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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

#171

Post by comex »

BenoitP wrote: post #158
buttershakes wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#172

Post by ascendantlogic »

rothbardrand wrote: post #159
ascendantlogic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which do you put more stock in? What they are signaling now or what they promise in a blog post? This makes their opposition to Segwit2X clear: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14... Its clear the opposition is to Segwit-- and Segwit2X contains Segwit.

http://bitcoinist.com/antpool-mines-segwit2x-block/

https://twitter.com/BITMAINtech/status/886839997440995328

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

#173

Post by ascendantlogic »

rothbardrand wrote: post #159
ascendantlogic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which do you put more stock in? What they are signaling now or what they promise in a blog post? This makes their opposition to Segwit2X clear: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14... Its clear the opposition is to Segwit-- and Segwit2X contains Segwit.

Segwit2x is an olive branch, they want the increased block size and are willing to implement Segwit to get it.

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

#174

Post by buttershakes »

hudon wrote: post #169
buttershakes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say it's an attempt to make Bitcoin more efficient? It's essentially exactly the code base of Bitcoin core with some very minor changes including a block size commitment in the future. Seems pretty clear that it is about control of that code base, and not really the technical underpinnings which are almost identical. I think the issue is that people have a vision of what Bitcoin is, that doesn't align with…

1. SPV is not sufficient for security because it requires whitelisted nodes. If your client connects to a malicious node, you are shit out of luck. 2. There is no non-blockchain alternative to online censorship resistant cash. So if the price to use it is high, you will either pay the fee for censorship resistance or use your credit card (which is faster, cheaper, gives you rewards or cash back, provides consumer pro…

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.

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

#175

Post by kbaker »

wmf wrote: post #132
jerguismi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK btc1 produces normal segwit blocks that will be accepted by Core; that's the point of the compromise.

Until the hard fork 3 months down the road, then the blocks won't be accepted.

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

#176

Post by buttershakes »

kanzure wrote: post #165
buttershakes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say it's an attempt to make Bitcoin more efficient? It's essentially exactly the code base of Bitcoin core with some very minor changes including a block size commitment in the future. Seems pretty clear that it is about control of that code base, and not really the technical underpinnings which are almost identical. I think the issue is that people have a vision of what Bitcoin is, that doesn't align with…

> 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.

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

#177

Post by shp0ngle »

fpgaminer wrote: post #94
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…

> 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, you know, clog the network. (In reality, nobody knows what will happen. Almost nobody uses segwit on litecoin right now, but litecoin is a toy currency...)

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!).

> enables lightning network which should hopefully reduce congestion on the Bitcoin network

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

> SegWit transactions are cheaper than traditional transactions

Well, that's a matter of "policy", and I am not sure if segwit2x nodes will implement the segwit discount or not. There were some issues about that, but I think they didn't have time to remove the segwit discount yet. But they plan to.

(Again I am not advocating big blocks, increasing blocks that way is not something that can be done forever. Segwit is fine, it solves some issues like maleability, but it's overhyped IMO. There is no scaling solution for bitcoin yet. And maybe there will not be?)

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

#178

Post by hudon »

buttershakes wrote: post #174
hudon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. SPV is not sufficient for security because it requires whitelisted nodes. If your client connects to a malicious node, you are shit out of luck. 2. There is no non-blockchain alternative to online censorship resistant cash. So if the price to use it is high, you will either pay the fee for censorship resistance or use your credit card (which is faster, cheaper, gives you rewards or cash back, provides consumer pro…

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 within minutes.

Please show me a use case for a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that even comes close to these numbers and that does not need censorship resistance.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/alphabay-takedown-dark-web-chaos...

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

#180

Post by fpgaminer »

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.

> The network needs a 10000x improvement.

Says who?

Would I like Bitcoin to support 10,000x more transactions per second than it does now? Of course. But just because I _want_ it to, doesn't mean it's magically going to be able to. Bitcoin is what it is.

I'd like ships that can go faster than the speed of light, but physics isn't going to bends its rules just because I want it to.

We cannot, physically, increase Bitcoin's throughput 10,000x. We could change one constant, the max blocksize, make it 10GB and ... oops, now the network is broken. No one on Earth can actually validate 10GB blocks in the span of 10 minutes. And even if they could, who could handle 1.4 TB of increasing disk space per day?

10,000x is an extreme example of principals that apply to any blocksize increase. If we increase the blocksize, it means less and less PCs are capable of actually running the Bitcoin software. And it won't take much before the exponential complexity of validating blocks eats everything.

Whether we like it or not, we are dependent on optimizing the Bitcoin network if we want any kind of scale. It will take time and it will take innovation. In the meantime, we have SegWit which enables lightning networks, which we can use for anything we don't need the full guarantees of a Bitcoin transaction for.

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