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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

#191

Post by hudon »

buttershakes wrote: post #188
hudon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

It is a lot. Again, please show me an example application of the blockchain that comes close to that number but that does not need censorship resistance.

The estimate of daily volume provided by blockchain.info obscures our discussion, especially if you consider that the daily volume for BTC/USD pair is around $1B. There could be $1B-worth of outputs in a day all dedicated to providing liquidity to exchanges, but entering/exiting the network is not an application of the network itself.

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

#192

Post by monort »

kinghajj wrote: post #76
shp0ngle wrote: post #66

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 is implemented, the command line option is a -prune=

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

#193

Post by curyous »

hudon wrote: post #149
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…

> SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team I disagree. SegWit2x is a misguided attempt to make Bitcoin "more efficient" without realizing that it puts at risk the core value proposition of Bitcoin: censorship resistance. At the root of this debate is a disagreement about what the blockchain is for. On one side, you have all the developers working on the Core project and activists like Amir Taak…

Big blocks increase decentralization and censorship resistance by allowing many more transactions and many more users.

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

#194

Post by kbaker »

BenoitP wrote: post #168
woah wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fixed the transaction replay ability I believe. I still have all my ETC, seems like it's not going anywhere.

How is that technically possible to prevent? The miners in the two chains gain from listening to what is going on in the other chain, and could just copy transactions and take the commission. Have no miner attempted to grab some fees? Or maybe the price of ETC is so low that it would be unprofitable? ---- Addendum: It is addressed in EIP #155 [1], where they changed the signing of transactions and put some sort of ch…

In btc1 there is not any replay protection right now, as the timeline didn't allow for development of this. It is an important feature request though, maybe follow along here:

https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/issues/34

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

#195

Post by kbaker »

narrator wrote: post #37

This is why I'm bullish on Litecoin. Already has segregated witness, lightning network, low transaction fees, and a low drama community.

Bullish up to the point where Bitcoin inherits all the features... If the BTC scaling debate gets solved successfully, then LTC will fade back into the background...

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

#196

Post by buttershakes »

kanzure wrote: post #184
buttershakes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Blocks aren't valid with double spends in them. You are saying the miner makes an invalid block by the rules in order to have a double spend transaction and then mislead the spv client with that information? I'm not making the argument that relay nodes are useless just that their security is being over stated, it catches this particular issue.

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

#197

Post by jcranmer »

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…

The standard financial example for blockchains is financial clearing, and the amount of money processed in these transactions is truly staggering. CHIPS alone processes $1,000,000 every minute.

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

#198

Post by kbaker »

kanzure wrote: post #18
wyager wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be specific, fully 88%(!) of miners are actively signaling support for the upgrade plan known as "segwit2x".[1] The contention was between whether Bitcoin should scale via block growth or via a different transaction serialization format that allowed for more transactions and also opens the door for certain forms of off-chain transaction. Segwit2x does both: it doubles the block size, and introduces the new transac…

> To be specific, fully 88%(!) of miners are actively signaling support for the upgrade plan known as "segwit2x".[1] Unfortunately, signaling is more like a bumper sticker you slap on your blocks. The rules you deploy and actively use don't really have to conform to what values you place in the blockheader. It's supposedly a way to communicate your intentions regarding your future enforcement of certain rules... http…

Because btc1 is not released yet. Once it is, start expecting the real blocks to be mined.

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

#199

Post by hudon »

jcranmer wrote: post #197
hudon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The standard financial example for blockchains is financial clearing, and the amount of money processed in these transactions is truly staggering. CHIPS alone processes $1,000,000 every minute .

Does CHIPS use a blockchain?

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

#200

Post by xg15 »

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.

Maybe I'm misinformed, but aren't SegWit (without 2x) blocks backwards compatible?

From what I understood, a valid SegWit block will appear valid to an old client.

Certain invalid SegWit blocks will also appear valid to old clients, but those blocks will be rejected by SegWit-enabled miners, so they have little chance to be included should the miners change.

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