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

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101–110 of 334 posts

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

#101
If Bitcoin splits, what do you predict would be the effect on holders of bitcoins?

- They have twice as much money (yay!)

- They have twice as much money but the value is split, so it's worth approximately the same.

- One of the branches wins or mostly wins.

- The split does so much damage that some (all?) value of coins is lost.

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

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only support it needs is hash power support. That's it. If enough of the hash power can be pulled into it, then it's game over for a minority chain. Running nodes costs almost nothing which means the network can be flooded with segwit2x supporting nodes, and companies will be motivated to switch over.

Miners can mine segwit2x blocks all they wish, but since services/exchanges are running core client, they are just mining invalid blocks from their viewpoint, and those blocks are ignored. That means miners can't sell their mined segwit2x bitcoins on exchanges. Mining blocks that services don't accept would be very, very stupid, essentially throwing good money to trash.

If your thesis holds, it invalidates the central tenet of a decentralised network. If a central party can set the rules, why not use the much better centralised transaction systems and forgo things like POW?

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not picking a side, just delivering info: You can see the signalling process here: https://coin.dance/blocks 90% are signalling the NYA intent to support Segwit2x. Since the software release 20% have signalled with segwit2x blocks. You can see business support here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support#Businesses I'm not sure if you consider Coinbase a major bitcoin company yourself, but I think they qualify…

> You can see business support here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support#Businesses > I'm not sure if you consider Coinbase a major bitcoin company yourself, but I think they qualify. That doesn't look like a very good proof. If coinbase plans to adopt segwit2x, why haven't they released an announcement? I wouldn't trust that wiki list very much.

You can click through to see the sources on each one on the table there.

And don't trust the wiki, no need to. Trust the hash power. The NYA signal was just a promise, so don't trust that one. But the BIP91 signals are coming in already. Just need to get that over 80% for just over 2 days. Then we'll see the original segwit signals jump to the 95%+ it needs.

But the truth is, you don't have to worry about finding any support proof or anything. We'll know what happens over the next week or two for sure. I don't care whatever direction it goes in, I just want it to go smoothly.

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

#104
I just moved ~20% of my crypto holdings from BTC to LTC. The rest I'll likely keep close to 40% of my cryptoholdings in BTC, but move it onto my own wallet. If a fork actually happens, I'd prefer to be in control of the private keys.

It's kind of odd that there is still so much FUD about segwit, as it has already activated on LTC. It hasn't appeared to open any security holes.

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

#105

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. Bo…

> Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever). The whitepaper itself mentions that the Merkle tree can be pruned so that doesn't need to be the case. Do you know why there hasn't been more effort towards implementing that yet?

It would appear the Bitcoin network has a hard time agreeing on breaking changes :)

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

#106

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…

I always wonder how people external to an organisation can judge the work of an executive. Are you maybe solely looking at outcomes, that may only slightly be influenced by his decisions and dominated by randomness and other factors anyway?

You just need to look at results. We have a fragmented and fractured community. The guy tweets non stop in some ideological holy war. They were even called out by Fred Wilson at Consensus for basically not delivering anything of value, and the leadership is the result of an internal shake up that ousted the previous CEO in favor of someone more in tune with the technology. I don't think it takes divination or insider knowledge to smell when something is going sour.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners can mine segwit2x blocks all they wish, but since services/exchanges are running core client, they are just mining invalid blocks from their viewpoint, and those blocks are ignored. That means miners can't sell their mined segwit2x bitcoins on exchanges. Mining blocks that services don't accept would be very, very stupid, essentially throwing good money to trash.

So if a huge number of nodes are Segwit2x capable, and the miners are mining Segwit2x blocks with the majority of the hash power, companies are going to stay on a less secure chain that can be attacked by the majority so that they can have a smaller block size and keep the core dev team because they love them? This isn't how that works. Proof-of-work will force those companies onto the dominant chain. Exchanges will…

Bitcoin protocol is defined by bitcoin core client, and I would guess more than 99% percent of the services that process bitcoin transactions use that client. The services don't follow actively the hash rate and they won't change the client based on that - the network automatically adjusts to the hash rate available so that blocks come each 10 minutes. If there would exist some other cryptocurrency with more hash rate doesn't mean that services would start calling that one bitcoin.

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

#109

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. Bo…

> Also cannot scale this way infinitely (you need to keep all the transactions on a disk forever). The whitepaper itself mentions that the Merkle tree can be pruned so that doesn't need to be the case. Do you know why there hasn't been more effort towards implementing that yet?

AFAIK the paper is referring to thin clients, right? You can already run those with the stock Bitcoin Core client. There's a command line argument that tells it to prune any blocks older than X. The disk space required by such clients is X times the maximum size of blocks + the size of the UTXO.

But you still need full nodes who maintain all historical data. Because, AFAIK, there's no way other way to trustlessly establish a UTXO without rescanning the whole blockchain. Maybe there are ways; I'm not that deep into Bitcoin's internal at the moment.

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

#110
It appears the emotional power of "money" coincidences with zealotry. It must be exciting to have your money tied into something that could split. If the split does happen and both forks keep running won't the world economy of bitcoins simply doubled? I assume someone will provide an exchange to move to/from bitcoin-zeal vs. segwit2
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