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Why is Bitcoin forking?

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Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#11

Post by ProblemFactory »

tomp wrote: post #8

Are they also doing anything about the centralization of mining pools? AFAIK, the main problem is that right now it's possible for miners to prove that they were mining "for the pool" and not for themselves. If this proof was impossible, each miner would be a selfish miner and any collaboration would be impossible.

Would that reduce the centralisation though?

An independent miner with an average affordable rig might find somewhere on the order of one block per year on average. This means that due to variability, a good proportion of miners would not find any blocks at all within the lifetime of their hardware, and give up forever.

If low-income-variability pooled mining becomes impossible, then my guess is that mining will be centralised to people who run purpose-built datacentres full of miners, not the casual users.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#12

Post by tomp »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #11
tomp wrote: post #8

Are they also doing anything about the centralization of mining pools? AFAIK, the main problem is that right now it's possible for miners to prove that they were mining "for the pool" and not for themselves. If this proof was impossible, each miner would be a selfish miner and any collaboration would be impossible.

Would that reduce the centralisation though? An independent miner with an average affordable rig might find somewhere on the order of one block per year on average . This means that due to variability, a good proportion of miners would not find any blocks at all within the lifetime of their hardware, and give up forever. If low-income-variability pooled mining becomes impossible, then my guess is that mining will be…

> If low-income-variability pooled mining becomes impossible, then my guess is that mining will be centralised to people who run purpose-built datacentres full of miners, not the casual users.

AFAIK, that's already happened. The difference is only that mining pools owned by independent entities wouldn't be able to collaborate. So you'd be more likely to have e.g. 5-10 big pools, as opposed to 2.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#13

Post by lawn »

For more context, here's a list of posts by Mike giving some background and some more thoughts:

The capacity cliff: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf771...

Crash landing: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32

On consensus and forks: https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050...

They were quite useful for someone not familiar with the topic.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#14

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #8

Are they also doing anything about the centralization of mining pools? AFAIK, the main problem is that right now it's possible for miners to prove that they were mining "for the pool" and not for themselves. If this proof was impossible, each miner would be a selfish miner and any collaboration would be impossible.

[deleted]

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#15

Post by Taek »

For people who have not been following along, the Bitcoin block size debate has been very intense and pulled out a lot of interesting psychology from the Bitcoin community.

Most of the core devs of Bitcoin are strongly opposed to increasing the blocksize to 8mb. 2 people in particular, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, have been making very strong political pushes to get the majority of Bitcoin users to favor their block size limit increase proposals, and it appears that they have largely been successful.

Everyone has an opinion on the block size debate, and it has become clear that politics are very important to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a complicated and delicate protocol, and having a qualified opinion on something like the blocksize debate likely requires around a year of studying the academic properties of Bitcoin. Most people don't realize this, and hold their own opinion in high esteem. In many ways, this would be similar to non-cryptographers engaging in debates about key scheduling in AES - it takes a lot of education before you are really qualified to make an opinion.

Unlike AES however, with Bitcoin most people believe that they have a qualified opinion, and actively engage in debate, religiously clinging to certain ideas without properly grasping their full implications.

Perhaps even more interesting is all of the drama and chaos on /r/bitcoin. Right now there are posts with 93% upvotes requesting that the moderators be replaced. The comment threads have lots of brigading, trolling, loudmouthing, and occasional spurts of academic discussion.

There are many accusations of the moderators censoring discussion that opposes their viewpoint on the subject. The moderators have been very active in deleting posts. Certainly many of the deletions were of garbage comments, but there also seems to be abuse-of-power happening.

Certainly there are many people trying to be as disruptive as possible, and deleting their comments only results in more assertions of censorship.

One big controvertial decision by the moderator team was to censor all posts relating to Bitcoin-XT, a client that runs code which will hard-fork Bitcoin after reaching 75% miner-usage. The two biggest proponents of the block size increase are responsible for XT, and censoring posts about XT seems synonymous to censoring topics about the block size. 'Off-topic' really doesn't seem like an appropriate label.

The behavior of proponents of both sides of the debate has been abysmal. Something in Bitcoin is broken, and it's not just related to the block size limit. The decision making process, and 'social consensus' process as a whole, needs improvement.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#16

Post by kalleboo »

bad_user wrote: post #4
mahouse wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just naïve to think that a decentralised monetary system could work. Some people think that regulation is evil.

Funny, a successful decentralized monetary system has existed for quite some time, being the oldest monetary system in existence and probably the one that will still be relevant in 1000 years from now ... Gold ;-) In my mind the only useful trait of Bitcoin has been its decentralized nature. Take that away and I'd rather deal with USD, EUR and my local banking system, thank you very much.

And in a world with only physical gold and no electronic payments, credit cards, wires, how quickly would business move?

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#17

Post by Taek »

lawn wrote: post #13

For more context, here's a list of posts by Mike giving some background and some more thoughts: The capacity cliff: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf771... Crash landing: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32 On consensus and forks: https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050... They were quite useful for someone not familiar with the topic.

Let's balance the discussion out a bit:

Greg Maxwell's thoughts (small blocks): http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34090559/

About internet bandwidth growth (~neutral): http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=493

An attempt at a well-rounded overview (~neutral): http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535

some thoughts by bittorrent creator Bram Cohen (small blocks): https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a...

Some thoughts by gavin andresen (large blocks): http://gavinandresen.ninja/

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#18

Post by hga »

kalleboo wrote: post #16
bad_user wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, a successful decentralized monetary system has existed for quite some time, being the oldest monetary system in existence and probably the one that will still be relevant in 1000 years from now ... Gold ;-) In my mind the only useful trait of Bitcoin has been its decentralized nature. Take that away and I'd rather deal with USD, EUR and my local banking system, thank you very much.

And in a world with only physical gold and no electronic payments, credit cards, wires, how quickly would business move?

That old problem has of course been addressed, e.g. by using things like gold certificates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate Which add their own set of problems, but at least you get a clear signal when they get repudiated.

Or you use banks, letters of credit from them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_credit), etc.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#19

Post by datashovel »

gus_massa wrote: post #9
datashovel wrote: post #2

It's somewhat ironic that one of the big selling points of Bitcoin was decentralization. The thing that they failed to realize is the team also needs to be decentralized. For something like this to take off it needs to be a specification for a federated network with zero single points of failure, and not an actual codebase with a dedicated team.

> specification for a federated network with zero single points of failure The problem is that some people want to change the specification (bigger blocks) and some want to keep the current specification. The block size is part of the specification or that it's only an implementation detail? For me, it's not clear what a "specification for a federated networks" means * One interpretation is that the specification is…

I imagine it would be closer to the 2nd of the two.

When I've thought about it, I come to the conclusion that the base specification needs to be so simple (with clear path for extensibility) that no one will disagree, and everyone can see that it's critical for an electronic currency to exist. Namely the ability to own it, and to exchange it.

Another thing is, I believe that in order for something like a global electronic currency to become universally accepted, without support from / cooperation with governments, there can be no center of power, and unfortunately structurally I can't imagine something like that could happen with a blockchain-based currency.

Don't get me wrong. I see the beauty / elegance of the blockchain, but I can't get my mind wrapped around the idea that everyone (or even a significant percentage of people) around the world will accept the idea that their currency is at the mercy of decisions being made by some relatively small group of people who basically answer to no one except in the sense that they'll always attempt to do popular things in order to prevent people from leaving their currency for another.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#20

Post by ctz »

im3w1l wrote: post #7

This was bound to happen sooner or later. Good that is "only" about something relatively minor like this, so that the community can practice handling it. Maybe later there will be a conflict where serious money is on the line and it would be bad if that was the first one. I mean this change will affect miner revenue, but transactions fees are still completely insignificant compared to block rewards.

I thought that if the split does happen all existing coins will be spendable on both sides of the split. Does that not count as 'serious money' on the line?!
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