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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

#181

Post by gomox »

BenoitP wrote: post #148

I'm starting to see a bit clearer on how a fork would pan out: Miners: Hashing power has little influence. As long as there are miners, and two chains rejecting each other transactions will be processed. At first, transactions processing might take a while, but difficulty will adapt. This will create two legitimate currencies. Now everybody in possession of 1 BTC would have 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb. Exchanges: Little power. T…

I was there at the ETH/ETC split and replay was a thing. Someone put together a special smart contract that received 2 addresses (one for the ETH chain and one for the ETC chain), checked which chain you were in and wired ether to either address accordingly.

After doing that (and because valid transaction execution was contingent on the actual chain you were in) each wallet became independent and you were free to use funds in each as desired.

This is the contract:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xaa1a6e3e6ef20068f7f8d8c835d2d...

And this is the related helper that checks which chain you are in:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x2bd2326c993dfaef84f696526064f...

I'm not clear on what a BTC equivalent of this operation would be. Seems like smart contracts saved the day, as trying to move BTC to 2 different wallets on split chains by hand risks a race condition.

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

#182

Post by shp0ngle »

woah wrote: post #153
fpgaminer wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think that gives the wrong impression. First off, Core != Blockstream. Secondly, the consensus amongst Core developers, as I read it, is they want as much on-chain as possible. Their definition of possible is what can a Bitcoin client handl…

Do any of these optimizations even get close to a 10x improvement? The network needs a 10000x improvement.

No.

Except for Lightning Network, which is this software that somehow routes transactions on a separate network, and it's not bitcoin; it doesn't have the same assurances, there are some third-party channels that route the transactions. (I admit, I haven't studied LN in detail.)

It uses bitcoin as a "backbone", sort of like you have SWIFT which is slow and expensive, and then you have credit card payments/paypal/whatnot that is built on top of it.

LN specifically requires segwit (the main issue of this "civil war").

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

#183

Post by kbaker »

campbelltown wrote: post #161
xutopia wrote: post #157

To me this whole process shows how great cryptocurrencies really are. The process is live, it is public and it is messy. Compare with how our usual currencies are handled. Behind closed doors with powerful banks or private companies deciding for our governments.

Exactly! Could you imagine if we could watch a live twitter fueled debate about how to upgrade our central banking system? It's a beautiful sight. Flawed, but beautiful.

With an up-to-the-second, 24-hour market behind it where fortunes can be made or lost on single tweets. Fun!

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

#184

Post by kanzure »

buttershakes wrote: post #176
kanzure wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> End users can still validate transactions via SPV, which is completely valid and provable without storing the entire block chain fraud proofs don't work because if you want to prevent someone from creating a fraud proof, you never send them the data that would be necessary to prove a fraud ("the block is too big! nobody (but some list of companies) have the bandwidth to support the enormous bitcoin network!"). SPV…

SPV does absolutely check the block headers, which is all you need to do the proof. You can say that transactions could be omitted from the actual block chain, but not that invalid header data could be served that let someone believe they were paid when they were not or some other falsification.

you're talking only about SPV proof of transaction inclusion, not about the other fraud proofs necessary for the version of SPV theorized in bitcoin.pdf

here's a recent one: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0180.mediawi...

But why would a miner give an SPV user the data that proves a fraudulent double spend in the same block?

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

#185

Post by kanzure »

shp0ngle wrote: post #177
fpgaminer wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think that gives the wrong impression. First off, Core != Blockstream. Secondly, the consensus amongst Core developers, as I read it, is they want as much on-chain as possible. Their definition of possible is what can a Bitcoin client handl…

> Core != Blockstream The overlap is very large. In the same way, segwit2x != Chinere miners, but come on, there is an clear overlap. > It's an effective blocksize increase to 2MB If all users start using segwit addresses and segwit transactions, and if all wallets software will know how to send and receive it. And that will mean users will need to send their money to their segwit-enabled addresses first, which might…

> In the same way, segwit2x != Chinere miners, but come on, there is an clear overlap

there's more overlap with core developers and chaincode labs.

> Lightning network might be a vaporware. Literally nobody is using it, since it does not exist.

it does exist, https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd and http://lightning.community/release/software/lnd/lightning/20... and other implementations of lightning also exist.

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

#186

Post by kbaker »

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.

You can look at ETH vs ETH classic to see the effect. Initial huge drop while things get reorganized, then after a long time, with the legacy chain worth 10% of the main chain, with unknown extra value lost due to the split.

This assumes enough hashpower where people can still transact on the legacy chain, and with some sort of replay protection to where exchanges can safely actually convert the funds to have two separate tradable tokens. Right now that doesn't exist, so exchanges won't touch it. This is a huge reason why Bitcoin Unlimited was a non-starter.

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

#187

Post by kanzure »

shp0ngle wrote: post #182
woah wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of these optimizations even get close to a 10x improvement? The network needs a 10000x improvement.

No. Except for Lightning Network, which is this software that somehow routes transactions on a separate network, and it's not bitcoin; it doesn't have the same assurances, there are some third-party channels that route the transactions. (I admit, I haven't studied LN in detail.) It uses bitcoin as a "backbone", sort of like you have SWIFT which is slow and expensive, and then you have credit card payments/paypal/what…

> and it's not bitcoin; it doesn't have the same assurances, there are some third-party channels that route the transactions. (I admit, I haven't studied LN in detail.)

lightning clients pass around bitcoin transactions to each other, check the protobufs: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/2bf92c9063...

admittedly the protobufs have changed since i last looked, here's the canonical diagram describing the hashed timelock bitcoin transaction concept: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/2bf92c9063...

or read the paper https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

> LN specifically requires segwit

false, see http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o...

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

#188

Post by buttershakes »

hudon wrote: post #178
buttershakes wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You just need to connect to enough nodes that their is a statistical probability that you aren't being censored. 2. There are already alternatives which have better censorship resistance than Bitcoin, limiting the block size does little to fix those issues. I also don't think the market actually values censorship resistance in their digital cash as much as you think.

> I also don't think the market actually values censorship resistance in their digital cash Alphabay processed $600,000 to $800,000 per day [1]. This is economic activity for tangible goods. In the list of other top uses of the blockchain might be ICOs, which are a way to leverage censorship resistance to raise money without permission from the SEC. On the high end, these accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars w…

I'm not sure why you think $800,000 per day is a lot. Compare that to daily volume for usage of the currency itself across all applications. https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

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

#189

Post by nfriedly »

What is Bitcoin and friends good for right now besides speculating with and trading for other currencies?

A while back there was a BTC marketplace where among other things, I spent 1 BTC on a steam key for the game Portal (a poor trade in hindsight).

But they shut down and the only other place that I can think of that accepts BTC is humblebundle.com - and presumably they convert it to USD right away.

Actually:

> Bitcoin payments have been disabled for the Humble Capcom Rising Bundle.

So, yea, who accepts BTC right now?

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

#190

Post by kbaker »

jerguismi wrote: post #115
buttershakes wrote: post #95

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…

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

If the exchanges trade 'segwit2x-coin' as Bitcoin, it will become 'Bitcoin', and the legacy coin, if it is possible to use at all, will have to be renamed.
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