I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
Lightning protocol addresses that. You can make millions of transactions per second [1]. Quite a lot of crypto sites are already supporting it and wallet support is increasing too [2].
> Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.
The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.
No we are not. Lots of devs, miners and businesses got together and forked to BCH.
The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.
Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions):
- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.
- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!
* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.
If you read the bitcoin core release notes going back at least the past 5 years, and look at the road map, every release and every planned addition has improved scalability— many of them very significant improvements.
The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive.
Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes.
But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.
So having a “currency” (its not really; is an asset) being controlled by an unaccountable “Tony cabal of developers” instead of a central bank is better how exactly?
Yeah let's increase block size without a way to control the precedent of size increase so only a very select few groups have the compute power to mine. Yay centralization
"I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers..."
No... we're not.
There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin.
To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_
Big blocks are probably easier to censor and harder to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.
Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority.
You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.
With Segregated Witness (SegWit) enabled on July 21, 2017, the Bitcoin block size has been increased by approximately 1.6 - 2 times. So the TPS should be increased correspondingly.
Bitcoin already scaled on the Bitcoin Cash chain all whilst Bitcoin Core dev payroll was taken over by Blockstream co and Chaincode Labs co who's vested interest lies in limiting the core protocol to sell side-chain tech. The market still trades BTC as Bitcoin because of the strong branding and censorship in various online communities.
All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.
The new "owners" of BTC will not let it grow. BTC was intentionally captured and development-centralized to stop it from being able to scale and become peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.
No, the block size must remain small. I just don't transactions and speed won't be handled on a second layer solution. people who think they want a bigger block size can go with Bitcoin cash or Gavin or whatever consortium was the fork and go with that. Good luck.
Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling.
Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit.
Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.
The article is fairly low-quality. It's more focused on fear-mongering around the perils of machine-judges and trying to make a headline around "if there's someone with commit power then in the end, it's not a decentralized system".
It makes a number of errors, most notably, calling the hashing power spent on securing the network "donations" (quotation marks sic).
Bitcoin has one job: securing the network of transactions.
Bitcoin is a mechanism to aggregate hashing power in order to make it possible to semi-objectively measure the risk of a block being reverted, in fact, this is the only formula in bitcoin's white-paper.
The paper examines a system of economic incentives, and somehow dismiss its key activity as an altruistic "donation". The article goes downhill from this statement onwards, and I couldn't feel like it makes a huge (yet ineffective) effort of deconstructing Bitcoin's governance model.
Some quotes that reinforce the superficial understanding of the Author:
> There are times, however, when two miners can find the
correct nonce for a new block within a few seconds of each other and both broadcast their valid block of transactions (nigh on) simultaneously to the network. This causes a split, or fork, where miners go ‘rushing off’ to mine on top of two competing blocks. Because this form of divergence is endemic
to the blockchain’s mechanics it is referred to here as a systematic fork; the discrepancy should be quickly resolved by network mechanisms (this happens, on average, two or three times a week). Systematic forks are temporary glitches...
These forks are essential to maintaining decentralization as a mechanism to make the network secure: trust the info, not the people that delivered the data, trust the signing mechanism (hash power spent), not the people running the machines.
> Furthermore, the political strategy of a user activated soft fork still requires code developers to create a client that reflects the political will of the market and thus demands the obligatory passage point of a Lead Developer found in version control systems.
Not true -- the UASF measures were not merged into the Bitcoin Core branch. Some code was merged to protect users from potentially problematic interactions with Bitcoin Cash fork.
Modeling Bitcoin's governance system is a daunting task. The author essentially confuses the power developers have with regards to miners: developers know there are things that would never fly with miners, and miners are way more powerful than what is described in the paper.
Are people really trying to re-ignite the blocksize debate in the HN comments section? This battle was waged, every conceivable argument on both sides was made. Small blocks with lightning to scale won, and the big blockers forked into arguably less successful coins like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. Time for everyone to move on.
Not having read the article but having participated in Bitcoin "production" a decent amount[1], I see a lot in common between Bitcoin and the organization of the intentionally non-hierarchical Quakers.
Quakers, despite being religiously-motivated to pursue non-hierarchical expression[2], necessarily adopt organizational structure: committees, clerks of committees, group decision-making about who will take certain roles, i.e. "meetings for worship with attention to business." There is some natural and arguably necessary inclination toward roles and authority for the sake of organizational clarity and efficiency.
What it does not have is empowered leaders with explicit authority, rather positions are cast as being in service of one another, in organizing groups of effort rather than controlling the outcome of the group, and thus tend toward eliciting the active participation of all. Care and attention are taken to minimize the gravitation toward arbitrary and unaccountable authority.
Bitcoin takes a similar approach - necessary roles expressed in service of one another / the general effort, with attention toward guarding against arbitrary or negative expression.
The other side of this relates to thought leadership - in some sense speakers naturally have authority via the Pareto Principle's natural tendency to distribute virtues unequally. However, by embracing a consensus-oriented development practice, the general perspectives are a check against individual mistakes or abuses by those empowered by position or circumstance.
I think maintaining the balance between the gravity of centralization vs the beauty and safety of decentralization requires a continuous effort. Thankfully, it is not solely up to the developers to ensure this - developers, node operators, and miners can each and all be active by refusing to upgrade or otherwise by forking the codebase. I would say that's the key ultimate check against the centralization, that every individual has the ability to vote with their node / personal activity. I'll be curious to hear if the article addressed any of that.
Exchanges trade both in Bitcoin and BitcoinCash, and I've just learned from the paper that they form a tree with a common origin. Does it mean that if I owned Bitcoin before the Bitcoin-BitcoinCash split, I can now spend it on both chains?
yes, but be aware, bcash is plagued with scammers, so as a precaution you should move your coins on bitcoin to another wallet before attempting to use a bcash wallet which could steal your bitcoin private keys.
Commenters will be interested in my interview with Bitcoin Core developer James O'Beirne on the real nature of 'power' in Bitcoin. See here: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/66/
There is both an overt development bureaucracy of Bitcoin and a shadow group. The overt effort is managed by MIT https://dci.mit.edu/ MIT developers have merge access to the Bitcoin official repo, which is truly the real power.
The shadow is who influences these people, and why. It really isn't conspiratorial - it's the long tail of influencers, media, meet-up groups, conventions, exchanges, and people who have a stake in Bitcoin.
Anytime there is a major disagreement, there is a fork. This is how numerous forks were created, the biggest of which are Bitcoin Cash, which later itself forked into Bitcoin Cash SV. A fork is just a group of developers who disagree with the official Bitcoin bureaucracy at MIT. If these dissenters have enough support then the new coin has value.
Bitcoin is old and stable, and through its age and stability it has gained trust. Major changes to Bitcoin simply won't happen anymore. The Lightning Network required very minor changes to the core protocol, and using Bitcoin's constrained tooling developers have (heroically!) engineered a scaling mechanism. It is not yet perfect nor easy to use, but over time the client services around it will improve.
The extreme wariness of core Bitcoin developers ensures that trust is maintained in the protocol. A major disaster in Bitcoin would be very bad for the whole industry.
If you don't like Bitcoin, just create your own coin, or fork from Bitcoin! Such is how so many new coins are made.
I don't believe any active Bitcoin developers work for MIT anymore. Bitcoin development is almost entirely done in the public (obviously security issues are handled in private), not really much place for any kind of 'shadow'.
I don't think meetups/conventions have much role in Bitcoin development either. I stopped going to them entirely because every event is reliably taken over by ICO/altcoin pumpers-- groups who stand to gain a lot by expanding their audience and are willing to pay to send representatives to events.
The same hardware. Miners get both a reward for mining (the fixed set of coins) as well as collecting fees. After they’re all mined, it’ll just be the fees.
Nothing changes except for the missing block reward. At the moment mining a block on BTC will net you about $100K (block reward + fees). If BTC wants to keep the same (relative) security as it has now while having no block reward, the transaction fees have to cover the $100K. With the current 7tps (at most) limit that will have to amount to about $24 per transaction when the blocks are 100% full all the time. If people aren't willing to pay that transaction fee or use an alternative (cheaper) cryptocurrency, the security of the BTC chain will plummet.
are there any recommendations in this paper? Many times with cryptocurrency projects I've found it easier to get anonymous contributions added or considered more heavily compared to having a known persona, since the gatekeepers are not impartial and more often very emotionally driven
Possibly. But you still need a Lead Developer to sign off on decision making. And high net worth individuals will have consolidated voting rights on those decisions. Perhaps if PoS is mixed with other development models?
The article is behind a paywall, but it's essentially a revisionist account of the block size debate of 2017.
This account seems pretty biased to me. For example, it not only gives short shrift to the user activated soft fork (USAF), but gets the basic facts wrong (page 15):
> User activated soft forks require a large amount of coordination, particularly from industry. ...
This is absurd. UASF was supported by far fewer companies than those supporting Segwit2x.
A UASF is a declaration that nodes controlled by a group of users will reject generated blocks failing to conform to certain specifications. In the case of the 2017 incident, the specification was that the block must signal support for segwit, thus ensuring its activation.
> ... The cohesive demand for a node-initiated upgrade of network rules gathers momentum around Bitcoin meet-up groups, forums, blog posts, social networks, conferences and company board rooms. With regard to SegWit, this momentum led to the ‘New York Agreement’ in 2017.
The New York Agreement led to the ill-fated and incompetently executed Segwit2x proposal, not the UASF. The author could have discussed that initiative in detail but didn't. In short, the (single) developer was incompetent and the update didn't even activate properly.
In the same vein: Could we perhaps have the titled changed to something more descriptive? "The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money" better describes that this is about the governing process of the protocol development rather than mining.
This is exactly why decentralized currency is no better than regular currency. Bitcoin is centralized in the hands of a few shady, anonymous exchange owners funding the development.
At least in a capitalist democracy we get to elect the criminals who rob us blind.
The two are not unrelated. If a protocol change creates a forked chain then acceptance of that protocol change is determined by mining the forked chain.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunshinerag|6 years ago|reply
[1] - https://lightning.network
[2] - https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|6 years ago|reply
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
> Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.
The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.
[+] [-] tapland|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kain_niak|6 years ago|reply
The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.
[+] [-] zallarak|6 years ago|reply
- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.
- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!
* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.
[+] [-] cyphertruck|6 years ago|reply
The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive.
Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes.
But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.
[+] [-] johndevor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|6 years ago|reply
I’ve never understood this argument.
[+] [-] blueprint|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrsnuffy|6 years ago|reply
No... we're not.
There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin.
To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_
[+] [-] ArchD|6 years ago|reply
Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority.
You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.
[+] [-] CalmStorm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leondavibe|6 years ago|reply
Years ago BTC once managed 550 000 transactions in a 24 he period
Now at best just over 400 000
So in reality it's more like 5 TPS
[+] [-] rkagerer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nighthawk24|6 years ago|reply
All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.
[+] [-] pokmon|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BigBubbler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathiasrw|6 years ago|reply
Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit.
Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.
[+] [-] eordano|6 years ago|reply
It makes a number of errors, most notably, calling the hashing power spent on securing the network "donations" (quotation marks sic).
Bitcoin has one job: securing the network of transactions.
Bitcoin is a mechanism to aggregate hashing power in order to make it possible to semi-objectively measure the risk of a block being reverted, in fact, this is the only formula in bitcoin's white-paper.
The paper examines a system of economic incentives, and somehow dismiss its key activity as an altruistic "donation". The article goes downhill from this statement onwards, and I couldn't feel like it makes a huge (yet ineffective) effort of deconstructing Bitcoin's governance model.
Some quotes that reinforce the superficial understanding of the Author:
> There are times, however, when two miners can find the correct nonce for a new block within a few seconds of each other and both broadcast their valid block of transactions (nigh on) simultaneously to the network. This causes a split, or fork, where miners go ‘rushing off’ to mine on top of two competing blocks. Because this form of divergence is endemic to the blockchain’s mechanics it is referred to here as a systematic fork; the discrepancy should be quickly resolved by network mechanisms (this happens, on average, two or three times a week). Systematic forks are temporary glitches...
These forks are essential to maintaining decentralization as a mechanism to make the network secure: trust the info, not the people that delivered the data, trust the signing mechanism (hash power spent), not the people running the machines.
> Furthermore, the political strategy of a user activated soft fork still requires code developers to create a client that reflects the political will of the market and thus demands the obligatory passage point of a Lead Developer found in version control systems.
Not true -- the UASF measures were not merged into the Bitcoin Core branch. Some code was merged to protect users from potentially problematic interactions with Bitcoin Cash fork.
Modeling Bitcoin's governance system is a daunting task. The author essentially confuses the power developers have with regards to miners: developers know there are things that would never fly with miners, and miners are way more powerful than what is described in the paper.
[+] [-] DennisP|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tharne|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Empact|6 years ago|reply
Quakers, despite being religiously-motivated to pursue non-hierarchical expression[2], necessarily adopt organizational structure: committees, clerks of committees, group decision-making about who will take certain roles, i.e. "meetings for worship with attention to business." There is some natural and arguably necessary inclination toward roles and authority for the sake of organizational clarity and efficiency.
What it does not have is empowered leaders with explicit authority, rather positions are cast as being in service of one another, in organizing groups of effort rather than controlling the outcome of the group, and thus tend toward eliciting the active participation of all. Care and attention are taken to minimize the gravitation toward arbitrary and unaccountable authority.
Bitcoin takes a similar approach - necessary roles expressed in service of one another / the general effort, with attention toward guarding against arbitrary or negative expression.
The other side of this relates to thought leadership - in some sense speakers naturally have authority via the Pareto Principle's natural tendency to distribute virtues unequally. However, by embracing a consensus-oriented development practice, the general perspectives are a check against individual mistakes or abuses by those empowered by position or circumstance.
I think maintaining the balance between the gravity of centralization vs the beauty and safety of decentralization requires a continuous effort. Thankfully, it is not solely up to the developers to ensure this - developers, node operators, and miners can each and all be active by refusing to upgrade or otherwise by forking the codebase. I would say that's the key ultimate check against the centralization, that every individual has the ability to vote with their node / personal activity. I'll be curious to hear if the article addressed any of that.
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_equality
[+] [-] wbazant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathiasrw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polyomino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephanlivera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seibelj|6 years ago|reply
The shadow is who influences these people, and why. It really isn't conspiratorial - it's the long tail of influencers, media, meet-up groups, conventions, exchanges, and people who have a stake in Bitcoin.
Anytime there is a major disagreement, there is a fork. This is how numerous forks were created, the biggest of which are Bitcoin Cash, which later itself forked into Bitcoin Cash SV. A fork is just a group of developers who disagree with the official Bitcoin bureaucracy at MIT. If these dissenters have enough support then the new coin has value.
Bitcoin is old and stable, and through its age and stability it has gained trust. Major changes to Bitcoin simply won't happen anymore. The Lightning Network required very minor changes to the core protocol, and using Bitcoin's constrained tooling developers have (heroically!) engineered a scaling mechanism. It is not yet perfect nor easy to use, but over time the client services around it will improve.
The extreme wariness of core Bitcoin developers ensures that trust is maintained in the protocol. A major disaster in Bitcoin would be very bad for the whole industry.
If you don't like Bitcoin, just create your own coin, or fork from Bitcoin! Such is how so many new coins are made.
[+] [-] nullc|6 years ago|reply
I don't think meetups/conventions have much role in Bitcoin development either. I stopped going to them entirely because every event is reliably taken over by ICO/altcoin pumpers-- groups who stand to gain a lot by expanding their audience and are willing to pay to send representatives to events.
[+] [-] moneytide1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwilliams|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 153791098c|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephanlivera|6 years ago|reply
Over time, most bitcoiners foresee the transaction volume and demand rising, such that miner fees will compensate for the reduction in block subsidy.
So once we get to the end of new supply around 2140, the system will sustain from ongoing transaction fees.
Dan Held and I explore this in this interview if you're interested: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/81/
[+] [-] thacypha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thacypha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robcohen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptowizard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|6 years ago|reply
1: Create a globally-sanctioned Internet Currency
2: Allow people to convert any currency to IC
3: Make internet access free for and available to everyone worldwide
4: Charge IC for access to websites and services like Facebook, Amazon, Steam etc.
[+] [-] aazaa|6 years ago|reply
This account seems pretty biased to me. For example, it not only gives short shrift to the user activated soft fork (USAF), but gets the basic facts wrong (page 15):
> User activated soft forks require a large amount of coordination, particularly from industry. ...
This is absurd. UASF was supported by far fewer companies than those supporting Segwit2x.
A UASF is a declaration that nodes controlled by a group of users will reject generated blocks failing to conform to certain specifications. In the case of the 2017 incident, the specification was that the block must signal support for segwit, thus ensuring its activation.
> ... The cohesive demand for a node-initiated upgrade of network rules gathers momentum around Bitcoin meet-up groups, forums, blog posts, social networks, conferences and company board rooms. With regard to SegWit, this momentum led to the ‘New York Agreement’ in 2017.
The New York Agreement led to the ill-fated and incompetently executed Segwit2x proposal, not the UASF. The author could have discussed that initiative in detail but didn't. In short, the (single) developer was incompetent and the update didn't even activate properly.
[+] [-] wmf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filleokus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayoutthere|6 years ago|reply
At least in a capitalist democracy we get to elect the criminals who rob us blind.
[+] [-] Arnavion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryancooper1918|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phantom6188|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phantom6188|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pokmon|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] uoylj|6 years ago|reply
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