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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#91
post #82
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the downvotes were a response to the tone of the post, not the actual content. Though, the content itself is incorrect as well. Consensus has been achieved by the miners and by a few major payment processors, but not by the userbase. Blockchains though are very resistant to moves by major players, and even the miners being at 85% are not enough to force fundamental changes like this into the network if t…

What type of power has the user base on the blockchain?

Coins only have value if people accept them as valuable. The userbase ultimately decides whether or not they would accept payment via a certain coin.

If the userbase is not interested in a coin, it will not matter how much hashrate is behind the coin, or how many figureheads try to prop it up. That coin will not have value.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#92

The problems described in this post are unlikely to happen. There is an attempt to split ("fork") the network scheduled for August 1. The people forking will force activation of a new feature, Segwit, while the non-forkers won't. However , the non-forkers are currently planning to activate Segwit as part of a compromise plan before the deadline. If this compromise happens as planned, there will be no need to force-ac…

If the community soft-forks as you say, then this will be disastrous since corporate miners will not be onboard and the forked chain will be vulnerable to attacks which could result in UASF chain's demise.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#93

> This means that any bitcoins you receive after that time may later disappear from your wallet or be a type of bitcoin that other people will not accept as payment. Can you imagine the uproar if Visa said the same thing? It would be totally unthinkable. Bitcoin can get away with this type of "disruption" because it's not really being used for anything other than a speculative vehicle.

Isn't "any [money] you receive [...] may later disappear" actually pretty common with credit card chargebacks?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#94
post #78

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). Ho…

> However, any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees, no change has received majority consensus. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of the miners, and the math is really simple: imagine a network on top of Bitcoin, e.g. lightning.network, which can process 10…

I think what the miners are afraid of, is that the power of the bitcoin network, leaves their hands and fall into the hands of second layer operators. At the same time, a higher blockchain size would make it less profitable for small miners, to mine bitcoin. Bitfury recently released an analysis, that predicts that 95% of current miners, would find mining to be unprofitable at blocksize of 8MB. This would further centralize profits and power over the protocol, with the big datacenter miners.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#95
post #42
post #37

Ok just another proof that bitcoin can definitely not be compared to gold. Or maybe it could? "After the event you might end up with gold or lead it all depends if your banker believe in transmutation or not (and if transmutation is actually achievable which will be determined by the best alchemists of the kingdom that need to agree together). So all in all the guild of merchants recommend that you don't accept gold…

It doesn't matter how well you protect your gold, you can never protect its value, since this will be diluted if someone else brings a lot of gold to market. That's what happened during the ~1700s: lots of gold was brought to market because of world travel and disrupted local economies. Bitcoin prevents this by automatically adjusting difficulty. Asteroid mining can make gold useless, while Bitcoin would continue to…

>> you can never protect its (gold's) value, since this will be diluted if someone else brings a lot of gold to market... Bitcoin prevents this by automatically adjusting difficulty.

It doesn't prevent it. If everyone decides to sell BTC now (including the big whales owning the major portion), it's price in USD will fall, too. How is this different?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#96

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). Ho…

That "Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems" is the topic of debate.

SegWit was not created toward the end of increasing the blocksize, it was created to fix transaction malleability along with various other improvements. That it arranges the partitioning of witness data from transaction data to sort-of not count against the block size was a bonus, especially since a lot of dubious attempts at forking to a larger block size we're being given decent backing in terms of funds.

The point of fixing transaction malleability is that it allows for more robust smart contracts that depend on transaction validity. Once you enable these smart contracts, you start scratching at the surface of scaling methods that shift risk to the willing participants. As every Bitcoin transaction must be validated by every Bitcoin node, the entire network must inherit the risk of attempting to satisfy demand for transactions. Not just in terms of hardware requirements, but also in terms of the viability of paying for security of the network against a diminishing block creation subsidy.

The maintainers of Core, and plenty of other people in the Bitcoin community, see the scarcity of block space as a positive and as an inevitability. It's a positive in that it provides the incentive for security as the subsidy gets reduced, and inevitable as any 'spare' space in blocks can incentive superfluous transactions. There's plenty of development on the front of moving bitcoins between other chains with different consensus rules that would allow for better scaling, and for better development and testing of solutions that could eventually make their way to the main blockchain.

I'm personally of the opinion that once you allow for the transfer of bitcoins to and from second order chains, that Bitcoin can essentially enter a version freeze.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#98

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). Ho…

Has anyone got a link to a neutral article summarizing the POVs and the players involved? I'm still confused as to many of the details, e.g. what /r/btc advocates if not SegWit.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#99
post #69

What strategy is the best for small investors ? Moving the money into altcoins or just pulling completely back ? Should we expect a soar on altcoins (e.g litecoin, ripple, antshares a.k.a neo) ?

Pretty easy. Pull all of your coins into a wallet you control (like bitcoin-core, running on your own computer), and then just ride through the storm. For some amount of time, there may be 2 or 3 versions of Bitcoin that are active, but if you use this strategy you'll own all of your coins on all the versions. So, as long as the combined value of every version is approximately around the value of the original version…

I have a few coins in a copay wallet, which is a BIP32 wallet. Does that mean that wallet is under my control and my coins are safe?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#100
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people simply believe there is a need for a digital censorship resistant currency like physical cash. I don't think it'll replace currencies, but I think it will serve a purpose as a means to transfer value when authorities don't want you to transfer value. Not saying if this is a good or bad thing, but it is a real value proposition.

It's also useful if you want to buy something online and don't want it showing up on your Credit Card statement.

For this use-case there is a better solution - GNU Taler [1]. It doesn't invent its own coins but works with existing currencies.

[1]: https://taler.net/en/

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