As someone who has been closely following the Bitcoin community since 2011, I am baffled by the toxicity of the blocksize debate and the resistance even against a moderate blocksize increase.
It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.
(BTW, I am a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list.)
There was also a post talking about how Theymos went to great lengths to modify the CSS for the /r/bitcoin sub in order to reorder the comment threads and make it appear as if posts from certain users are highly up voted when they are in fact heavily down voted.
I'm aware that Theymos isn't a direct employee for Blockstream. That doesn't mean he isn't receiving financial compensation or some sort of other quid pro quo for supporting the Blockstream agenda.
"This could be trivially verified by searching "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin block size XT classic"
I'm sure that will return a lot of results of people trashing any increase in blocksize and saying negative things about alternative node implementations those kinds of comments are encouraged and promoted.
Edit: since you are a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list you are probably also aware that there is censorship going on in that forum as well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44nzxt/continued_censo...
I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't know the answer to that question, but if, as it sounds, someone or group could just change the blocksize, that, based on my simple understanding of math, seems to indicate an ability to alter the supply-demand curve for the commodity.
Perhaps your comment is genuine but when people say stuff like "if we increase the block size next they will want to increase the money supply!" I feel like they are trying to hood wink less technically adept Bitcoin users into supporting their small block view.
The consequence is identical. Is it not? Perhaps, the consequence is the opposite? If there is no ability to transact with the currency, the currency has no value?
I'm seriously ignorant, you can tell, but I would like to understand. Perhaps my questions can help reveal the answer? If not only to me, then to the community? Is that too scary? The truth? Too scary?
Bitcoin's value is limited by small block size though. A large part of the value of BTC is the value of the total transactions done through it. Limiting the number of transactions will severely limit the price in in the long term. BTC will probably lose out to an alt coin if the transaction back log due to the small block size continues and is not resolved sooner rather than later.
I think, still though I'm not articulating my point well enough. Fiat currency fails 100% of the time because it is controlled by humans. My understanding thus far was that bitcoin was controlled by physical limits in the real world, that of electricity, compute power, ultimately: Math.
Now, here, we are not talking about the supply of bitcoins themselves, but rather, the number of transactions with them that can occur.
That too is a factor in the value of a currency. It's not just the supply of currency that affects the value, but whether or not the person receiving that currency believes in its value, in this case, they must believe they can themselves use that currency to conduct future transactions.
It is this belief, in the case of bitcoin -- transactability for the lack of a better word, that is controlled by human beings -- and this is the same failing that has caused the collapse of every fiat currency in history prior to the US Dollar.
Now I'm learning that bitcoin has not solved this problem and I can't understand how bitcoin will survive this failure.
For a money to survive, it must be bound by physical laws beyond the reach of humans to change. It is human fallibility that is the culprit behind all fiat failures in history. We must invent a currency immune to the decisions of humans to solve the problem that has plagued fiat throughout history.
Even though humans can constrain the transaction throughput of bitcoin, bitcoins or other crypto currency, will probably, eventually, converge on a solution where the possible tx rate is far larger than we can use. Tx rate limiting won't be a feature of any crypto coin that survives. You're just observing the effects of imperfect initial engineering. I wouldn't draw broad conclusions about the impossibility of successful cryptocurrencies based on this current limitation.
Just store both olympic sized swimming pools of gold in the same place and put numbers in accounts that represent the weight owned by the person.
We typically think about ounces of gold, but we could go down to the atom if necessary, theoretically anyway.
Bitcoin's governing rules on the other hand are enshrined in software and can only be changed through a democratic consensus process. It's a big step forward over fat cats deciding monetary policy in smoke filled back rooms.
I am now convinced that bitcoin will, like all fiat currencies, inevitably fail. It doesn't matter if its value is controlled by one human or a democratic process controlled by humans, it is controlled by humans and humans are fallible, therefore bitcoin will fail.
There is no question of this. The only question is, When?
- There are a lot of exchanges that don't involve direct transactions on the blockchain (buying and selling BTC is nonlimited in terms of quantity or time).
- There are many altcoins, claiming to do certain things better such as proof of work or block size etc., however, the most convincing argument for using BTC seems to be the current market capitalization. As such, it is understandable that the Core wants to introduce the least amount of distraction possible, i.e. go against improvements whatsoever.
Can anybody please explain why increasing block size would mean more centralization?
However, Bitcoin is only useful because of the consensus on what the protocol is - so in practice, people must generally run whatever everyone else is running. At the moment, there's a general consensus that everyone should be running software implementing the same protocol as the latest version of the Bitcoin software implemented by a certain group of people. That could, theoretically, change if the majority of the community doesn't like some change to the protocol, forcing the dissenting minority to follow along with them.
The "core developers" and the Bitcoin Foundation don't matter, although they sometimes act like they do.
No, everyone validates all blocks. (Or at least they theoretically should.) Otherwise you could get miners lying about whether they've validated a block. Changing the Bitcoin protocol is essentially creating an altcoin - the only difference is that the money distribution is "pre-seeded" with everything that's happened on the Bitcoin network so far. If all users move along, the altcoin succeeds and the "original" Bitcoin fails.
If everyone except the current miners decided to follow new rules, the miners would be forced to follow - there's not much point mining a currency which nobody will accept in exchange for goods, services or other currency.
We already have a term exactly for what you're talking about: a hard-fork (or just a fork if you like).
On either side of the fork is bitcoin, not the "original" bitcoin and an "altcoin".
You're also incorrect in other ways. In the case of most forks, you fork via voting by "x% of the last 1000 blocks were mined by this implementation". Because of that, if everyone except the current miners use the alternate implementation, the new "fork" will never activate.
That's because forks are not altcoins, but typically run on the same exact chain, behave compatibly with each other (prior to activation), and wait for consensus in mined blocks (to activate).
That method of voting does mean that only miners get a vote. It's not because they validate all blocks, but rather because mining a block is the same as voting in basically all fork-consensus-algorithms so far.
The point is that on one side you have the original protocol in use, and on the other side you have a different protocol in use. Both of them are called Bitcoin and use the same database up to the point of the fork, but they're not the same protocol in much the same way that Dogecoin is not the same protocol as Bitcoin - someone who attempts to use the pre-fork protocol will not be able to achieve consensus with someone attempting to use the post-fork protocol.
> In the case of most forks, you fork via voting by "x% of the last 1000 blocks were mined by this implementation".
That is not the only way to implement a fork. As I say, you can fork the chain simply by convincing enough users to use your fork - there's no hard requirement for any miner-level voting to be done at all.
> but they're not the same protocol in much the same way that Dogecoin is not the same protocol as Bitcoin
What you're arguing is essentially that "EMCA6 is not javascript because it supports features the previous javascript didn't, much the same as ruby does".
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. They're the same cryptocurrency both before and after the fork. Dogecoin is not. Can you see how that term is not a good term when we have a better one?
Also "achieve consensus" there is absolutely incorrect. The correct term is "will have to update their software, else they will be incompatible". Software updates are normal, and we don't demand that each program rename itself every time it updates.
> That is not the only way to implement a fork
That's the only way anyone's trying to fork though. Yes, gavin said he'd just do a hard-cut over, but he didn't and it'd be a bad idea.
Forking the chain is only useful if the economic majority and miners come along, else your chain will be less secure and less useful (also, double spending problems etc).
Or, rather, ECMAScript 6 is not ECMAScript 5 because you can write code in the former that doesn't work in the latter, and probably vice versa on edge cases. They are separate languages. If you continue writing in ECMAScript 5, you're missing out on all the nice ECMAScript 6 libraries.
But with Bitcoin it's even worse - if you continue using pre-fork Bitcoin, you cannot reach consensus and thus transact with people using post-fork Bitcoin. They're not precisely the same protocol, by definition - they bare the same name but they're not the same protocol, they are different protocols and for the fork to win, the first protocol dies. The name is irrelevant to this.
Similarly, HTTP 2.0 isn't the same as HTTP 1.1, and claiming one is equivalent to the other is nonsense, even if they bare the same name.
I'd also argue that if the amount of hash power put into the network can be derived from the value of the network (trivially provable), the result of the economic majority choosing to adhere to different rules is that either the miners will follow or new miners will pop up quickly as there's a demand for them.
I'm not saying pre-fork and post-fork bitcoin are equivalent, or the same protocol version. That's a strawman. the term "Bitcoin" is obviously different from "ECMAScript 5/6" and "HTTP 1.1/2.0" in that it's not a version of a protocol/standard. Bitcoin is a term for the overarching thing, just like "Javascript" and "HTTP" are overarching terms for those, encompassing multiple standards etc.
Again, "altcoin" already has a term unrelated to protocol. "altcoin" means a cryptocurrency that is not closely related to bitcoin.
You're talking strictly about protocols and versions there (which, btw, bitcoin should just version its protocols), but that's not what "Bitcoin" means to the common man.
You're making my argument for me by comparing "HTTP 2.0 isn't HTTP 1.1", but they're both HTTP, not gopher or ftp.
Voting also applies in hard-forks. Case-in-point, XT/classic both had activation thresholds and voting.
Splitting the chain is not really useful unless you have a large majority with you for both technical and non-technical reasons, and so you vote.
Soft-forks and hard-forks aren't so different in the happy-case. They both extend the same original chain, they both have concerns about two competing chains existing and wish to avoid that, they both change the validation layer in some way (though to lesser and greater extents).
With the 70% you can do more interesting stuff, like using a 35% to mine in the fork/altcoin you like and use the other 35% to block the other fork/altcoin so no one can make transactions in it.
With the 90% you can play games, like mining during the day as usual, and do fancy stuff at night. From 0am to 4am, keep a 10% as protection against attacks, and use the other 80% to mine empty blocks in the other chain, starting from the last block you mined last night. So in 4 hours with a 8x hashing power is enough to catch up with the other chain and then when they get up in the morning they will see all their transactions reverted.
A fork with little hash power is very insecure.
For example, you could have a bot monitor blockchain data and see that when someone sent payment to your NewShoeStore address, parse the metadata in the block to get their size, color, brand etc.
Furthermore, the terms "war" and "toxic" seem tremendously overblown. It was just a fork of some software that hardly anybody, in the scheme of things, really uses.
Maybe we should get the neovim guys some of this press frenzy, eh?