Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

lists.linuxfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 253 posts

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#121

Post by nosuchthing »

zanny wrote: post #97
pwaai wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market fundamentals seem non existant here. At least a few years ago, when there were bad news the prices would reflect that. Now, it seems to go up anytime bitcoin is mentioned at all, regardless whether the market understands the implications or not.

This is why I got out of bitcoin trading. It used to correlate to the general attitude about it. Now the coins and miners are so centralized the real driving force of bitcoins price is the thousand wallets holding 95% of all BTC. Its like trying to predict market movements for a stock where 95% of the shares in a company are owned by one person. It isn't up to anyone else but that person where the price trends, becau…

Reposting this as pertinent:

  In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure 
  of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to 
  determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in 
  the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and 
  many addresses have been used only once or a few times. 
  (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small 
  exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from 
  early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 
  25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution 
  "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea 
  and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution 
  look like that of a workers' paradise

  Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 
  22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, 
  there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with 
  any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a 
  quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner 
  was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in 
  thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the 
  most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in 
  "RSA encryption")"
[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#122

Post by lawn »

hudon wrote: post #101
lawn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrast it to how many people it takes to block any on chain scaling. As everyone practically runs Core the power in practice lies with their maintainers. Bitcoin as it is now is crippled. There is no reason to block on chain scaling except for the Core maintainers to retain their power and allow their second layer solutions to viable.

People choose to run Core and the network is worth 122 billion dollars. You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right".

> You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling

Multiple dollar fees doesn't require any more arguments. The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking.

> but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right".

Have you considered that it's driven by speculation instead of technical merit? When the blockchain becomes unusable due to high fees and congestion the bottom will fall out. It cannot be driven by pure speculation forever.

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#123

Post by viraptor »

runeks wrote: post #116

I guess this is one of the merits of proof-of-work: force miners to mine on one chain only, and if the token on the fork is worth less compared to their relative increase in hash rate on the fork, they lose money. In my opinion, the financial motive of miners played a big role in this decision, and that’s exactly what proof-of-work is supposed to achieve: consensus through selfish miners. Has anyone done the math on…

All the time: https://whattomine.com/calculators

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#124

Post by xiphias »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #110

I still don't really understand why people were so against a block size increase. I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too much, but it doesn't really seem as though increasing to 2mb really make such a big difference? Am I missing something?

SegWit was a soft-fork block size increase with other scaling improvements. I'm strongly against having any hard fork in Bitcoin. The last Ethereum hard fork (when half of the devs wanted to cancel it because of the bug that was found) showed how dangerous it is. At this point Bitcoin is worth so much, that it's better to not touch it at all without a formal proof that the network is not harmed at all.

The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split.

Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization just because non-holders want low transaction fees (that can be very easily be created by a centralized system)

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#125

Post by RyanZAG »

justzisguyuknow wrote: post #98
zanny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I got out of bitcoin trading. It used to correlate to the general attitude about it. Now the coins and miners are so centralized the real driving force of bitcoins price is the thousand wallets holding 95% of all BTC. Its like trying to predict market movements for a stock where 95% of the shares in a company are owned by one person. It isn't up to anyone else but that person where the price trends, becau…

It seems like yes the day-to-day fluctuations may be at the whim of the large wallets, but how can they actually be in control of the price over longer periods? Or if they can, then given that it's in their interest for the price to keep rising long-term, why not hold and go along for the ride?

They want to slowly sell off their stock so as not to affect the price too much. If they sold nothing, they'd make no money off bitcoin and eventually when they did want to sell, the effect would be so huge as to crash the entire currency. So to maximize their return from their bitcoins, they need to constantly sell off bitcoins. Not too much to affect the price too badly, but not so little that they aren't cashing in appropriately on their investment.

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#126

Post by PaulAJ »

bpicolo wrote: post #14

So bitcoin went up because they were going to fork, and now it's going up again because they will not? k Edit: Otoh, looks like it's seeing a bit of a drop now, but I doubt it will hit the pre-anticipation levels.

The price swings are probably driven by people with future positions on one chain or the other.

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#127

Post by ratacat »

ashark wrote: post #28
temp987654 wrote: post #23

So... this should probably mean a deep dive for btc price then, right?

I checked coinbase expected exactly that, thinking "oh man, I'm glad I didn't sell my eth a month ago to buy into bc trying to capture free altcoins like others did and like I considered doing, it'll be down like 10% at least" but it... shot up about 10% instead. I don't get it.

Coinbase had one million new accounts opened in a seven day period this month. The rise is substantially organic in new people coming in.

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#128

Post by olegkikin »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #113
olegkikin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum works fine as a currency too (~15 sec per block, quite nice). It also works fine with simple contracts, it's the humans who aren't good enough (yet) to write bug-free code. Bugs in software of various kinds cause billions of dollars worth of damage, deaths too. Yet I don't see people claiming it's the fault of C++.

Yet I don't see people claiming it's the fault of C++ A major driving force behind the development of Rust is that exact claim.

I doubt software written in Rust has no bugs.

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#129

Post by lawn »

xiphias wrote: post #124
xwvvvvwx wrote: post #110

I still don't really understand why people were so against a block size increase. I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too much, but it doesn't really seem as though increasing to 2mb really make such a big difference? Am I missing something?

SegWit was a soft-fork block size increase with other scaling improvements. I'm strongly against having any hard fork in Bitcoin. The last Ethereum hard fork (when half of the devs wanted to cancel it because of the bug that was found) showed how dangerous it is. At this point Bitcoin is worth so much, that it's better to not touch it at all without a formal proof that the network is not harmed at all. The biggest di…

Hard forks aren't dangerous. Monero has scheduled hard forks all the time. It's the best and cleanest way to upgrade.

> The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split.

Yet there's no research to remotely suggest a meager increase to 2MB would have any effect. Compact blocks and Xthin (and recently Graphene) also improves on this immensely.

> Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization

Typical black and white thinking. Bitcoin must have a primary use case that's not a store of value otherwise it will crash down when no new money is injected.

> just because non-holders want low transaction fees

Yeah because non-holders are the ones who want to use Bitcoin as was always intended. Pure holders are only in for the speculation.

The title of Bitcoin's whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" not "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Store of Value System".

Re: Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

#130

Post by hudon »

lawn wrote: post #122
hudon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People choose to run Core and the network is worth 122 billion dollars. You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right".

> You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling Multiple dollar fees doesn't require any more arguments. The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking. > but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right". Have you considered that it's driven by speculation instead of technical merit? When the blockchain becomes unusable due to high fees and congestio…

The pure speculators I know invest in smaller cap cryptocurrencies to maximize their gains. The only people I know invested in bitcoin are in because they believe in its long term value.

Anyway at this point you're trying to predict the future and I'm sharing anecdotes so we're not getting anywhere, let's tackle your main point:

> The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking.

The value of full nodes is widely understood by bitcoin contributors [0][1][2]. Increasing the block size directly increases the amount of resources required to run a full node. Increased bandwidth requirements is especially a problem.

It is up to the candidate (s2x), not the incumbent (core) to show that no, it won't be harder to run full nodes, or to show that you can have just as much security by running an SPV node. Because the candidate has failed to back up their proposal with evidence that security is not harmed, the proposal cannot be allowed to move forward. Makes sense?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/fu...

[1] https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-full-nodes-889c20100a8d

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node

Post reply on HN