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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

#281

Post by Taek »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #93
erikpukinskis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There is no Bitcoin to control. Bitcoin is an idea, and there can be as many variations as people have ideas. There will be a main trunk, centered around the middle of the market, but the whole point of cryptocurrencies is they can be forked and survive. In the new world, everyone has their own universe. The sooner one believes, the stronger their position in the 2030 economy.

Name one that has forked and survived. Ethereum Classic is not "surviving".

Ethereum Classic today has more market cap than Etherum did the month before the split, how is that not surviving? They have grown immensely since the split.

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

#282

Post by Taek »

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #209
arcaster wrote: post #47

After working in the space for about a year, after being a developer and enthusiast surrounding crypto since the early days of BTC this "bickering among core devs" is nothing new. Any press or "talks" that say otherwise are either being influenced with serious bias or are simply reporting false information. I like DLT tech, however, if bitcoin has shown us anything it's that once you solve the double-spend problem yo…

The governance issue is, to me, the 'final boss' of Bitcoin. They way it's set up, Bitcoin should ruthlessly follow the will of the majority and generate new consensus. I cannot think of another system that could potentially do this as effectively. It's ugly, bitter, and has real costs, but the way it's playing out gives me confidence that cryptocurrencies are truly a novel form of human communication about value.

Why would you want a financial system that follows the will of the majority? Financial systems are incredibly complex, and the majority is easily influenced by ideas that seem correct because they can be stated simply, though those ideas may actually have no hold over reality.

The whole point of bitcoin is that it is stable, trustworthy software. You don't have to worry about the latest fad screwing up your ability to use the financial system.

Democracy can easily be achieved with rigid protocols: just have multiple coins! (Bitcoin, ethereum, etc), and if you prefer one over the other, use the one you prefer. Then make a system that keeps them mostly interoperable (they already are, it's very easy to change funds between them), and viola! Nobody becomes victim to the will of the majority, while the majority can still pick between multiple options.

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

#283

Post by Taek »

keyme wrote: post #138
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 on…

Exchanges and merchants transact... with users. Also, you definitely don't have to use the longest chain. That's one of the key innovations if Bitcoin, you only follow the longest chain that your node sees as valid. At the moment of the split, most nodes will not see the 2x chain as valid, so they will not follow it even if it is the longest chain. But those nodes will keep working.

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

#284

Post by buttershakes »

jhall1468 wrote: post #266
buttershakes wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied. This always get's bandied about. There are less than 20 people responsible for the vast majority of the commits in the last year, the other 90+ are small scattered changes. Easy to verify, go look at the commit logs. Oh, and 3 of the top Contributors aren…

> Segwit is all about sidechains, that's the main application, and the real purpose. You're just wrong. Segwit is about a major malleability bug. It happens to open the way for sidechains, but do you honestly think we shouldn't fix the bug purely because it happens to make sidechains more feasible? > Side chains mean transactions off chain. Transactions off chain mean less fees for Bitcoin miners. It's not rocket sci…

Segwit is not about fixing malleability. Malleability can be fixed without SegWit. It's a simple change to the TX format. Segwit is over engineered to avoid a hard fork, and is primarily meant to support side chain technology, but in reality now we end up with multiple competing forks.

You believe that limiting the block size increases adoption. That is an absurd viewpoint, I'm sorry. I don't agree with you. I think its like saying limiting the bandwidth of the backbone of the Internet increase adoption. What? It doesn't make sense there, and it doesn't make sense for Bitcoin. Regardless of what layer two technology exists. Layer two solutions are great, but if you look at highly scalable networks layer 1 isn't a piece of crap.

I didn't dismiss how the blockchain works. This is your own misunderstanding of how to verify nodes. If you put the utxo hash into the block header you have lightweight history verification, Ethereum does it, and so can Bitcoin. It doesn't do it for historical reasons, not because there isn't a better technical way to do it. Nodes that need to can still validate full history, but just like headers validation can work for spv, a modified header could be used for full history verification. The fact this hasn't happened is incredibly telling, its because it helps create a false narrative around nodes not having the compute, bandwidth or disk space to handle bitcoin transaction history.

Listen, you can attack my technical chops all you want. I've built tremendous amounts of stuff with Bitcoin, and it's obvious that small blocks are hurting adoption, hurting businesses that are trying to build software on Bitcoin, and creating arbitrary and ridiculous limits that are not in the realm of sound computer science. Arguing over a 1 megabyte increase in block size is the height of absurdity, it's Bitcoin's butter battle, and advocating for overly complicated layer 2 solutions when we are years away from being necessary is some kind of intellectual masturbation.

I'm advocating for larger blocks, I hope that core is punished for their complete lack of management capability by losing control of the network, and I think that market forces will crush this absurd vision for Bitcoin when it is relegated to some small unimportant chain. Let's wait and see how it pans out.

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

#285

Post by duckingtest »

Torgo wrote: post #65
badloginagain wrote: post #32

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why not both? It doesn't appear that the two strategies are mutually exclusive. Is it just that SegWitX2 is considered too rushed? Is it just that miners have a vested interest in maintaining influence? Personally it seems like smart contracts and other similar services beget an ecosystem that could swell the market cap by a significant amount, I assume miners would have a long…

both sides are in many ways right in their criticisms about the other side, they are just fundamentally conflicting visions of the long term nature of the network. In my opinion the problem here is the network was built so that it operated only by people acting on incentives and those incentives being aligned with the good of the network, and it turned out that miners acting in their own interest wasn't actually good…

You should ask the question about Core developers' incentives: what do they personally gain from scaling bitcoin? Nothing, at best increase in value of their holdings which they share with lots of free-riders, and only until they sell. They only gain continuously if scaling is prevented as that opens space for their second-layer solutions - presumably to be enabled by planned 'improvements' to bitcoin. Ie. their only incentive is to capture bitcoin for rent extraction.

Miners are the only entities that have a continued incentive to improve bitcoin directly.

THAT'S the real conflict, everything else is BS.

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

#286

Post by Taek »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #276
taysic wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me it is. From Gavin Andresen, one of the original developers: http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessaril... "So it looks to me like the actual out-of-pocket cost of running a full node in a datacenter won’t change with a 20 megabyte maximum block size; it will be on the order of $5 or $10 per month."

That's nauseating. I have to hear all this vitriol over a silly difference like that? Why doesn't anyone just bring this up every time Blockstream talks? I feel like I'm in bizarro land.

Because it is nonsense. What Gavin did in that post was napkin math that completely ignored all of the complexities of secure blockchain design.

It's like a guy showing that we can get humans to Mars eailsy just by greatly increasing the amount of fuel in the rocket. Any rocket scientist would have heart attack if such a notion became broadly popular, because it's so naive.

A lot of this debate can be summarized by saying that the popular opinion is being propagated by non-experts spouting incorrect ideas that seem correct to the general population because they are accessible, because they ignore the hard (but important) parts of blockchain design.

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

#287

Post by jhall1468 »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #96
jerguismi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I suspect that SegWit2x will end up taking over the network" What? They had first release like yesterday, the project has released one tarball, no packaging, no very good marketing etc. The biggest marketers seem to be the tinfoil hat opponents who fear the fork so much that they speak about it everywhere. I don't think it is at all likely that segwit2x client will gain support. Or if it will gain support, it will t…

90% of the hashing power has signaled their intention to adopt segwit2x as of late June. I assume it will become the dominant chain once it locks in right before August 1st.

That's misunderstanding even the basic issue here. Segwit signaling needs to begin August 1st, it won't lock in for about 2 weeks and that has nothing to do with the 2x part which won't even happen until November.

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

#288

Post by jhall1468 »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #60
apeace wrote: post #16

The days are counting down to the "Segwit2X" rollout, the idea supported in the "New York Agreement" (NYA)[0]. There is a contingency plan in place should the Core-supported User Activated Soft Fork become activated.[1] Segwit2X has working code, has been tested in beta, and is now in RC.[2] Without commenting on the merits of the different approaches, the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator. To ca…

> the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator Is there a good "live-thread" where I can follow the events?

Not a live thread, or interactive much but:

https://www.xbt.eu/

Once the BIP91 hits 80%, an as long as it does so before August 1st, this issue is going to go dormant until November.

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

#289

Post by jhall1468 »

criddell wrote: post #220
sp821543 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XT/Classic was a mere skirmish compared to this. On one side you have Chinese miners and one developer gunning for segwit2x because it gives them a significant advantage related to their hardware. On the other side you have the other dozen or so core developers who want a more conservative approach. As a side-effect this version levels the playing field for miners.

Why is it an either-or situation? Couldn't they increase the blocksize and use side chains?

Miners don't want side chains because that reduces their fees. Miners want Bitcoin to be VISA where they are the conglomerate that controls it.

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

#290

Post by jhall1468 »

mhluongo wrote: post #13
ihuman wrote: post #6

How is this different then what happened with Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin classic?

Segwit2x has the hash power to end this. Also, with XT there wasn't really n alternative scaling solution to a blocksize increase, as far as I know. This time we have SegWit as an alternative and with the threat of UASF, the community is being forced to compromise on SegWit + a 2MB hardfork.

Hash power follows value not the other way around. For some reason a lot of people seem to think the entire economy follows the miners.
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