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Comment by sail | Hacker News Reader

This may be naive but why can't Bitcoin fork? Forks historically produced better results.

Why would switching to a cryptocurrency that is better designed be a bad thing?

Bitcoin did fork. That is what Bitcoin XT was. Every major operator of Bitcoin XT nodes got systemically DDoSed, including Coinbase, until participation died down. There are concerted efforts to prevent blocksize expansion.

Additionally, admins at most major bitcoin news sites censored or banned users discussing it.

Switching to another cryptocurrency is a whole different can of worms - remember, btc right now costs around $420 a coin, and all that value is because of the total sum of people invested in it. No other cryptocurrency has anything close to the btc market cap, so capital fleeing the bitcoin blockchain may not trust alternative ones that are much smaller. The problem with bitcoin right now is that mining power is majority controlled by a very small group of people, and any other competitive cryptocurrency is much more at risk for whales taking control.

> mining power is majority controlled by a very small group of people

what can change to make this better? Because it seems the root of the problem is that some small group of people managed to amass a large amount of hardware.

Maybe spending $121M of VC money whipping up hype about distributed mining...

A large part of the problem is again a flaw in bitcoin itself. SHA256 mining is extremely GPU unfriendly by design, whereas most other cryptocurrencies use scrypt which is much more applicable to the GPU model. As a result, ASIC hardware to do SHA hashes to compute blocks in bitcoin became by far the most efficient hardware to mine bitcoin, but because it is custom it requires a ton of money to fabricate. So you see hundred million dollar mining operations emerge because only they can afford the fab run on a custom PCB to do SHA256 hashes.

In theory, Litecoin would not have the same pandemic ASIC runaway market control problem. GPUs would still moderately competitive, and act as a counterbalance that normal users have available to them to mine. There would be custom scrypt hardware, certainly, but it would most likely not have the insane performance advantage over general purpose computers that SHA algorithms have.p

To fix bitcoin itself, you need to commoditize the hashing hardware used by the best in the industry. If everyone had access to the ASIC's bitfury were using at reasonable prices normal people could afford, people could distribute the mining more, but as it is most of these vendors are using in house solutions that dramatically outperform off the shelf bitcoin mining hardware.

There have been hundreds of Bitcoin forks. XT is just another in a long list of failures.

This is a fantastic question, not naive at all, and it's really at the heart of what the debate is all about. This is a really complicated issue, hence all of the vitriolic discussion. I'm going to try to take a crack at it and fail. I will mostly be reiterating ideas that are from this[1]. I'll try to be brief, and you can read more from [1]. I am also very opinionated on this issue, and I will try to be as impartial as I can.

Something that's really confusing is that the word "fork" actually means at least two different things in the block-size debate context. The first is forking the bitcoin software, and the second is forking of the bitcoin blockchain/network. Bitcoin XT, Hearn's project, was the former, a software fork, that would cause a "hard-fork" in the blockchain. Hard-forks in Bitcoin are very dangerous. There has never been an intentional hard-fork of the Bitcoin blockchain since its inception 7 years ago.

There's a very difficult question of just simply, "how do hard-fork?" A hard-fork would separate the p2p network into two different networks with incompatible rules. A hasty hard-fork could very easily destroy people's money and bitcoin all together. Many, including myself, strongly disagree with Bitcoin XT's hard-fork procedure.

It's also not clear that this particular software fork, Bitcoin XT, is better. I'm not going to go into that issue here as it's extremely complicated. We have an alternative solution, segregated witness, which is effectively equivalent to Bitcoin XT's short-term plan implemented as a blockchain soft-fork. Soft-forks are significantly less dangerous as they do not segregate the network.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq

It's actually not true that there's never been a hard fork. I know the Core FAQ says that, but it's incorrect. When we moved past Berkeley DB to LevelDB, there was an accidental hard fork that revealed limits in older nodes nobody knew about. But those limits had to go, and so the change was attempted again in a more controlled manner some time later. So it was known that the network would start producing blocks that older nodes would reject. That's a hard fork. It was scheduled in advance and went off smoothly.

The idea that hard forks are dangerous or irresponsible is a belief that is not well supported. However it's a rather good piece of Bitcoin Core propaganda to scare people away from doing what's necessary.

> The idea that hard forks are dangerous or irresponsible is a belief that is not well supported

bip99 - https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0099.mediawi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3t21dh/dangerous...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3griiv/on_consensu...

> scare people away from doing what's necessary

Most block size hard-forks can be deployed as a soft-fork. "It's necessary" is highly contentious and you have failed to cite any of the arguments you disagree with- you're wasting everyone's time.

I said "intentional hard-fork" for a reason. For everybody's reference, the bdb to leveldb hard-fork happened in early 2013. Everybody acted swiftly to correct the issue by downgrading to 0.7 if I recall correctly.

An accidental hard-fork is a completely different animal from an intentional contentious hard-fork where half of the network goes one way and the other half the other way for the foreseeable future.

So did I. Please re-read my post. The same change that triggered the accidental fork was done smoothly later on, but the change was the same - it was a deliberate hard fork. You probably didn't notice because there was plenty of lead time and I don't think any miners got split off the chain, even though they could have.

Mike, can you imagine any way to run a cryptocurrency so that growth doesn't threaten decentralization?

Could a cryptocurrency not be controlled by those who can afford to spend the most in CPU power (like governments)?

Could consensus occur by human power?

I think the fundamental problem OP puts here is that true power always seem to be in hands of few - whether its physical currency or crypto currency. Look at it this way: Every currency needs to have attribute of being produced through some work. However ultimately most of the work is owned by who have wealth or power. Thus no matter what currency one comes up with, ultimately few handful of wealthy individuals or governments can completely control its production as well as evolution. In Bitcoin case, few governments or individuals can own 95% of the production capacity because that's the proportion of wealth/power they own. So fundamental premise that general population's computing power would outweigh computing power of governments/wealthy is wrong due to simple fact of inequality that necessarily has to exist. No amount of forking would prevent this scenario to occur again.

Could one design against this?

That was sort of the idea of BTC, that a decentralized currency would mitigate this. Nakomoto's original paper actually devotes some attention to this, discussing why they don't want to rely on a centralized authority, and in the introduction he writes:

> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

The thing that jumps out to me the most at this point is that Nakomoto also wrote:

> The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

And with Heard's article, presuming that the facts are true, which seems to very much be the case, this seems to me the most serious risk to the system.

It can. It will if it has to. This is yet another person who is upset that only a minority believes their fears that we are on the brink of catastrophe.

If the block size becomes a problem, it will change. It is not yet a problem. If the transition is painful, people will be more open to this kind of warning in the future. If it's painless this will all have been moot.

> It is not yet a problem.

That's a controversial premise that the article repeatedly addresses.

You may not be convinced, but there is a lot of stuff cited in there on that exact point.[1] Those links lead to other resources fleshing this out pretty quickly.[2, 3]

I found this bit persuasive:

> "Some customers contacted Chris earlier today asking why our bitcoin payouts didn’t execute ... The issue is that it’s now officially impossible to depend upon the bitcoin network anymore to know when or if your payment will be transacted, because the congestion is so bad that even minor spikes in volume create dramatic changes in network conditions. To whom is it acceptable that one could wait either 60 minutes or 14 hours, chosen at random? It’s ludicrous that people are actually writing posts on reddit claiming that there is no crisis. People were criticizing my post yesterday on the grounds that I somehow overstated the seriousness of the situation. Do these people actually use the bitcoin network to send money everyday?"[original article, citing [4]]

I'm an outsider here, and don't have a stake in this. So maybe people who have followed this debate more closely can recognize that as a total fabrication, but to me it sounded like a plausible business concern.

[1] http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size...

[2] http://gavinandresen.ninja/the-myth-of-not-full-blocks

[3] http://hashingit.com/analysis/44-bitcoin-traffic-bulletin-re...

[4] http://forums.prohashing.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=679

Complaining about that, and at the same time complaining about the (opt-in) new feature to allow transactions to be changed before inclusion in the block chain, seems hypocritical.

Could you explain how that's hypocritical? I don't see it.

I actually think it seems like pretty good evidence. They're adding a (according to the author) questionable feature with notable possible downsides while ignoring a long standing problem with the simple solution because it (allegedly) furthers their goals to have the problem continue to exist.

>notable possible downsides

It's opt in, anyone that wants to accept zero conf can just insist that all transactions don't opt in.

>a long standing problem with the simple solution

Hard forking bitcoin is not simple. It's never been done before on purpose, and many people are extremely hesitant to mess around with a billion dollar system.

Why is it hypocritical? He complains that some transactions took too long to go through. With RBF, those transactions could simply be resent with a higher fee. But if you're against RBF, then you need the original transaction to go through, and you'll have to wait if it had a low fee.

Basically, the problem is caused by his own opposition to RBF, as far as I see.

(Disclaimer: I've been spending less time around the bitcoin community recently, so my information might be out of date. The patch that was committed is definitely opt-in, but I can't guarantee all the mechanics work how I'm describing them.)

Ok, so it's hypocritical on the 'transactions take too long' issue. Thanks for explaining.

I just saw https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/41aocn/httpsbitcoi... and https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3urm8o/optin_rbf_i...

I think this paints Hearn's attack in a significantly worse light as I had previously thought.

> It is not yet a problem.

The original Medium post disagrees with this premise.

Whilst i have no stake in the claim (other than my .001 btc), and have not spent any, i m getting conflicting conclusions from different posts/sources. Since I do not follow any of the people, it's hard to know what is reliable or not.

This might simply mean that bitcoin is too immature and isn't quite ready for the mainstream.

There's some friction to switch, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially with some new tech like sidechains, you can make a new cryptocurrency following new rules, but still backed by Bitcoin value: https://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf

Sounds like some tried and then get DDOSed

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