Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

>The other chain completely implodes, and stops existing.

Are you sure? If I'm not wrong, this isn't that much different from Ethereum/Ethereum Classic situation.

Ethereum Classic's price is no where near Ethereum's but it is still maintaining a good position - 5th by Market Cap and 3rd by 24hr volume.

You are saying the ALL of the mining power will eventually move over, but what if it doesn't the miners (85% of whom support Segwit2x) stay on the non-UASF fork?

UASF Bitcoin will be very weak, so I can't expect what would happen, but I'm just saying its not so simple.

There's a lot of shady movement going on in both BTC and ETH right now. We're seeing pretty violent swings. I'm guessing this is a symptom of the uncertainty. We'll likely see a downtrend overall in the next few weeks. Daily movements are day by day.

What's the cost? It was 36MB originally and it has been reduced to 1MB as a temporary measure to limit spam.

As a BTC amateur, trying to approach it from an ordinary user's perspective, all I know is I used to be able to set whatever fee I wanted and wait a few hours and things would get through, and now I have to play some sort of game of chicken with the network, guessing whether my transaction will ever be processed unless I pay as large a fee as possible.

I've used the fee prediction engines to try to avoid low fees and still ended up waiting eight days for a transaction to process. I gave up on it during that week, only for it to go through after I paid another way.

I don't really get the debate, I mean maybe implement the solutions from both sides at once? I don't care, my local solution is to just avoid it as a payment network for now. That's its own kind of vote I guess...

I'm sure there will be a camp arguing that I just wasn't smart enough, with the corollary that UX as a discipline coddles whiners like me.

Maybe so.

The game theory of fees and congestion is still interesting, with miners always interested in an incrementally more painful network for users, until the tragedy of the commons hits and it collapses.

Bitcoin has a first mover advantage, which led to some network effects increasing its popularity. Miners are extracting some rents from that popularity right now. But there may be a weird game theory here, where users are driven to prefer newer bitcoin clones with smaller (less secure) networks, simply because the fees demanded are far lower and (more importantly) more predictable. Price volatility of newer networks is a major a downside, but there's an equilibrium. Everything has a price, even volatility/stability. If you're doing one transaction and not storing value, then your risk on a new network is bounded by how long it takes you to get money in or out of the network and process the transaction. BTC will bleed off support, under some values of: BTC fee, BTC tx processing time, processing time variation, velocity in and out of smaller network, and volatility of smaller network. (This might be asymptotic and leave BTC the leader though, no guarantees.)

While creating a lot of confusion about long term coin viability, these forces could provide a useful equilibrium on power consumption, a downward force on how much power we want validating transactions. I've been worried about the power cannibalism scenario, where BTC becomes a payments standard but we're racing to commit all new power generation simply to verifying the network. But power use puts a floor on tx fees, and users with available alternatives put a ceiling on them, so... maybe we won't build a dyson sphere dedicated only to powering one payment network after all.

This is the main narrative being pushed by Blockstream and Core who are afraid of loosing control over the main Bitcoin reference client, beware.

> I think you missed the key issue. Mining is largely centralized under the control of Bitmain, both via pools and indirectly via miners they have sold

False, bitcoin mining has never been as decentralized as it is now: https://coin.dance/blocks

> Segwit2X is a compromise-- but Bitmain does not like it because it activates segwit.

False, they are signaling Segwit2X and have been open to support segwit (except the arbitrary discount).

> So BitMain has announced they plan to do a forcible Hard Fork of Bitcoin, splitting off into another chain, that they will privately mine-- and they intend to neutralize segwit on it.

As per your own link, this is a plan against the UASF fork.

> They have publicly complained that segwit offers lower fees for transactions that use less resources.

And instead they back bigger blocks and flexible transactions which would give them even lower fees? If your statement was true then they wouldn't do that.

> The entire conflict (including the "scaling problems" which have recently been proven to be due to spam driving up transaction costs) is Bitmain attempting to increase and protect their near monopoly.

No, it is because Blockstream and Core wants to retain control. Do they support Segwit2X even when 90+ of all miner power signals it? No.

Segwit as a soft fork is a crappy implementation and reduces the security of Bitcoin. See:

https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-...

Flexible Transactions is a superior proposal:

https://zander.github.io/posts/Flexible_Transactions/