Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#61

Post by jerguismi » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

mhluongo wrote: post #59

jerguismi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I suspect that SegWit2x will end up taking over the network" What? They had first release like yesterday, the project has released one tarball, no packaging, no very good marketing etc. The biggest marketers seem to be the tinfoil hat opponents who fear the fork so much that they speak about it everywhere. I don't think it is at all likely that segwit2x client will gain support. Or if it will gain support, it will t…

They have a huge amount of committed hashpower and the support of most major Bitcoin companies.

No major bitcoin company has stated that they will run segwit2x client. If you have conflicting information, please link announcement/blog post about that.

As for the hashpower, it doesn't matter what clients miners run. You can't force the nodes to run specific client with hashpower.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#62

Post by jethro_tell » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #40

jethro_tell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't invest in a Cryptocurrency. It's called gambling. edit: autocorrect.

What's the difference?

The difference is that when I buy a stock, they have a balance sheet, usually physical and/or digital assets like buildings, datacenters, warehouses, trucks, intellectual property, software programs, patents. They usually also have people, and some type of plan to leverage everything so that the sum is greater then the parts. That's an investment, when you pay them to leverage their assets and people.

Even in a situation like yahoo, because there are real assets, even though they didn't leverage on the dream, the were still parted and sold for scrap because there was real value behind the stock. That won't happen with BTC.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#63

Post by erikpukinskis » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

statoshi wrote: post #48

buttershakes wrote: post #26

This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…

Core developers never had control in the first place. No one has control; it's weird to see so many people applying authoritarian concepts to an anti-authoritarian system.

Yes. There is no Bitcoin to control. Bitcoin is an idea, and there can be as many variations as people have ideas. There will be a main trunk, centered around the middle of the market, but the whole point of cryptocurrencies is they can be forked and survive.

In the new world, everyone has their own universe. The sooner one believes, the stronger their position in the 2030 economy.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#64

Post by jerguismi » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

statoshi wrote: post #48

buttershakes wrote: post #26

This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have their own parts to play as factions. It's getting tense, but it's been years in the making. Groups…

Core developers never had control in the first place. No one has control; it's weird to see so many people applying authoritarian concepts to an anti-authoritarian system.

They don't control, but they have lots of power in the sense that 99% of people will just run the bitcoin core client without researching too much, what is in the code.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#65

Post by Torgo » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

badloginagain wrote: post #32

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why not both? It doesn't appear that the two strategies are mutually exclusive. Is it just that SegWitX2 is considered too rushed? Is it just that miners have a vested interest in maintaining influence? Personally it seems like smart contracts and other similar services beget an ecosystem that could swell the market cap by a significant amount, I assume miners would have a long…

both sides are in many ways right in their criticisms about the other side, they are just fundamentally conflicting visions of the long term nature of the network.

In my opinion the problem here is the network was built so that it operated only by people acting on incentives and those incentives being aligned with the good of the network, and it turned out that miners acting in their own interest wasn't actually good for scaling past a certain size and operating on certain types of transactions.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#66

Post by shp0ngle » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

The basic question is how to scale; off-chain or on-chain. The rest is just theatrics and typical nerdy hyperbole.

One side of the fight (Core / blockstream) wants to scale off-chain, pushing transactions to side-chains and/or lighting networks, and want to profit from off-chain solutions.

The other side of the fight (segwit2x / miners) wants to scale on-chain, making the blocks bigger, and profit from block fees.

Both sides have pros and cons.

Pros of off-chain solutions - more scalable, don't need expensive confirmations for each transaction, more long-term. Cons: the solutions don't exist yet and might be vaporware; segwit etc are just stepping stones.

Pros of on-chain solutions - making the blocks larger can be done now, no need to wait for new software and new networks. Cons - makes the blocks larger, which makes running bitcoin nodes harder. Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever).

The discussion about segwit is in reality just discussion about how to scale, and who profits.

As for me, I don't really care, Bitcoin is inefficient either way

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#67

Post by fpgaminer » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

badloginagain wrote: post #32

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why not both? It doesn't appear that the two strategies are mutually exclusive. Is it just that SegWitX2 is considered too rushed? Is it just that miners have a vested interest in maintaining influence? Personally it seems like smart contracts and other similar services beget an ecosystem that could swell the market cap by a significant amount, I assume miners would have a long…

> Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why not both?

By both you mean, SegWit + Bigger blocks?

It's not possible today to raise the blocksize without exponentially increasing the computing resources required to run a Bitcoin node. So it's not a parameter that can be easily tweaked without drastic consequences.

Also, increasing the blocksize requires what's called a hardfork. That's a backwards incompatible change. Anyone who hasn't updated their Bitcoin software will be left in the dust, and potentially dangerously so.

SegWit, on the other hand, raises the effective blocksize to 2MB, patches a bunch of issues, and provides a means to safely enable off-chain transactions on top of Bitcoin. It does all this as a soft fork; backwards compatible.

That doesn't mean a blocksize increase isn't appropriate; it needs to happen at some point. But because hardforking is so disruptive, it would be best to roll in other breaking changes while we're at it. We should have a solution to the exponential computation issue, and we should have a mechanism to increase blocksize again in the future without another hardfork. Those are hard problems to solve that will take time. SegWit was meant to be a stop-gap.

All that said, I'm not personally opposed to the idea of a more immediate hardfork, ala SegWit2X. I don't think it's the _best_ idea, and I think the hardfork should happen at least 12 months down the road, not 3 months as SegWit2X plans, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. The big issue with SegWit2X is that the developers working on it are not competent for the task at hand, and it's being pushed by parties with perverse incentives.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#68

Post by Torgo » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

jbondeson wrote: post #56

timq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. Because what I see from my point of view is a dozen of Blockstream employees pushing for segwit, with barely no support from the community nor the miners. And on the other side I see a growing majority of miners, a growing majority of the community asking for a simple block size increase, wich is a matter of 10 lines modified, compared to 5 000 lines and a great bunch of compl…

I find it sad (but not at all surprising) that this is the state of the Bitcoin community. The level of discourse for what is supposed to be a technology that is billed as "liberating money from the whims of governments" has neatly conformed to exactly that of the current state of political discourse. Everyone who disagrees with you is a shill/troll or an idiot. Adding math and "decentralization" doesn't magically pr…

How sad that a human-created and human-run endeavor turned out to be merely human after all.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#69

Post by jerguismi » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:48 PM UTC

yoodenvranx wrote: post #60

apeace wrote: post #16

The days are counting down to the "Segwit2X" rollout, the idea supported in the "New York Agreement" (NYA)[0]. There is a contingency plan in place should the Core-supported User Activated Soft Fork become activated.[1] Segwit2X has working code, has been tested in beta, and is now in RC.[2] Without commenting on the merits of the different approaches, the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator. To ca…

> the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator Is there a good "live-thread" where I can follow the events?

People follow block signaling a lot. Note however that miners cah signal whatever bit, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually run some specific software. For example "NYA" signal doesn't mean actually much, maybe intention to run segwit2x. The first software was released one day ago, the NYA signaling started way before that.

http://coin.dance/blocks

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#70

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 4:48 PM UTC

drukenemo wrote: post #29

luka-birsa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not buy anything right now. Too risky. When BC bleeds, the whole ecosystem goes down. Go on a holiday, enjoy the sun, do nothing.

Also wondering if it's time to sell mine. Already sold like 70%...

Personally I wouldn't sell now, especially if you can wait it out a year or two. The dust will settle eventually, and it'll be on the rise again, most likely, higher than it got a couple of months ago. But I don't know what's going to happen anymore than anyone else claims to.