Is Bitcoin breaking up?
wsj.com
wsj.com
Bitcoin Classic was created by Jonathan Toomim, an American miner and developer who went to China to talk directly with Chinese miners and to test the effect of bigger blocks on mining operations behind the Great Firewall. Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin Core's former lead developer, and Jeff Garzik, another prominent Core developer, as well as many others, are collaborating with Toomim on further changes that Bitcoin Classic may implement later.
The big difference between Bitcoin Classic and Mike Hearn's failed Bitcoin XT is the concerted effort by the people behind Classic to garner the explicit support of miners (and other important members of the Bitcoin ecosystem) for a blocksize increase. At my last check yesterday, mining-pool operators representing 72% of global hashing power had explicitly expressed their support for Bitcoin Classic's blocksize increase, as had the operators of many popular exchanges, web wallets, and payment providers. (There is a growing compendium of prominent supporters on Bitcoin Classic's website; the complete list is on the project's Github page [1].)
That means that Bitcoin Classic is very likely to break Core's monopoly on the protocol soon. The blocksize increase, and the fork of the blockchain that it will create, is tentatively scheduled to take place after March 1. Get ready.
(By the way, the best sources for information and discussion about the Bitcoin world are now the /r/btc sub-Reddit and the discussion forums at bitcoin.com and bitco.in; the community's former hubs, /r/Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org, are both controlled by the same operator/moderator, and he has strongly censored and perverted all discussion of changes to the protocol that are not supported by Core's intransigent cabal of developers.)
Most people really gave them way too much credit and took them at their word, but it's been dug into the ground at this point that they are going to try to lie, censor, and outright sabotage any attempt to adapt bitcoin since they think creating problems gives them an opportunity to solve them.
As far as I'm concerned, neither side 'has a monopoly' on the protocol because they haven't documented the protocol with a proper specification.
Forking Bitcoin today to 'solve' contingent future problems seems like the height of folly.
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 setup. Many people were absolutely unwilling to even talk about XT (or as you mention, allow others to talk about XT) because "OMG it's not Core!". That argument will be a lot less viable if everyone's moved to Classic.
XT was much more aggressive. Not only would it have initially increased the blocksize to 8MB, but then it fixed a schedule of doubling the blocksize every 2 years[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_XT#Determining_the_new...
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 2MB, which is only 0.4MB higher than that proposed by Core.
Performance test data shows 32MB is the absolute maximum block size you can handle on a modern desktop PC today [2]. And by this I mean you could validate no more than one block per 10 minutes, hence realistically you actually couldn't run a full node on a desktop at 32MB. You'd need a clustered full node just to keep up, which is unprecedented in Bitcoin.
To make matters worse, 32MB blocks gets Bitcoin to 300 tps which is less than 1% of VISA's current capacity.
[1]: http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessaril...
[2]: https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bit...
If we wait for a perfect fix to all problems, current and projected, we'll be waiting forever.
Hearn mentions the backstory behind this in a comment here [0], posted a little while after you posted your comment. After reading his comment, does the shift from 20MB max blocks to something smaller become less "interesting" and more understandable? If not, why not?
Edit: Additionally, do you have anything to say about this comment? [1]
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.
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 their coinbases, etc.
Why eight? Because it's a Chinese homonym for "prosper" or "wealth":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Eig...
It crops up in the Chinese Bitcoin community all the time. So this choice obviously wasn't based on any kind of scientific analysis. Having Bitcoin protocol constants be decided by rhymes would obviously have been an embarrassment, but nonetheless, we compromised and did it.
After Core rejected the now-modified BIP 101, Gavin and I released XT together. At this point the miners changed their tune. They announced they would never run anything except Core, period, end of story. This "requirement" had not been specified before. From both speaking to them personally (I have had various phone calls with miners around the world, including miners in China) and their public statments, they made it clear that their loyalty to Core was absolute and no matter what changes we made to XT, they would never run it. Thus compromising further was pointless.
Why is Classic different? It wasn't, just one or two days ago. After I released my article, I was CCd on a private thread where KnC Miner published an "open letter" and suggested switching to Classic. The other miners shot him down immediately saying they wanted the change to come from Core. Then the price started sliding, and they started reversing their positions. Suddenly, Classic was acceptable whereas just hours before it had not been.
And the trigger for that was your medium article the other day. :-)
And since, block size/scalability was the key point in your post. Would you be willing to re-join Bitcoin, since what you wanted would be achieved? Even if its Classic and not via XT.
Perhaps, my question may come across as naive. But looking at it from outside (reading /Bitcoin & /btc & etc), it would definitely clear a lot of air, and be good for Bitcoin.
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.
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:
[0] http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099...
If I had Electum which uses the Bitcoin Core could I send Bitcoin to someone using Bitcoin Classic or Bitcoin XT?
If not then this causes a lot of problems and confusion.
I have a small nitpick to offer. Any hard-forking change is one for a new network and a new chain, by the very definition of hard-fork. The original Bitcoin blockchain and network will still exist, no matter how many times some of its users employ a hard-fork. A hard-fork cannot "turn off" Bitcoin for everyone else. This is no different than the way that an altcoin, like Litecoin, cannot "turn off" Bitcoin merely by the deployment and launch of Litecoin.
Since their proposal is a backwards-incompatible change (hard-fork), it should be obvious that it does not increase the capacity of the current system, but rather a new system. I find myself wondering how anyone can think it is increasing the capacity of the previous network, given the definition of an (intentional!) hard-fork?
Maybe if we all just wish hard enough, IPv4 will spontaneously transform into IPv6..... Bitcoin will continue to function even in the presence of yet-another hard-fork.
Anyone is welcome to do as they please, including whatever hard-forks they might want to participate in, just as anyone is welcome to use Bitcoin or how they are welcome to abandon Bitcoin if they find that they don't like its offering. However, anyone who wants to participate in a hard-fork should do so in a safe and responsible way, such as by using a new name for the new system, using a new address identifier to avoid cross-chain contamination accidents, etc.
What is Bitcoin Core's role in all of this? https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/2016-01-07-statement
Soft-forks and hard-forks? https://petertodd.org/2016/soft-forks-are-safer-than-hard-fo...
bip99 has some more details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0099.mediawi...
Bitcoin Core published a capacity increases roadmap: http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-...
... and a FAQ about their capacity increases roadmap: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...
> and [theymos] has strongly censored and perverted all discussion of changes
That's not really true, just search "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin" for XT or classic or whatever. His lynch mob is waving the banner of censorship but meanwhile actual content shows up on the subreddit. Theymos even acknowledges this, but for some reason refuses to use moderation to eliminate the false allegations of censorship in his subreddit.
Every "version" is pure w.r.t its current rules. Hard-forking is something that impacts a new chain. The old chain still exists even after a hard-fork.
_Anyone_ can run old Bitcoin versions and participate on the old chains using the pre-hard-forked-changed rules.
There is no way to "turn off" the previous chain, at least not in the protocol.
The old version could become unmaintained, have no remaining miners, no remaining validating nodes, etc. That's true. But for this to be the case, there would have to be universal disinterest in maintaining the previous tech, or mining with the previous rules, operating and running fully-validating nodes, etc. Universal disinterest cannot be measured.
I cannot offer you any justification I agree with for the previous hard-forks. At the time that those hard-forks were deployed, various justifications were given, and as of 2016 I am not sure that I can agree with those reasons now. Perhaps at the time I would have found merit in the idea that the Bitcoin ecosystem was small enough to tolerate a hard-fork or something. Another possible rationalization is that, at the time, the Bitcoin software was horribly inefficient in hundreds of ways, this is why verification took >10 hours of a blockchain that was less than 30% the size of the current 2016 blockchain.... and 32MB was probably a security hole that everyone at the time was able to universally agree must be plugged. This sort of reasoning resonates with me even as of 2016; if there was a hole that bad in modern Bitcoin, heck yeah we would all have to do a hard-fork, it's unfortunate but security is important and I like avoiding holes.
FWIW, I don't care about purity.
Here is some text on validation costs:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/validation-...
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/v...
> other releases that required a hard fork as well the world didn't end
Bitcoin isn't going to destroy the world, nsh is. Anyone saying otherwise is just trolling you.
This is not true at all. I do not understand why journalists repeat this claim. It is like saying "investing in the stock market is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate". It is not true. Whether you invest $1000 or $1 million your returns—as a percentage of your initial investment—will be the same regardless if this is the stock market or Bitcoin mining.
In fact I would say the opposite is true: small miners have a slightly better profitability than large-scale miners, because they are so small they do not even have to cover certain costs. A large-scale miner will have to pay for hosting or for building a data center but a small miner will host the hardware in his house at no extra cost. A large-scale miner will have to hire staff to maintain the miners but a small miner will maintain his machine himself.
Of course profitability depends a lot on electricity costs, but again you might be a small miner and live (for example) in Douglas County, Washington and pay a domestic electricity rate of 2.5 cents per kWh, and you will beat many large-scale miners who almost always pay more (see my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907584).
Large-scale miners may get a financial advantage by buying hardware in bulk, or manufacturing it themselves, but this is a cost saving of at most 20 or 30%, and this certainly does not make mining so expensive that small miners cannot participate.
The author has conflated a couple of things. That is the exact opposite of how OSS works. The reason why the majority need to adopt is purely from a "one true coin" standpoint—there is nothing stopping forks or new alt coins from spinning out.
Currently there is only one Bitcoin implementation. And the developers a) refuse to implement what users want. And b) implement bloat that users dont't want.
So Bitcoin will "break up" in a similar way the WWW "broke up" when new browsers were introduced.
It's a good thing.
I wish someone would take a closer look at how Google push Chrome as well.
different significance
Its not as if somebodies coins will suddenly become worthless.
Bitcoin has a lot of actors. Users, investors, miners, exchanges, shops... And everybody will have some hassle with a fork.
Just like on the WWW where there are webmasters, webdesigners, users, browser vendors, shops... And every has some hassle with browser compatibility.
I think this is in fact the nightmare scenario that some folks are worried about.
I agree with you it's unlikely to happen, because it's in very few people's interests, but I think that the degree of danger is exactly what's causing people to try so vigorously to find ways to co-operate on this matter.
And it's true that browsers also have incentive toward compatibility. But the fact is, despite this incentive, browsers remain in many ways incompatible. And for the most part, nobody notices, because minor incompatibilities in browsers do not "fork" the web the same way an incompatibility in bitcoin protocol forks the blockchain.
But "breaking up" ? That's just sensationalist bullshit. That's like saying Netflix is on the edge of bankruptcy because it's raging success has temporarily killed HD streaming in Australia & Antarctica. As a community building exercise, this debacle is great for Bitcoin, it really shows no one is in control and consensus to change the rules of the game is very hard to reach.
Also, "Lightning-like" channels aren't unique to Bitcoin- they can be implemented on Turing-complete currencies, and even on bank servers[1]
It took us two thousand years or so to go from using the weight of a bale of barley to represent the value of silver, bronze, copper to eventually actual coinage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
Maybe digital currency takes 15-years or so to work out the problems much like they did with barley to coins but it is definitely the future.
Bitcoin as a retail currency doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Robocoin, the Bitcoin ATM company, just went bust. Lots of companies nominally accept Bitcoin, but that's just a shopping cart program talking to Coinbase or Bitpay for immediate conversion. The retail transaction volume is small. Given the volatility problem, the conversion costs, the risk of loss, and the general headaches, Bitcoin is a lose vs. paying 1% - 3% for credit card processing.
They'll get through until China bans it.
China has a classic trilemma : let the currency depreciate, give up on monetary stimulus, or institute capital controls.
Pick any 2 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity
To date, they've shown pretty good success in controlling the Internet and Bitcoin is no different.
I don't think Bitcoin advocates have necessarily thought through the implications if countries were no longer able to control capital movements, hence pursue independent monetary and currency policies. As the euro experience has shown (also the history of the gold standard), it's not necessarily an improvement in monetary arrangements.
China's leaky exchange controls are a strange subject. So much is leaking that investors in China are buying large amounts of property in London, New York, and Miami, but not occupying it, as a way to stash cash. However, the outflows aren't big enough to affect the value of the yuan.
The People's Bank of China (comparable to the Treasury Department plus the Fed) hasn't cracked down as much as they could. There seems to be an internal policy disagreement within China's government over whether the yuan should be an international currency. To be used internationally means allowing convertibility and giving up some control, and facing the possibility that China's domestic economy can be yanked around by world events. But convertibility increases China's external economic power. Back in 2013, there were announcements of convertibility within the next year. In November 2015, the target date was 2020.[1] China's stock market crashed last week, which may prompt tightening up on capital outflows again.
Much of what happens with Bitcoin is driven by these far larger issues.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/china-deve...
> Bitcoin as a retail currency doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
I buy things online with btc much more than a credit card, so I beg to differ
> Robocoin, the Bitcoin ATM company, just went bust.
They made huge and expensive ATMs that aren't necessary for what most people try to do right now, which is buy bitcoins. You can literally buy parts and make your own ATM.
> Lots of companies nominally accept Bitcoin, but that's just a shopping cart program talking to Coinbase or Bitpay for immediate conversion.
As opposed to credit card transactions? Don't blur the issue of accepting payment and a business keeping and therefore investing in bitcoins.
> the conversion costs Less than credit card fees. 1% as opposed to 3% off your revenue stream matters quite a bit, not to mention no charge backs.
// const MAX_SIZE = 1;
// make it bigger to fix crash
const MAX_SIZE = 2;
Edit Cool Beans Thanks for the DownVote Mark, glad to be of help.
If I was a handler for an organization that wanted to insert an asset into the bitcoin community, someone like you would be the ideal candidate. Someone that young people, new to the community, naturally respect and will listen to. Strange how you've spent so much time cultivating your standing with people like that, while your reputation plummeted among the people that understood the network (and had far more skin in the game than you did, because if I remember correctly you never foresaw the spectacular growth of the bitcoin network, never thought it would work, and therefore did not really have that many coins yourself). I have a long history of having a keenly skeptical eye, I have solid critical thinking skills, and I bat away wacky theories all day long. I have NEVER, in any forum, posted any comment of any type in regards to bitcoin, this is my first one- I believe in speaking humbly, thinking deeply and acting bravely. While the evidence that your motives in the bitcoin network may not be what you say they are is only circumstantial, it has been accumulating for some time now. And the strongest allegations have come from the people who have the best reputations for clear thinking and scam calling. I mean you no ill will Mike, regardless of your intentions. But the forces at play and the implications of our technologies' reach is so spectacular that it is quite reasonable now for us to assume that smart and highly motivated people will appear who will use great cunning to harm the network. Every spidey sense I possess has been going off about you for a long time now. I can remain silent no longer.
J'accuse Mike, J'accuse.
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).
(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.
If they have to frame a headline as a question, you can usually assume the answer is "no"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.