Live data from Hacker News

Is Bitcoin breaking up?

wsj.com

91–100 of 100 posts

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#91
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems misleading to call something "bitcoin classic" that would implement a hard fork. The bitcoin implementation by the "real" bitcoin foundation (ie, asciilifeform's group) at least can claim that it is an implementation of the actual bitcoin protocol: http://thebitcoin.foundation/

The original Bitcoin didn't include any block limit and Bitcoin's inventor wasn't worried about block size being too large[0]. The current 1MB limit was itself a hard fork of the original as a temporary spam protection measure while the network was in it's infancy. So the name really isn't misleading. A lot of people are ignorant of the history of the block size limit though. [0] http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptogra…

It was a soft fork.

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is increasing the blocksize beyond 2MB expected to favour Chinese minors more so than average users? And if that's the case, would you mind explaining how so, exactly?

The dynamic is not one in which when miners win, users lose. The issue is that users want more transactions per second and therefore want bigger blocks to be created, however, when miners create larger blocks, they have a hard(er) time propagating them to the entire network and thereby run the risk of their block being orphaned (someone else's block will be accepted first, and the miner's block and work done on that…

Oh I see, which is why Chinese miners would be especially hesitant about moving to larger block sizes, because the GFoC significantly limits speeds.

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#94

Hi Mike. I met you at San Jose conference in 2013. I remember very clearly- you were the most dashing, handsome, well spoken and charismatic person at the entire conference, a very rare find in the developer community. I was just finding my bearings in this technology at the time, I was a long way from home, and remember the confidence it instilled in me, knowing that someone like yourself was involved in this. But a…

cui bono? Mike and his peers have everything to gain by trying to splinter BTC. Given the stability and distributed nature of Bitcoin itself the weak point is obviously the developers and that is exactly what they are going after.

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#95

Hi Mike. I met you at San Jose conference in 2013. I remember very clearly- you were the most dashing, handsome, well spoken and charismatic person at the entire conference, a very rare find in the developer community. I was just finding my bearings in this technology at the time, I was a long way from home, and remember the confidence it instilled in me, knowing that someone like yourself was involved in this. But a…

Bitcoin is interesting because it attracts comments like this. Make no mistake, there is a turf-war going on; a true battle of mass popular opinion.

People do good things and they do bad things; but for some reason Bitcoin has crossed the threshold of being technically understandable so people resort to trusting people instead of ideas; so you end up with a lot of narratives (on both sides).

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#96

Hi Mike. I met you at San Jose conference in 2013. I remember very clearly- you were the most dashing, handsome, well spoken and charismatic person at the entire conference, a very rare find in the developer community. I was just finding my bearings in this technology at the time, I was a long way from home, and remember the confidence it instilled in me, knowing that someone like yourself was involved in this. But a…

Personal attacks (and this is a weird and creepy one, something else that Bitcoin doesn't seem to lack for) are not allowed on HN. Please don't post them here, especially when your "keenly skeptical eye" can come up with nothing worse than "dashing, handsome, well spoken and charismatic".

(This is not an opinion about anything to do with Bitcoin or who, if anyone, works for "an organization".)

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#97

HAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA people are waking up to your trickery. You are conman. Take your shit coin and shove it up your bosses ass!

We banned this account for obvious reasons and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#99
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way XT seems to have failed yet Classic seems to be suceeding seems odd to me. Is all it took really just to have a developer fly out to China and talk to a hanful of people? Seems like there's a lot more politics going on behind the scenes. In any case, fixing the blocksize limit will be good, but I think the real value in Classic is breaking the perceived monopoly Core has and moving to a healthier political se…

> In any case, fixing the blocksize limit will be good This presumes the blocksize limit is being fixed, which is an incorrect assumption. Originally, the proponents of Classic wanted to boost block size limits to 20MB effective January 2016 [1], and used bombastic and divisive language, inventing their own crisis even, to get people to take them seriously. Interestingly, those same people are now contending for just…

>Performance test data shows 32MB is the absolute maximum block size you can handle on a modern desktop PC today [2].

No, it's maximum size you can handle using a single-threaded poorly-optimized cpu software.

>Additionally, a profile of the CPU usage of this node, using golang’s great profile capabilities, shows that the CPU usage is dominated by the ECDSA signature verifications

OpenCL on gpu can easily process 50 MILLION bitcoin addresses per second (ecdsa + sha). [0] Note that OpenCL is available even on smartphones. For a very rough estimate, Adreno 530 on Snapdragon 820 has 500GFlops, 10% of 780 ti which can do 50M/s, so it should do about 5M/s. So a $400 smartphone should be more than enough to process 32MB blocks - provided the gpu is used.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

Re: Is Bitcoin breaking up?

#100
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way XT seems to have failed yet Classic seems to be suceeding seems odd to me. Is all it took really just to have a developer fly out to China and talk to a hanful of people? Seems like there's a lot more politics going on behind the scenes. In any case, fixing the blocksize limit will be good, but I think the real value in Classic is breaking the perceived monopoly Core has and moving to a healthier political se…

No. It took a sharp fall in the BTC price. This narrative that Gavin and I were unwilling to compromise is deeply unfortunate. BIP 101 originally started with a 20mb limit+growth. That was based on some calculations Gavin did. At that point the Chinese miners started saying they couldn't accept 20 because of the firewall, but eight would be OK. They put announcements of their support for eight megabyte blocks in thei…

XT angered people because it was seen as an attempted coup. That was back when the Core devs were viewed as untouchable gods by most of the Bitcoin community. People are now willing to accept Classic because the core devs have been acting like babies. They've destroyed their reputation with the community by refusing any compromise, attacking Classic with Trojan pull requests and making a lot of outlandish statements in public forums. This hasn't sat well with the people who are heavily invested in Bitcoin. If XT were introduced now it might have gained more traction.

At this point the community seems to be mostly decided that they want to break the Core dev's monopoly and Classic provides a lowest common denominator way to do this. I just hope the Classic devs make better choices.

Post reply on HN