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

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

#131

Post by mhluongo »

jerguismi wrote: post #119
eganist wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not making it up, talking to real people in the space.

You can also check out the SegWit2x mailing list archive [0] for companies actively testing SegWit2x. From there I've seen BitGo, Blockchain, Bloq, OB1 (Open Bazaar), Purse.. these are significant companies in the Bitcoin economy.

[0] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x...

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

#132

Post by wmf »

jerguismi wrote: post #87
buttershakes wrote: post #83

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.

AFAIK btc1 produces normal segwit blocks that will be accepted by Core; that's the point of the compromise.

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

#134

Post by knocte »

buttershakes wrote: post #127
knocte wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've said it before but anyone who put money into Blockstream You seem to have taken sides against BitcoinCore team, following the typical conspiracy theories. But FYI, Blockstream is not Core, Core is not Blockstream. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/622bjp/bitcoin_cor...

I have taken sides, but against the general core development process and the corporate interests that are permeating it. Yes, blockstream is not core, but they have exerted a tremendous amount of influence on the team and direction. In addition to directly employing many core developers, sponsoring contractors, and tirelessly advocating for a vision of Bitcoin that frankly differs substantially from anything put fort…

Even if most of what you say seems to be completely false, I wouldn't even worry a tiny bit even if it was true, in the same way I don't worry by the fact that many Gnome developers are paid by Red Hat.

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

#135

Post by just_one_time_ »

buckie wrote: post #112
DINKDINK wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They have GitHub commit access. That is what OP should have meant to say. And that, for Bitcoin, is as good as ownership.

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

#136

Post by buttershakes »

knocte wrote: post #134
buttershakes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have taken sides, but against the general core development process and the corporate interests that are permeating it. Yes, blockstream is not core, but they have exerted a tremendous amount of influence on the team and direction. In addition to directly employing many core developers, sponsoring contractors, and tirelessly advocating for a vision of Bitcoin that frankly differs substantially from anything put fort…

Even if most of what you say seems to be completely false, I wouldn't even worry a tiny bit even if it was true, in the same way I don't worry by the fact that many Gnome developers are paid by Red Hat.

You are making the mistake of equating Bitcoin development with other open source projects. It's just not comparable to Gnome, Linux, or any other open source development. If I don't like the gnome developers I just don't run their code, but if I don't like the consensus driven code of Bitcoin my only choice is to sell. The stickiness of the implementation is extremely important to the overall discussion.

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

#137

Post by discombobulate »

faragon wrote: post #129
discombobulate wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. It's explaining the dynamics around the possible hard. Who wants what & why they want it. It's the most concise overview I've seen.

Sure, it is not a bubble, but a new paradigm... Oh, wait.

Personally, I wouldn't call it a new paradigm. It's quite similar to what already exists. With one improvement (which comes with trade-offs).

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

#138

Post by keyme »

rwmj wrote: 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.

My guess is that a split of any initial ratio (even 50-50) will quickly converge to 90%+ of all users on one side. Quickly, as in minutes to hours.

Also, by "users", I don't mean holders. I mean entities that actually transact bitcoin on a daily basis. Exchanges and merchants. They can't afford to lose any time (money) on waiting for their favorite chain to win. They have to use the longest chain (and they are the only ones that matter).

Seeing that there is no way in hell the initial split will be anything worse than 75-25 (against Core), I predict that the price will quickly stabilize on the markets after the initial panic (which is already underway, IMHO).

The value of "bitcoin" (the winning side) after the split (and recovery from panic) will have lost an amount equivalent to what "minority coin" is worth at the time (if anything).

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

#140

Post by fpgaminer »

badloginagain wrote: post #124
fpgaminer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Thanks for the explanation, that makes the bit about 80% of miners needing to adopt make sense. Why do you lack confidence in the SegWit2X developers? It seems the miners would be the last ones wanting a potentially fatal bug. Do they have less to lose if an exploit/honest bug burns the blockchain? Again, apologies if these are uninformed questions- I have only a layman's understanding of BTC.

> Why do you lack confidence in the SegWit2X developers?

I think the fact that they're pushing a hardfork 3 months after SegWit activates says a lot. We're talking about making all existing clients on a 40 billion dollar network obsolete and open to abuse. Giving only 3 months time to upgrade is absurd. Also, I believe SegWit2X was spawned some time in May? Being generous, that's only been 3 months of development so far.

When it comes to software like Bitcoin, where the slightest bug can result in catastrophe, I want the most conservative developers imaginable.

The development of btc1 (the SegWit2X client), AFAIK, has not been open. Most of it has occurred behind closed doors, with only the merges to the public repo being visible.

Another notable concern is there was a pull request submitted recently against the SegWit2X client (btc1). It changes the "seed nodes" list; adding in nodes that will run SegWit2X software. That's fine, except one of the nodes belongs to a company who's goal is to monitor and de-anonymize the Bitcoin network. For those not familar, seed nodes are the nodes the Bitcoin client initially connects to, from which they can learn about other nodes on the network. Giving a company that is actively trying to make Bitcoin unfungible is ... concerning to say the least.

> It seems the miners would be the last ones wanting a potentially fatal bug. Do they have less to lose if an exploit/honest bug burns the blockchain?

Just because you have a massive mining farm under your belt, doesn't mean you know the first thing about the ins-and-outs of Bitcoin. Mining is such a small part of what is otherwise a massive ocean of domain knowledge needed to understand Bitcoin. The people who contribute to Bitcoin Core have been doing it for 8+ years! And they're a band of cutthroats who aggressively review each other's code. The developers working on SegWit2X have no of those advantages.

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