I obviously don't understand this at all. I thought it was distributed and that that was the whole point.
Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
151–160 of 381 posts
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#152I wrote this in case anyone wants more information: https://smsprivacy.org/bip148-uasf Should be a bit more informative than TFA.
Naw, this isn't about Segwit2x, it's about the hard fork bitmain wants to do: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14...
I'm pretty sure the announcement on bitcoin.org is about the BIP148 UASF.
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#153Well, 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…
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…
Or,
Any distributed payment network will asymptotically approach unusability over time.
Otherwise miners are leaving cash on the table.
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kinda, they could DoS the UASF chain, but then the UASF chain could respond by doing a proof of work hard fork. If the community is behind it, then a POW change would render the 10s/hundreds of millions of dollars in mining equipment worthless. So the real question is whether or not the UASF side has the support of the community or economic majority.
You mean proof of stake? Is there a working implementation of proof of stake yet? I thought it was mostly theoretical and academic at the moment.
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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#155To me, hashing power is not the process by which the outcome will be decided. IMHO, the percentage of technical signalling will not even matter that much. Two chains will get created quite quickly. And some BTC holders will try to take advantage of the situation. Since transactions can get replayed on the other chain (and copying them from one chain to the other brings a stability advantage) the technical way things…
If I had an exchange I would be sure to check on all forks whether certain coins have been used before allowing processing. Since all forks are known, this is probably how they're going to avoid double-spending.
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
FlexTrans are far more crappy and far far less tested than segwit. It introduces its own weird format that nobody uses, that's sort-of-XML-but-binary (I mean, the authors said to themselves "I like XML so much I want it in a binary protocol") - and problems with types of formats is exactly where the various maleability problems come from! Which was reason for the segwit in the first place! I am not for UASF and I thi…
You oppose Segwit2x AND BIP-148, but you like Segwit?
Segwit2x is sort-of-OK for me frankly.
I don't like the part where they rush to implement everything as fast as possible. And from apart (and I don't follow Segwit2x that much), the changeset seems too big from bitcoind.
And they say openly they plan hard-fork, not this UASF where the S is not really that S and is almost guaranteed to result in a split and confusion.
They signal Segwit in a compatible way, so it's OK. Just the timeline is crazy.
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin protocol processes about 7 transactions per second. Doubling the speed by doubling blocks will not make it much closer to the 50K transactions per second of a system like VISA. But it is probably possible to scale the transaction system off-chain - with https://…
While I agree that only increasing block size forever (or simply removing the size limit) doesn't seem reasonable in the long run, are we sure that segwit and the off-chain scaling solutions proposed today will really solve the long-term scaling issues of BTC? All the practical "here's how lightning's going to work" papers I've read so far leave me very skeptical. Here's an example: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/…
the incentive is that after you lock $50 in Bitcoins you get to spend $50 eventually for the same transaction fee
so if the transaction fee is $0.50, you get to transact at 1% cost
if you paid $0.50 for each coffee it would be 10%
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#158All this "unconsensus" is weird to me given that PoW was created to fix just that. I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners. After all, anybody can be a miner. Anything other than that just doesn't make it decentralized anymore.
If you trust the developers, exchanges or even users to make decisions, then why not just make a BitcoinSQL where the servers are controlled by these groups?
Mining specifically allows for this not to happen. one-CPU-one-vote as per Satoshi's paper. No matter the rules of the protocol, the chain with most work is the one that most people agreed upon. This seems to me the only true democratic solution and I don't understand how anything else is possible.
With regards to fees being to high and miners actually liking that, that's bullshit, because miners (which are also users!) care about the health of the entire system. If something like SegWit will bring many more users, that's a win for them.
Let's not forget that anybody can be a miner! Miners aren't just these chinese groups of people. It's the only true democratic way of reaching consensus - anything else is really not a way to reach trustless consensus in my opinion.
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#159Well, 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…
I'd argue the other way. They didn't get involved in this mess and are just warning their users about possible disruption. What you wrote is your point of view which people might agree or disagree with.
The article doesn't state what the issue is though. You probably knew immediately if you've kept up with it, but as someone interested in Bitcoin but not having followed these developments it was like the BBC telling me to lock my doors and close the curtains, but not saying why.
Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not…
Well - increasing the block size is not costless - it is not just pushing the gas pedal a little more like in your example.
What is the cost? I would assume it is consolidation of mining power since larger block size makes it even less likely for smaller players to be able to verify new blocks in real time.
But isn't mining power already consolidated?