts and other similar services beget an ecosystem that could swell the market cap by a significant amount, I assume miners would have a long term goal of doing just that.
As a disclaimer, I own Bitcoin, but I'm definitely a layman and I don't really have a horse in the race. What I'm most concerned is what these changes are going to accomplish when looking back 10 years from now. I'm in BTC for the long-term, and this whole thing stinks of petty bias and tribal power plays.
Can someone show some math on how much more expensive it would be to run a node if block size is allowed to increase from 1 MB? It sounds like a silly made-up excuse.
Not really a "civil war"-- basically, bitcoin will keep working, even without the segwit upgrade if it gets delayed another year or two, and there might be some new altcoins that could be spun off from the current bitcoin, and there might be some brand confusion for a while as people wonder whether something incompatible with the bitcoin network is still bitcoin.
Can someone please ELI5 why ASICBOOST would be considered an exploit?
Especially considering Satoshi clearly got caught off guard by the quick rise in GPU mining-- which led to the bootstrapping mechanism putting Bitcoin in fewer hands than it otherwise would have. But I never saw Satoshi call GPU mining an exploit.
[+] [-] buttershakes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hudon|8 years ago|reply
I disagree. SegWit2x is a misguided attempt to make Bitcoin "more efficient" without realizing that it puts at risk the core value proposition of Bitcoin: censorship resistance.
At the root of this debate is a disagreement about what the blockchain is for. On one side, you have all the developers working on the Core project and activists like Amir Taaki or "crypto-economists" like Paul Sztorc (creator of the decentralized prediction market which Augur is trying to re-implement), who believe the blockchain is for financial sovereignty. Bitcoin mining is a way to decentralize transaction validation, after all, such that no central authority can tell you which transaction is valid or not. Therefore, if you cannot run a full node and validate the mined blockchain yourself, Bitcoin is basically pointless because you have lost your ability to transact with censorship resistance. Increasing the size of blocks makes full blockchain validation more difficult. The risk then is miners mining a blockchain and you are not being able to contest it. The miners can decide not to include your transaction, they can require KYC for you to submit a transaction, etc., and you will have little leverage against this because you won't be able to validate the work they are doing.
On the other side, you have businesses and corporations (BitPay, BitMain, etc.) who believe that the blockchain can replace VISA, essentially, so they will do anything to make the system more efficient. This includes sacrificing decentralization and making it more difficult for users to validate the blockchain. They believe that being a full node doesn't matter and all that matters is replacing whatever current financial institutions are running with a blockchain.
What the second side of the debate is missing, however, is that the blockchain will never be as efficient as VISA. There is a reason why when over 70 of the world's largest banks got together at R3 and assessed how Bitcoin can help them transact, they came up with a distributed database called Corda and not a blockchain: blockchains are not efficient [1]. They are inefficient but they are useful because they are decentralized and enable permissionless transactions.
[1] https://www.corda.net/2016/10/r3-corda-makes-different/
[+] [-] jerguismi|8 years ago|reply
What? They had first release like yesterday, the project has released one tarball, no packaging, no very good marketing etc. The biggest marketers seem to be the tinfoil hat opponents who fear the fork so much that they speak about it everywhere.
I don't think it is at all likely that segwit2x client will gain support. Or if it will gain support, it will take years at this point for it to gain any considerable support.
The whole thins is totally exaggerated. People have nothing to talk about, so they will invent tinfoil hat scenarios and discuss those. Bitcoin protocol has staid fundamentally the same for many years and it is pretty likely that it will stay that way.
[+] [-] knocte|8 years ago|reply
You seem to have taken sides against BitcoinCore team, following the typical conspiracy theories. But FYI, Blockstream is not Core, Core is not Blockstream. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/622bjp/bitcoin_cor...
[+] [-] statoshi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rothbardrand|8 years ago|reply
There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visible engineering expertise, and has has backed a series of code projects over the past two years all of which have been spectacular failures: BU, XT, Classic, ABC and BTC1-- all have had significant vulnerabilities.
Their goal: Very large blocks that cannot cross the Great Firewall of China easily, increasing Chinese centralization.
On the other side you have The Engineers: Hundreds of engineers who have contributed to Core, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto and going forward to the present day. They are called "corporate" because Blockstream hired some of them, but the blocksteram engineers are prominent only because of their contributions and smarts, not because they exercise any control.
These engineers for the past 8 years have delivered quality software and 2 years ago delivered Segwit-- a misnomer that covers a large number of improvements for bitcoin that require a soft fork to activate. Segwit enables scaling and so many more applications to be built on Bitcoin, including smart contracts and side chains.
However, Segwit also reveals an exploit. An exploit that Jihan Wu has been using to give him a competitive advantage and which is in part why he has been able to gain centralized control over bitcoin hashing. This exploit is called ASICBOOST and segwit would put a stop to it.
This is why Jihan has opposed it.
Worse the corporates have spent millions on a 50-cent army of shills to spread FUD and misinformation and conspiracy theories to discredit core.
At the end of the day-- its the engineers who know what they are doing vs the corporate shills who sneer and think it can't be that hard to deliver bitcoin software -- but have so far completely failed to deliver anything that wasn't unmitigated crap.
How it's going to play out:
Jihan Wu has declared he will hard fork his own coin (and remove Segwit) because the real bitcoin industry and core agreed on Segwit2X .... he has hash power, so he may be able to make his coin dominant... for awhile. But core has solutions to this, and at the end of the day we will likely see chain split with the hash power on one side and the engineering resources on the other. That hash power advantage can be fixed within a few weeks.... the lack of engineering talent can't be fixed for love nor money-- as any engineer worth a damn understands what is at stake and will never join Jihan's Jihad.
[+] [-] gabridome|8 years ago|reply
Thank you! As someone who has put money into Blockstream, I can assure you I'm following the situation very close.
Blockstream has few developers contributing to Core and associating with it is a very partial and poor view.
It is not a conventional company and the actual CEO (recently nominated) has the ability to keep such a group of talented minds together.
I humbly consider Blockstream the best investment I have done in my life under many aspects but the main one is the quality of the people working in it.
[+] [-] sp821543|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabridome|8 years ago|reply
As someone who has put money into Blockstream I must say:
1. I follow the situation very close
2. The CEO was nominated not long ago
3. He has got the ability to keep such a group of talented minds together
4. Blockstream is not a conventional company
5. Core is an independent group of talented developers and FEW of Blockstream founders are part of it
6. I humbly admit that Blockstream is the best investments of my life under many aspects the main of which being the quality of the people working in it.
[+] [-] propter_hoc|8 years ago|reply
He was. http://www.montrealintechnology.com/austin-hill-out-as-block...
[+] [-] xiphias|8 years ago|reply
Any update to the network that is able to take away from it's value storage characteristics is bad, and core deeply understands this, unlike many other teams.
[+] [-] martinko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-corporate-takeover-attemp...
[+] [-] kkleindev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shp0ngle|8 years ago|reply
One side of the fight (Core / blockstream) wants to scale off-chain, pushing transactions to side-chains and/or lighting networks, and want to profit from off-chain solutions.
The other side of the fight (segwit2x / miners) wants to scale on-chain, making the blocks bigger, and profit from block fees.
Both sides have pros and cons.
Pros of off-chain solutions - more scalable, don't need expensive confirmations for each transaction, more long-term. Cons: the solutions don't exist yet and might be vaporware; segwit etc are just stepping stones.
Pros of on-chain solutions - making the blocks larger can be done now, no need to wait for new software and new networks. Cons - makes the blocks larger, which makes running bitcoin nodes harder. Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever).
The discussion about segwit is in reality just discussion about how to scale, and who profits.
As for me, I don't really care, Bitcoin is inefficient either way
[+] [-] kinghajj|8 years ago|reply
The whitepaper itself mentions that the Merkle tree can be pruned so that doesn't need to be the case. Do you know why there hasn't been more effort towards implementing that yet?
[+] [-] andrewla|8 years ago|reply
I think the size of the node is a consideration, but not a huge one -- before we started butting up against the limit, blocks were naturally much smaller than the 1MB limit -- the fear of spam and dust transactions never materialized, so there's no reason to expect that the economics are fundamentally different now.
The biggest con by far is the hard-forking nature of the change. Changing the limit means that clients will have to accept blocks that they currently don't accept. This applies to core, of course, but also to the innumerable other implementations of the bitcoin protocol. Don't make the mistake of thinking that core is the only player here -- a hard fork is trouble for everyone, miners included, and has a substantial risk of causing two viable chains to appear, which is much more of a disaster for Bitcoin (because of how long it takes to adjust difficulty) than it was for Ethereum. With sufficient consensus, this becomes less of a problem for the same reason -- the defunct 5% chain (with 95% consensus) will take 280 days to converge on a new difficulty, during which time that network will be extremely congested. But if miners are misconfigured, etc., even if there is consensus there may be an unintentional hard fork.
The second biggest problem is the rise in the risk of orphaned blocks. This, I think, is probably what holds most miners back -- the longer it takes to transmit and verify a block, the greater the chance of a block being orphaned is. Orphans hurt the security of the network by making it so that a smaller fraction of the net hashing power is actually being applied to the problem of securing the network. As much as people complain that the proof-of-work is "wasteful" in the ecological sense, wasting even that wasted work would make nobody happy.
Segwit, on the other side of the debate, has the attachment to off-chain scaling, but also offers a solution to transaction malleability, which is a huge problem for bitcoin businesses as it can be difficult to tell whether a transaction ever made it to the network, much less rely on features like child-pays-for-parent. Since the current version of segwit is a soft fork, it should, in theory, work with existing non-core clients, and the Litecoin adoption should give us some information on how that works in practice, but Litecoin doesn't have nearly the adoption that Bitcoin does, so it's hard to generalize.
[+] [-] fpgaminer|8 years ago|reply
I think that gives the wrong impression. First off, Core != Blockstream.
Secondly, the consensus amongst Core developers, as I read it, is they want as much on-chain as possible. Their definition of possible is what can a Bitcoin client handle on the average user's PC. The problem is that, today, the answer is not much. Increasing the blocksize to allow more transactions requires an exponential increase in the computational requirements of the Bitcoin client. So it's not really feasible to just "scale on-chain", as of today.
SegWit accomplishes two things. 1) It's a stopgap. It's an effective blocksize increase to 2MB, and it enables lightning network which should hopefully reduce congestion on the Bitcoin network. 2) It's an optimization; SegWit transactions are cheaper than traditional transactions.
SegWit is just a stopgap while developers implement a series of optimizations to the Bitcoin network that allow it to handle more capacity, without increasing the computational resources to the point where average users can't run the software.
But those optimizations are going to take a long time.
[+] [-] apeace|8 years ago|reply
There is a contingency plan in place should the Core-supported User Activated Soft Fork become activated.[1]
Segwit2X has working code, has been tested in beta, and is now in RC.[2]
Without commenting on the merits of the different approaches, the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator. To call it a "Civil War" is not an exaggeration.
[0] https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-conse...
[1] https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14...
[2] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x...
[+] [-] arcaster|8 years ago|reply
Any press or "talks" that say otherwise are either being influenced with serious bias or are simply reporting false information.
I like DLT tech, however, if bitcoin has shown us anything it's that once you solve the double-spend problem you're still left with an even more grotesque problem of governance.
People pick fun at ETH since it has a "single leader", but Vitalik is more of a back-seat conductor than a "grand leader". Also, most arguments of "bitcoin being a truly decentralized platform because our devs are decentralized" can easily be diffused by vaguely looking into how BlockStream operates...
The political shit-storm being paraded by BTC needs to end soon, we really don't need another 2-3 years of douchey BTC core devs arguing on the internet and bad-mouthing any project that isn't BTC.
[+] [-] xutopia|8 years ago|reply
Compare with how our usual currencies are handled. Behind closed doors with powerful banks or private companies deciding for our governments.
[+] [-] campbelltown|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73ver|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BenoitP|8 years ago|reply
Miners: Hashing power has little influence. As long as there are miners, and two chains rejecting each other transactions will be processed. At first, transactions processing might take a while, but difficulty will adapt. This will create two legitimate currencies. Now everybody in possession of 1 BTC would have 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb.
Exchanges: Little power. They will trade both BTCa and BTCb, and accept commissions.
Trader of goods, in embedded devices: They might have to modify their client to accept both currencies, but they would have to follow the market rates. Otherwise they would have to suffer income loss from people using them to profit from arbitrating the markets.
BTC-rich individuals: They have now 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb. But there is transaction replayability. If they spend 1 BTCa, their BTCb can also get spend the same way. And they lose their BTCb. Chains have a strategic advantage to replay transactions getting to the other one because: 1) they get to keep the commission, 2) they ascertain themselves as more encompassing economically (not sure on this one maybe, they want to stay neutral).
Now, if BTC-holders can wallet-emptying-double-spend them to 2 different addresses they control on the 2 chains. And, compared to the ones who got their transaction replayed, they have kept both their BTCa and BTCb.
TL;DR: IMHO, come the technical fork, some BTC-holders will be tumbling until they irrevocably acquire their BTCa + BTCb, and use them to make runs on the markets, effectively materializing the economic fork.
----
I'd love the opinion of someone who lived through the ETH-ETC split, especially about the transaction replayability part.
[+] [-] gomox|8 years ago|reply
After doing that (and because valid transaction execution was contingent on the actual chain you were in) each wallet became independent and you were free to use funds in each as desired.
This is the contract:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xaa1a6e3e6ef20068f7f8d8c835d2d...
And this is the related helper that checks which chain you are in:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x2bd2326c993dfaef84f696526064f...
I'm not clear on what a BTC equivalent of this operation would be. Seems like smart contracts saved the day, as trying to move BTC to 2 different wallets on split chains by hand risks a race condition.
[+] [-] woah|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|8 years ago|reply
- They have twice as much money (yay!)
- They have twice as much money but the value is split, so it's worth approximately the same.
- One of the branches wins or mostly wins.
- The split does so much damage that some (all?) value of coins is lost.
[+] [-] rihegher|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nfriedly|8 years ago|reply
A while back there was a BTC marketplace where among other things, I spent 1 BTC on a steam key for the game Portal (a poor trade in hindsight).
But they shut down and the only other place that I can think of that accepts BTC is humblebundle.com - and presumably they convert it to USD right away.
Actually:
> Bitcoin payments have been disabled for the Humble Capcom Rising Bundle.
So, yea, who accepts BTC right now?
[+] [-] marme|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swampangel|8 years ago|reply
Quite a few domain/web hosting/VPS companies accept it, like Namecheap and Namesilo.
Online gambling sites accept it for obvious reasons.
It's hardly ubiquitous, but for some things it's fairly practical.
[+] [-] colordrops|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] placeybordeaux|8 years ago|reply
It's kind of odd that there is still so much FUD about segwit, as it has already activated on LTC. It hasn't appeared to open any security holes.
[+] [-] colordrops|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olegkikin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihuman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp821543|8 years ago|reply
On one side you have Chinese miners and one developer gunning for segwit2x because it gives them a significant advantage related to their hardware.
On the other side you have the other dozen or so core developers who want a more conservative approach. As a side-effect this version levels the playing field for miners.
[+] [-] badloginagain|8 years ago|reply
Personally it seems like smart contracts and other similar services beget an ecosystem that could swell the market cap by a significant amount, I assume miners would have a long term goal of doing just that.
As a disclaimer, I own Bitcoin, but I'm definitely a layman and I don't really have a horse in the race. What I'm most concerned is what these changes are going to accomplish when looking back 10 years from now. I'm in BTC for the long-term, and this whole thing stinks of petty bias and tribal power plays.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hellbanner|8 years ago|reply
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v4.pdf
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38273/have-bitco...
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kanzure|8 years ago|reply
Here is some background:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-segwit2x-scaling-proposal-c...
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/segwit2x-what-you-need-to-know...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/major-exchanges-will-co...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/countdown-segwit-these-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587
https://www.reddit.com/r/sound8bits/comments/5xre70/the_orig...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6mz19j/potential_n...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6mgecw/frankensegw...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-unlimited-miner... or https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/verified-chatlogs-why-jihan-a...
how about some peer review yo, https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017... and https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
Especially considering Satoshi clearly got caught off guard by the quick rise in GPU mining-- which led to the bootstrapping mechanism putting Bitcoin in fewer hands than it otherwise would have. But I never saw Satoshi call GPU mining an exploit.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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