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Comment by haakon | Hacker News Reader

Here's your "propaganda".

The segwit softfork may fix some things that make side chains more feasible, but that undersells it severely. It mainly solves a bug in bitcoin that prevents a good implementation of Lightning Network (which is not a side chain), and it also upgrades on-chain transaction capacity by doubling it, while solving another bug in Bitcoin (quadratic scaling of sigops) which make such a capacity increase safer.

More information here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

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Not that there's anything terrible about Segwit, it's just that we already have better solutions for everything it claims to do.

For instance we have a solution for the transaction malleability issue - Flexible Transactions - which causes a tiny fraction as much technical debt while offering big benefits in future-proofing. Why bother with Segwit when we have a better solution?

But that's neither here nor there because Segwit doesn't even solve the actual problem that everyone wants fixed right now - block size. The small, one off, slow to deploy solution offered by Segwit isn't a scaling solution at all. It's likely that take-up of Segwit wallets will be fairly gradual which means it'll probably never even prevent the blocks being full. Even if it does we'll be back in the same hole in a few months time anyway because of the small one off change. What's needed is a solution which actually fixes the problem.

> What's needed is a solution which actually fixes the problem.

That solution is the lightning network, which the transaction malleability fix of the segwit patch fixes and makes possible.

The concept of segwit is fine. The problem is that the implementation of it as a soft fork is questionable, and trying to position it as a capacity increase is even more questionable.

Only people who really don't understand how bitcoin works are pushing for a hard-fork over a soft-fork.

https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050...

Mike Hearn would disagree with you, and he knows a lot about how Bitcoin works.

The same Mike Hearn that referred to bitcoin as the failed experiment?

https://medium.com/@coolbearcjs/the-mike-hearn-experiment-ha...

The same Mike Hearn that recently announced the failure of his R3CEV venture to deliver a blockchain solution for banking?

https://twitter.com/Beautyon_/status/834152812405735425

The same Mike Hearn that tried and failed to push through a fork of the bitcoin network called Bitcoin XT that allowed for a personally controlled black-list?

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-blacklist...

Yeah. That guy. He has an agenda, and it hasn't been aligned with bitcoin for quite some time.

Hearn is right. The wider world simply doesn't know how dysfunctional Bitcoin is, mostly because of the censorship taking place on the main communication channels. You will literally be banned from /r/bitcoin if you post a comment notifying other users that comments are being deleted.

The blacklist article is pure FUD, seemingly written with the sole intent of smearing Hearn.

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