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Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

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Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#41

Post by Analemma_ »

jswny wrote: post #12

Oh boy another incoming Bitcoin proposal civil war in the comments section. I can't wait until nullc gets here. Why is it so hard to have a non-censored, rational discussion about this topic without it becoming some ridiculous flame war every time?

> Why is it so hard to have a non-censored, rational discussion about this topic without it becoming some ridiculous flame war every time?

Because each side thinks they are acting selflessly in the best interests of Bitcoin with sound technical reasoning, while the other side has sinister ulterior motives. Bitcoin scaling debates (like most political debates) are riddled with assumptions of bad faith.

What really makes it complicated is that, to some extent, both sides are right: there really are people on each side who stand to profit greatly from their proposal winning and thus have their finger on the scale. Of course, each side only notices these people when they belong to the other camp.

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#42

Post by zmonx »

kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

This is a very good summary of the situation, thank you for posting this.

However, one critical issue is omitted in the above: The suggested approach (SegWit), albeit probably more by coincidence than by intention, also corrects a shortcoming of the existing transaction protocol that lets you reuse parts of the computation when trying to find a suitable block, leading to a net gain of ~20% hash power over other miners if you exploit it.

Critically, said approach ("AsicBoost") is patented! Therefore, not all miners can use the approach, leading to a centralization of hash power in contrast to the original intention of Bitcoin.

Miners who currently benefit from this oversight in the protocol have no short-term interest in removing it via a change of protocol headers that SegWit entails, in addition to the other reason you mention, i.e., higher transaction fees if there is a backlog due to small blacks.

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#43

Post by zzalpha »

fragsworth wrote: post #26
kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

An additional wrench thrown into the mix is the fact that the Ethereum and Ripple developers/owners have a lot to gain by trying to make sure Bitcoin is unable to scale. It doesn't take much effort (since the miners are already hesitant about agreeing to some update) to sabotage the whole situation. It's quite possible that they're funding both sides of the debate to make sure none of them generates a super-majority.…

See, these are exactly the kind of poisonous claims that make this an impossible debate.

In short: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you want to claim an altcoin conspiracy to destroy Bitcoin, prove it. Otherwise take your baseless gossip elsewhere, please.

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#44

Post by petertodd »

kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

> It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand, fees are high ($2-3 per transaction for fast confirmation.)

The idea that Bitcoin's high transaction demand makes transactions slow is a serious misconception.

Bitcoin transaction fees are a supply and demand system, and each transaction you send is a bid for the limited supply of blockchain space. If you place a sufficiently high bid, you'll get into the next block almost every time. The price of that bid is getting a lot higher than it used to be, but that's a case of Bitcoin becoming expensive to use, not unreliable.

OTOH, let's suppose you're bid is lower. I think where part of the misconception comes from is that both supply and demand are variable, the latter because of fluctuations in how many transactions people send, and the former because blocks are found randomly in a Poisson process. So if you want, you might get lucky and pay a lower price. But that's the same with any commodity with a free market - you wouldn't complain about gas becoming unreliable because you have to wait a few days for the price to dip, you'd still say it was becoming expensive. And like gas, as you lower your bid you very quickly find yourself waiting forever.

The other root cause of this misconception, is many of the people pushing the "Bitcoin is becoming unreliable" meme have business interests where they want Bitcoin to be a payment system first and foremost. That demands low fees. Unfortunately for them, Bitcoin's underlying technology is fundamentally ill-suited to that need and always will be - you need layers on top of Bitcoin such as Lightning to suit those needs.

Even worse, for some of those people they want Bitcoin to be a transparent payment system, with every payment easily visible, e.g. due to promises made to government regulators, or because their very business model is to deanonymise Bitcoin transactions. That subset's needs are very incompatible with scaling Bitcoin, as every scalability improvement will inevitably improve privacy against some attackers when compared to the current "everything public" Bitcoin protocol. For example, even Paypal offers improved privacy for myself in Canada, against the government of Iran snooping on my payments. Equally, a common complaint in the fintech world is the poor privacy properties of blockchains...

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#45

Post by asymmetric »

fragsworth wrote: post #26
kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

An additional wrench thrown into the mix is the fact that the Ethereum and Ripple developers/owners have a lot to gain by trying to make sure Bitcoin is unable to scale. It doesn't take much effort (since the miners are already hesitant about agreeing to some update) to sabotage the whole situation. It's quite possible that they're funding both sides of the debate to make sure none of them generates a super-majority.…

This is quite the unsubstantiated claim.

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#46

Post by dragonwriter »

kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

> However, this upgrade is very contentious with the miners who are entrusted with securing the blockchain against attackers

The whole value proposition of mining is that rewards would shift over time from newly-issued coins to transaction fees. Any solution which offers an alternative for transaction settlement and reduces the demand for normal on-chain transactions and the fees from them is, then, an attack on the basic value proposition of Bitcoin mining.

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#47

Post by xorcist »

r1ch wrote: post #13
simias wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an external observer in all of this and I was reading some discussion about this earlier, could you explain your position to those like me who aren't very familiar with this issue? From what I read segwit sounds like a reasonable solution to what seems like a very real practical issue with bitcoin today. So far all the people I've seen arguing against this change seem more interested in fueling conspiracy theorie…

Segwit is an complicated and large code change that fundamentally alters the bitcoin protocol to solve a problem that can instead be fixed by adding: if (blocknumber > 500000) maxblocksize = 8000000;

That suggestion has been put forward a number of times since the limit was put in place. One problem with that is that it is a backwards incompatible change so there need to be some signalling mechanism in place to ensure the rule change takes place at the same block height for every node. The logic would need to have been put in years before it activates.

A more longer term problem is the governance problems it entails. Large economic interest will want to adjust that value to their liking, so it should preferrably be a little more non-arbitrary.

So a more flexible approach is necessary, preferrably one that is backwards compatible for old nodes. Extension blocks, and a special form of extension blocks called segregated witness, can do exactly that. They have other problems, but most are pretty well understood by now, and most developers see segregated witness blocks as a way to more than double block size whilst minimizing risks.

(It also brought along the possibility to fix other long standing problems with the transaction format, so in the end several other things such as script versioning, uxto defragmentation and non-malleability was stuffed in there.)

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#48

Post by Meekro »

kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

The saddest part of this whole thing to me is how it has destroyed the bitcoin community. Just a few years ago, we were close-knit and friendly. We loved "to the mooon!" memes every time the price rose. Every new business accepting bitcoin was an excuse to throw a party. We organized meetups and talked tech and wrote wild essays about what it would take to replace government-backed currencies across the world. We were nerds and dreamers and it was fun.

Over the last 6 months, all that has been replaced with suspicion and hate. Both sides now have their own heavily-moderated forums that mostly don't tolerate dissent from the party line. There are elaborate theories getting posted about why those who disagree with you are really all part of some huge conspiracy or astroturfing campaign. Naturally, there is not a shred of evidence for any of this.

I miss the old days.

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#49

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #46
kbaker wrote: post #17

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand…

> However, this upgrade is very contentious with the miners who are entrusted with securing the blockchain against attackers The whole value proposition of mining is that rewards would shift over time from newly-issued coins to transaction fees. Any solution which offers an alternative for transaction settlement and reduces the demand for normal on-chain transactions and the fees from them is, then, an attack on the…

[deleted]

Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling

#50

Post by gfody »

Zarath wrote: post #30
gfody wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meanwhile r/btc is calm and collected. I suspect r/bitcoin is targeted by certain entities seeking to instill doubt and divide the community. the network is going through its usual boring phase of doubling the block size by way of emerging consensus. around this time just before the block size jumps there's a lul in efficiency that translates into higher transaction fees. if you're a psycopathic pumper dumper it's a…

r/btc is calm and collected? Every single day I see a ridiculous tinfoil hat theory about how Segwit is just a plot by Blockstream (who they always mention is funded by BANKSTERS!!! and AXA!!!) to either stall scaling and destroy bitcoin OR (mutually incompatible) scale with lightning network which will somehow allow Blockstream to profit. Didn't have to look far to prove my point... front page when I looked for it:…

sigh, I guess r/btc is discovered.. tbh I don't participate in these subs often. for this very reason
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