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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

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Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#11
> At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can be scaled to achieve various goals or whether the Bitcoin blockchain itself should evolve in a way that it can scale to achieve those various goals.

No, among the developers actually working on Bitcoin that is not what the debate is about at all.

Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger, and indeed it can be argued that this is the only property about Bitcoin which is interesting/useful. Why? Because all properties we care about (availability, uncensorability, unseizability, etc.) derive from decentralization[0]. And at the end of the day we can do everything Bitcoin does faster, better, and cheaper on some alternative consensus system (see: Stellar, Open-Transactions, Liquid) that does not have this decentralization property. Decentralization is expensive. It requires a dynamic membership, multi-party block signing algorithm, which at the moment means proof of work. And proof of work costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year to maintain, and throttles the available bandwidth due to the adversarial assumption and the existence of selfish mining[1].

The question is not whether Bitcoin should be a store of value or a medium of exchange. That implies we have some choice in the matter. The question is what level of on-chain utility does Bitcoin actually support under untrusted, adversarial conditions, without losing all properties derived from decentralization. This is an empirical question. The available bandwidth is something that can be determined from the performance of the code in the real world extrapolated to various adversarial simulations.

We had two Scaling Bitcoin workshops last year that gave us a data-driven answer: 3-4MB per block, tops. There are potentially ways that this number can be improved (see: weak blocks), and those are being worked on but are still some time from showing results. There are also some assumptions underlying this number, e.g. that we change the validation cost metric, which none of the existing proposals do in a smart way. But the scientific process is telling us right now that with the tools available to us we can increase the worst-case block size to 3-4MB with a better metric without the decentralization story becoming unacceptably worse off.

That is the plan of Bitcoin Core. The deployment of segregated witness will allow up to 2MB blocks under typical conditions, and 3-4MB under worst-case adversarial conditions. It will exhaust the available capacity for growth in the Bitcoin network at this time. Meanwhile, work progresses on IBLT, weak blocks, Bitcoin-NG, fraud proofs and probabilistic validation, and other related technologies that might provide an answer for the next increase a year or two later. I'm hopeful we may even be able to get an order of magnitude improvement from that one, but we'll see.

No one I'm aware of is pushing for smaller blocks because Bitcoin should be a store of value and a settlement layer. If I had magic pixie dust I'd want 1GB blocks and everything on-chain too. But we live in the real world and are stuck in a situation where Bitcoin loses all of its unique properties if we scale much further than where we are at now. And so we must ask the question: what will Bitcoin become, since it can't scale on-chain? How can we live with that outcome? The idea of a settlement layer and off-chain but trustless payment networks like Lightning naturally arise from that thinking. The Lightning Network[2] is a way that we can have our cake and eat it too: Bitcoin remains small and decentralized, but everyone still has access to bitcoin payments. Lightning can potentially scale to global usage with a small-block chain as the settlement layer.

[0]: http://bluematt.bitcoin.ninja/2015/01/14/decentralization/

[1]: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/

[2]: http://lightning.network/

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#12
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this touches upon an even bigger problem in the Bitcoin community. Very few people actually know what they want other than the price to go up. And those who do are all at odds with eachother because Bitcoin can't do everything at once.

The very people who want the value to go up will keep the Bitcoin alive. It is too early to proclaim it dead.

LOL, that works until it doesn't. There's a name for that sort of financial scheme...

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#14
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this was a stock or some other security, and I somehow had influence over how it is managed thus what I said could affect its value, declaring it "dead" (or soon to be worthless) AND holding interest in it (long or short) - would be criminal in most countries.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#15
post #2

This is interesting to me because it presents the blockchain size dispute in a way that seems much more sympathetic to the "no, we shouldn't increase the blockchain size" crowd than Mike Hearn's essay. Is it really true that the people who are objecting to increasing the blockchain size see Bitcoin turning into a reserve "currency" to hold wealth instead of a liquid currency used to make real time transactions? Is th…

I would say if one read's Mike's essay and assumed a few things, his opinion would be that it's a moot point. There are already people who think bitcoin is a liquid asset where trading x bitcoins can buy something of value. Those people are having a bad user experience buying stuff with bitcoin, and thus are less encouraged to use bitcoin in the future, which hurts bitcoin as a whole.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#16
It is a traditional view that in order to increase throughput we need to increase the bandwidth. This is true but we also know that throughput can be increased by abstracting the existing bandwidth to hold more information.

Increasing the blocksize will increase throughput, but is it the only way? Definitely not. The very recently improvement by Dr.Peter Wuille to segregate the witness (cryptography used to validate transactions) from the data (transactions) increases the capacity by around 66%, even if block's max size is unchanged. This is already in the testing phase. There is a whole bitcoin scaling roadmap & a lot of work going on.[0]

Practically, the death scenario being painted by XT hasn't realised and transactions are still going through normally.[1]

The bitcoin developer community comprises of very capable hackers many of whom are not only PHDs but have also invented new cryptographic techniques and also are robust security coders.[2][3]

[0]https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq [1]http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions?panelId=4&ful... [2]https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt [3]https://blockstream.com/2015/08/24/treesignatures/

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#17

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this was a stock or some other security, and I somehow had influence over how it is managed thus what I said could affect its value, declaring it "dead" (or soon to be worthless) AND holding interest in it (long or short) - would be criminal in most countries.

Then this would be illegal (the website owners have a short in Herbalife).

http://www.factsaboutherbalife.com/

I think as long as you disclose your position in the stock/security, you can say whatever you want.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#18
post #9

The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested financially , you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not go…

Isn't this also how the stock market works?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#19
post #2

This is interesting to me because it presents the blockchain size dispute in a way that seems much more sympathetic to the "no, we shouldn't increase the blockchain size" crowd than Mike Hearn's essay. Is it really true that the people who are objecting to increasing the blockchain size see Bitcoin turning into a reserve "currency" to hold wealth instead of a liquid currency used to make real time transactions? Is th…

I would put it in a slightly different way: Everyone wants "Visa" functionality, but there is a debate about whether the solution is a one-layer system where base Bitcoin provides transaction throughput or a two-layer system where transaction throughput is provided by a separate layer on top of Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#20
It seems like the potential fork in bitcoin is already happening to some degree with Elements and the sidechain (https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements) -- a super interesting project that I just found out about yesterday! I can't help but feel, to a certain degree, like forking bitcoin is re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic though. There already seem to be more viable alternative cryptocurrencies.
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