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

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111–120 of 334 posts

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All those claiming that coinbase is planning to run segwit2x, please link to a statement provided by a representative of that company. I think you are just talking bullshit.

https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-conse...

The digital currency group (dcg.co) includes Coinbase in its portfolio.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. Bitcoin is a consensus system, and the default client for better or for worse has a stickiness that doesn't exist in normal open source software because of this group consensus. So there is definitely a measure of control. Yes, it's not total or complete, but it is there.

Bitcoin Core does not have control over the software users run on their machine. If you believe differently, you don't understand how Bitcoin works. You might be confusing network effect with control.

I think they mean that a blockchain doesn't exist in a vacuum, someone has to write the code. While anyone can write a new client/protocol upgrade people won't upgrade to just anyone's new client given how much value Bitcoin represents.

No one has hard-control over bitcoin, but the leading dev group has some manner of soft/non-coercive control (by momentum alone).

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

#113

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…

Depends what you mean by secure. If users cannot validate the blocks, then no matter how much hashpower is available, it is vulnerable to miner attack.

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

#114

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…

[deleted]

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

#115

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…

If miners would do a hard fork with different protocol rules, that would be called something other than bitcoin, maybe "segwit2x-bitcoin" or something.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well certainly it will be interesting if this trick gets miners to signal segwit, as currently the segwit signaling is only around 45%.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think "The Establishment" is scared of Bitcoin, I've got some bad news for you.

If they really didn't see anything in it (be it profit or wanting to get to market "first"), then there wouldn't be so many large firms investing in their own blockchain tech.

Permissioned blockchains contain almost none of the interesting properties of a public, untrusted-node blockchain, and function mostly as a signed-transaction append-only database.

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

#118
post #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.

I think this is the problem or at least what permits what we're seeing. If coin holders had to choose a side for their coins to be found on I bet things would be rather different. However, this is in no one's financial interest.

Right now, the risk isn't that high as the worst case (added uncertainty breaks bitcoin completely) is very unlikely. Instead, (a) one side wins you still have the same amount of coins or (b) both sides win and you probably have +2x the value long term.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those claiming that coinbase is planning to run segwit2x, please link to a statement provided by a representative of that company. I think you are just talking bullshit.

https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-conse... The digital currency group (dcg.co) includes Coinbase in its portfolio.

That agreement seems very general, doesn't indicate that the participants will run specific code. Segwit2x client didn't even exist at that time, first release was yesterday.

People are just making this bullshit up.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

That's not what it means. You are right that those clients would begin rejecting blocks, but you can be sure that when customers are calling them asking why their transactions aren't being validated that they will switch. It's not economically feasible to run a business on a minority hash power chain with low transaction throughput.
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