Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by solotronics » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

buttershakes wrote: post #167

rothbardrand wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are. There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visibl…

You are ascribing to the Bitcoin core narrative of a bunch of freedom fighters who are building a decentralized future of freedom, but that narrative does not hold water. First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. That tells you that the allegianc…

I'm not sure if it's economically possible to compete with Chinese Bitcoin miners for a number of reasons. To get around capital controls Chinese nationals invest in ASICs and mine to move money out. There is incredibly cheap power in China due to government subsidized hydroelectric and coal. Supposedly many miners bribe power officials and get free electricity. ASICs for Bitcoin mining are made in China and I assume are much cheaper there? It doesn't really matter where the miners are though unless they are colluding due to political reasons to reject transactions.

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

#252

Post by buttershakes » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

hudon wrote: post #238

buttershakes wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://qz.com/931810/cheapair-and-bitpay-data-show-rising-b... This isn't the most accurate thing, but looks to me like several millions USD worth of volume just in Bitpay. That doesn't account for all of the other payment processors, or the peer to peer payments, or the exchange trading, etc. I'm not saying dark markets aren't an early driver of Bitcoin, but it's not where the majority of the action is now at all.

"peer to peer" payments don't require a blockchain: see Venmo, Square Cash, Facebook Messenger, PayPal, TransferWise, Uber (paying the driver), etc. Exchange trading is not really using bitcoin, it is buying/selling bitcoin. This is like saying buying a car is an application of cars... Having said that, Bitpay is processing more than I thought. The data in that article would mean it's about $5M per day... I'd love to…

Well, that's a narrow definition of P2P. All of those are centrally cleared systems vs a decentralized one. Buying a car is an application of money. The killer app for Bitcoin is better money, that's the vision I subscribe to and the one I would like to see proliferate.

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

#253

Post by shp0ngle » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:07 PM UTC

kanzure wrote: post #187

shp0ngle wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Thanks for the links. I was under the impression that LN needs maleability fix. (And I am not the only one who thinks that - see https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/segwit-lightning/ )

I don't take FlexTrans as serious attempt at malleability fixing

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

#254

Post by shp0ngle » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:08 PM UTC

kanzure wrote: post #185

shp0ngle wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Interesting. I will try the docker example later

BUT you have to admit it is still in research and not widely used/accepted/tested by users

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

#255

Post by Daishiman » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #35

Daishiman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called hedging bets. That's how you become an established player.

You hire 50k people and throw 5/10 at block chain just to make sure you don't get caught with your pants down. That's barely an investment.

They will acquihire when the time is right. They have absolutely no need to do any in-house tech whatsoever.

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

#256

Post by olegkikin » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #171

BenoitP wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not years. The difficulty is recalculated every 2016 blocks (14 days)[1]. If one chain has 10% hashing power, for less or equal to 14 days the transactions could take 10 times more to validate. But that's assuming markets aren't correcting miners in the "right" direction in the meantime. Who wants to waste electricity on undervalued coins? ---- Considering most of BTCs have been mined at the time bitcoin core had no…

But if blocks are being produced at 10% of the expected rate, it will take 14*10=140 days before the difficulty is recalculated.

If you're hard-forking, you can increase the recalculation rate for a few first new blocks. You can even recalculate every block for, say, 1000 or 5000 blocks .

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

#257

Post by xiphias » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

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…

Core is one of the best managed team I know of: they stay true to the most important feature of bitcoin: decentralization. They do this on many levels. What most people don't realize is that Bitcoin is the best method for storing value even in it's current form, without any protocol update. Also value storage is the reason why Bitcoin is hyped so much, and why it's so emotional for people to talk about it.

Any update to the network that is able to take away from it's value storage characteristics is bad, and core deeply understands this, unlike many other teams.

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

#258

Post by fpgaminer » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

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…

> If all users start using segwit addresses and segwit transactions

SegWit blocks can vary from 1MB in non-ideal conditions to near 4MB in ideal conditions. 2MB is just the average.

You're right, yes, ideally we'd want everyone using SegWit transactions. But we don't need all users to start using them to start seeing congestion relief.

I would expect 90% of transactions are generated by 10% of Bitcoin's users. Maybe even more skewed than that. (That 10% is likely businesses, power users, etc). Getting those 10% to switch to SegWit transactions will be relatively easy; they'll feel the value of reduced fees more readily.

It's likely Bitcoin Core would start using SegWit addresses by default some time after SegWit is activated. Since the majority of users use Bitcoin Core, the shift wouldn't take too long.

> hardfork would solve that issue immediately - no need to upgrade wallets, no need to figure out how do segwit-inside-P2SH addresses work (they are different from normal addresses!).

Hardfork _does_ require upgrading wallets. In fact, it requires upgrading _all_ wallets. Anyone who hasn't upgraded cannot participate in Bitcoin any longer if a hardfork is used.

Contrast that with SegWit. SegWit doesn't require that everyone upgrade. And yet everyone will benefit from the increased block capacity, even those not using SegWit addresses, because the fees overall will go down.

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

The plan was for SegWit to activate, providing a more immediate ~2MB increase in block size, and then mid-term we'd see things like the lightning network come online and provide further relief. Long term developers would continue improving network efficiency which means the existing blocks can carry more transactions, and also eventually a hardfork to add some mechanism for increasing blocksize (that doesn't require further hardforks).

> Well, that's a matter of "policy"

I didn't mean that SegWit transactions were inherently cheaper in terms of fees. Sure, fees are always policy. But, AFAIK, SegWit transactions are actually cheaper in terms of network load. The discount on SegWit transactions is not just to expand the blocksize; they're also discounted because they put less strain on the network compared to old-style transactions.

EDIT: And to be clear, the SegWit discount we're talking about is a discount on the weight of a SegWit transaction's size in calculating the total blocksize. AFAIK, there is no fee discount on SegWit transactions; they pay the same per byte fee. SegWit2X has no way to remove that discount without changing consensus rules. So that specifically is not a matter of policy; it's matter of consensus. It would thus required another hardfork to change those rules.

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

#259

Post by xorcist » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:33 PM UTC

buttershakes wrote: post #146

BenoitP wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as one miner is still mining the core chain, the transaction will be validated. It may take a little while at first, but difficulty will adapt. It's going to be 2 legitimate currencies that are going to differ in value in exchanges. And each current BTC holder will be able to spend 2 coins (provided they take precautions against replayability; like making at first a double-spend to different wallets on the tw…

It would take years for the difficulty to adapt to a 10 minute block time if the hash power dropped that much, there is a limit per two week adjustment period. More than likely the code would have to be modified to accommodate a rapidly dropping difficulty. See my other post, but that essentially destroys the security of the minority chain. BTC rich people are on both sides of the debate, expect to see some dumping a…

Realistically, what will happen if mining power moves to an alternative chain but Bitcoins are still what is traded at exchanges, is that miners will move back very quickly. The first one to move will gain the most economically, so game theory dictates the move back will be swift.

In the end, miners mine what people buy. It's that simple.

Any speculation as to what happens if all miners move as one, motivated by ideology instead of economics, is just that.

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

#260

Post by xorcist » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

kbaker wrote: post #190

jerguismi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that simple. Exchanges and custodial wallets hold other people's funds, so they are not allowed to decide arbitrarily which chain is "Bitcoin". That would be regulatory suicide.