What's a typical btc txn fee nowadays?
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Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#52Warning 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…
kbaker has done a good job of laying out the facts, but since he seems to lean towards the SegWit side, let me make the argument from the perspective of their opponents, the "big blockers."
Satoshi Nakamoto himself believed that bitcoin block size would have to increase rapidly, and that on-chain scaling is good enough for nearly all transactions. He wrote that blocks could scale up from the current 1MB to over 700MB as bandwidth and disks got cheaper while Bitcoin got more popular. [1] He foresaw the day when a "full node" would not be someone's laptop, but rather something the size of a data center. There would only be maybe a hundred full nodes in the world, run by universities or major bitcoin stakeholders, and everyone else would use various kinds of thin clients to interact with the network.
Gavin Andresen, the developer that Satoshi hand-picked to lead Bitcoin after his departure, shared this vision. He believed that on-chain scaling via bigger blocks is technically simpler (and simple is good!), and the resulting loss in full node count is nothing to worry about.
I'd also like to point out that one of the most modern coins, Ethereum, actually has both. They let miners vote on block size (big blocks), and they support off-chain scaling (like SegWit). They have both, and Satoshi thought Bitcoin should someday have both.
So let's get both! =)
[1] http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/02/re-bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-p...
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#53Warning 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…
Also add that the largest manufacturer and user of ASICs is most likely covertly using something called AsicBoost [1], a patented [2] chip optimization for Bitcoin's proof of work. They (Jihan Wu/Bitmain/Antpool) have stated that the capability is manufactured into their chips but they are currently not using it [3] for the greater good of Bitcoin, though this would cost them millions in mining profits.
Activating Segwit as a soft fork would prevent the ability to use AsicBoost and therefore a lot of people suspect that most of this debate is actually just a delay tactic by Bitmain to maintain their mining dominance with covert AsicBoost. They likely have no intention to support Bitcoin Unlimited (they don't seem to be running the software).
Segwit recently activated on Litecoin only after the threat of a User Activated Soft Fork (much easier to execute on Litecoin). The Segwit activation threshold on Litecoin was 75% of the hashpower (compared to 95% on Bitcoin). At one point Segwit had achieved 75% of the hashpower until suddenly 3 mining pools increased their hashpower by about 300% in 1 day to block Segwit (the same day that Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain declared that the Litecoin miners to be shipped needed "additional firmware testing"). These pools were Antpool, LTC.top, and LTC1BTC [4], all of which controlled a much smaller fraction pre-segwit. For this reason, it's likely that Jihan Wu controls both Antpool and BTC.top and therefore about 30% of the hashpower on Bitcoin.
[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=+CVE-2017-923... [2] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitmain-may-be-infringi... [3] https://blog.bitmain.com/en/tag/asicboost/ [4] https://www.litecoinpool.org/pools
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Perceived 'crypto economic incentives' will taint any controversial decision in most public chains. Those incentives must be tested to prove that they work. If they fail, we rebuild chains with better incentives; this is how bitcoin became anti-fragile.
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#55Warning 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…
kbaker has done a good job of laying out the facts, but since he seems to lean towards the SegWit side, let me make the argument from the perspective of their opponents, the "big blockers." Satoshi Nakamoto himself believed that bitcoin block size would have to increase rapidly, and that on-chain scaling is good enough for nearly all transactions. He wrote that blocks could scale up from the current 1MB to over 700MB…
For the record I support the "COOP" compromise. SegWit activation during the UASF timeline so that doesn't screw things up, with a locked-in HF to 2MB blocks.
I agree that bigger blocks are needed to ease even non-witness/standard transaction backlogs, and to ease up on wallet and other providers that want a faster network in-place without needing updates that work in concert SegWit like the Lightning Network. The 1 MB was originally an anti-spam limit. In a dream world, we would have a dynamic anti-spam block size. But I don't see consensus happening any time soon. :(
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's what the banks want, the users wants something else.
No, that's what users that only post in the unbelievably censored r/bitcoin want, and what Blockstream wants. For those of us users that want bitcoin to work as intended, instead of being artificially crippled to push second layer solutions, Segwit is terrible.
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Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's what users that only post in the unbelievably censored r/bitcoin want, and what Blockstream wants. For those of us users that want bitcoin to work as intended, instead of being artificially crippled to push second layer solutions, Segwit is terrible.
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…
> So what's your position exactly? That the current issues with transfer fees and the long term usability of bitcoin are overstated?
Oh definitely not that - it's a huge problem! Places that accepted bitcoin no longer do, and bitcoin's market share is plummeting - there's no reason it every should have happened. But instead of a simple fix to the problem (upping a temporary limit put in place in 2010 - that's eight year old tech), now Blockstream is trying to push a massively complex revamping. It won't even help with the scaling problem - it only discounts Segwit enabled transactions (since Litecoin enabled Segwit, almost nothing has used it). It's primary purpose to enable second layer solutions Blockstream can consult on. Even if something like Segwit was a solution, FlexTrans is a much better way to go. Even if Segwit activated tomorrow, there'd be little-to-no backlog relieft, and Bitcoin would be forever saddled with inescapable tech debt.
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's what users that only post in the unbelievably censored r/bitcoin want, and what Blockstream wants. For those of us users that want bitcoin to work as intended, instead of being artificially crippled to push second layer solutions, Segwit is terrible.
I don't read r/bitcoin regularly. I think we need both a block size increase and SegWit (or something like it) It's pretty obvious to me that linearly scaling solutions like simply increasing the block size are not sufficient to achieve global mainstream adoption (at least without further centralizing mining), much less the sort of machine-to-machine / micropayment revolution that a scalable cryptocurrency could unlo…
> I think we need both a block size increase and SegWit (or something like it)
Yes - the former now (or last year!) to resolve the massive backlog as new adopters come in. We later need something to enable greater scale than blocksize alone, but not yet; other cryptos like Ethererum are able to handle a much higher transaction throughput. When the time comes when something like SegWit IS needed, FlexTrans is a much better solution.
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#59Warning 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…
Depending on what you see as the value proposition for Bitcoin. Long term settlements = transaction fees for miners. Short term = Lightning or other providers.
Personally, I think that mining only should not be a for-profit enterprise. Only parties that have goals aligned with the long-term economic future of Bitcoin should be involved in mining, like major exchanges, merchant providers, etc. The value proposition was only ever to secure the network and get some financial help with doing so.
Otherwise, you have to have constant innovation and investment otherwise you are pointlessly fighting the difficulty level adjustment.
Re: Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
#60Warning 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 miner…
I didn't want to mention it since it is still not proven that this is happening, only strongly suggested.
Of course I support any efforts to get rid of shortcuts in the POW function ASAP, and by any means necessary. The whole reason behind a POW function is to ensure a fair competition.