This seems suicidal, what a terrible idea to change things in this way just when the idea was getting some traction. It will set a precedent that there is a lot more uncertainty in cryptocurrencies and hold back adoption.
Now they're following an agenda to deliberately prevent the blockchain from scaling in the way it was originally designed to. Why? To make the blockchain look ineffective - and now we have high fees and slow confirmations as a result. Bitcoin is badly affected by the congestion and so people are becoming desperate and clamouring for Blockstream's forthcoming off-blockchain scaling solution.
This would have worked out pretty well for them except that there has inevitably been opposition to these political games. A couple of other development teams have sprung up with forks which are more closely aligned to Satoshi Nakomoto's original scaling vision. These groups have been vociferously attacked by Blockstream and Blockstream has generated terribly misleading FUD about them in order to try to retain their control of the ecosystem.
Blockstream has failed. One of the alternate implementations "Bitcoin Unlimited" has all but won the war because the majority of miners are worried that the ecosystem is being damaged by Blockstream. Miners care about the value of their bitcoins and that's being eroded by the Blockstream-imposed congestion. The miners appear to be moving to Unlimited and it will most likely take over as the standard "Bitcoin" implementation at some point.
The whole "chain split" thing is mostly more FUD. A hard fork isn't a big deal if handled sensibly. The minority chain will quickly die off naturally because it'll be uneconomic to mine on it. This is just as it was designed to work by Satoshi Nakomoto.
No doubt people from the other side of this debate will see things differently but that's how it looks to me.
Blockstreeam was founded by long-time bitcoin lead developers.
The rest of your post is paranoid nonsense.
He's still welcome to contribute (hundreds of people contribute to Core, only 3 of them has commit access), but it doesn't look like he's interested in that.
No he wasn't, he granted himself that title. Then largely left on his own in ~2013 to focus on the (now discredited and defunct) "Bitcoin Foundation" that he created.
The people developing the Bitcoin project have been pretty stable since 2011.
There is this lovely time coded git-blame chart that was put up last year: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0
People like Mike Hearn were always outsiders to the project, and have spent a lot of time doing this like arguing for blacklisting, blocking tor, and other things that most contributors think of as strongly at odds with the principles of the project.
For the benefit of anyone taking your comment at face value, I'm here to say:
Your response is total garbage.
edit:
More details, my response was written slightly in haste...
1. I'm a (non-blockstream) core dev, I've worked on patches for the last release which sped up validation up to 40% with more efficient caching algorithms. To imply that Core isn't scaling flies in the face of those improvements (and the many others, developed by blockstream and others!)
2. I also co-founded the MIT DCI, which employs several bitcoin core developers (non-blockstream). Historically, DCI also employed ex-lead maintainer Gavin Andresen (he resigned to focus on other things). DCI employs the current lead maintainer.
3. I also co-founded the Scaling Bitcoin conference (I was the first program chair). You can see the archives of research presented at the workshop https://scalingbitcoin.org
4. Blockstream isn't imposing any constraints: Bitcoin has fundamental scaling concerns, and they can't be addressed quickly (e.g., increasing blocksize) without significant drawbacks for the future of the platform.
5. here's some point by point refutation
> They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain...
Mining is actually highly centralized right now. There are a handful of people with a lot of control. If you simply "follow the hash power", these miners could implement whatever they want, e.g., "I get a million coins per day extra". Validating against Bitcoin's predefined rules keeps it decentralized.
> Now they're following an agenda to deliberately prevent the blockchain from scaling in the way it was originally designed to.
Many of the algorithms in Bitcoin would/will fail spectacularly with really large blocks, so that wouldn't work. The way Bitcoin is "designed" to scale, I would argue, is through crypto (e.g., snarks/Mimble Wimble), which allow you to compress O(n) transactions to O(1).
> Why? To make the blockchain look ineffective
Actually, many of the features added with SegWit make bitcoin more functional than ever; txn malleability was a major woe for users of the software.
> and now we have high fees and slow confirmations as a result. Bitcoin is badly affected by the congestion and so people are becoming desperate and clamouring for Blockstream's forthcoming off-blockchain scaling solution.
Bitcoin was always going to need fees -- otherwise why would they be in the protocol from the start? You need to pay for the bandwidth and permanent storage costs one way or another. If Blockstream has a commercialization strategy for off-chain, so be it, but fundamentally they can't be a gatekeeper to that.
> This would have worked out pretty well for them except that there has inevitably been opposition to these political games.
You can spin the game theory whatever way you like... what if the miners want to have larger blocks that they exclusively fill with their own garbage transaction, centralizing the network, while still charging high fees for real users in light of this artificial demand?
> A couple of other development teams have sprung up with forks which are more closely aligned to Satoshi Nakomoto's original scaling vision. These groups have been vociferously attacked by Blockstream and Blockstream has generated terribly misleading FUD about them in order to try to retain their control of the ecosystem.
I've looked at their designs. Sometimes you have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough. Emergent consensus has a number of fatal flaws, a lot of other people have gone into good detail on how.
> Blockstream has failed.
Not yet :p
> One of the alternate implementations "Bitcoin Unlimited" has all but won the war because the majority of miners are worried that the ecosystem is being damaged by Blockstream.
Do you have a source on this? When you say majority of miners, do you mean by hashrate or by "noses"? Theres a high degree of centralization; so it's hard to truly judge.
> The miners appear to be moving to Unlimited and it will most likely take over as the standard "Bitcoin" implementation at some point.
Miners may be signalling for support but not actually running the code. Signalling (and getting other smaller miners to try to switch) and not actually switching is a great strategy to get a mining edge.
> The whole "chain split" thing is mostly more FUD. A hard fork isn't a big deal if handled sensibly. The minority chain will quickly die off naturally because it'll be uneconomic to mine on it. This is just as it was designed to work by Satoshi Nakomoto.
A chain split is indeed a big deal. When the ethereum chain split, a lot of exchanges lost a serious amount of money with both tokens having replay attacks. This means that it's difficult -- nigh impossible -- for users to have a sane outcome using many of the ecosystem platforms following a hardfork.
On the other hand I don't respect the political moves made by some other people in this whole fiasco. They've damaged bitcoin horribly.
Edit: just repeating - I don't think most core developers have anything to do with this.
edit: I forgot to say I edited my post with more background.
* not trying to appeal to authority, but you can go compare across all competing clients and see who is contributing the most meaningfully _to you_ and contrast that with who listens to gmaxwell and sipa.
That's true, but there's a fundamental difference between the fee structure when blocks are full vs not full.
When not full, and I believe the way the system was intended to work, the tendency is for miners to compete for users fees; hence the fees will tend to the actual cost of mining. Just enough for miners to stay in business and secure the network, with all extra value being captured by the users.
When full, users compete for mining space, and as such fees tend to the value of a bitcoin transaction. Which means all extra value is captured by the miners, and the users eventually have no incentive to use bitcoin as their transactions tend to be as expensive as they're worth.
Another troubling side effect of that is because of the zero-sum nature of mining, the extra fees will eventually just cause difficulty to increase to match, slowly pushing bitcoin's cost to match its value, providing very little (really almost no) incremental decentralization/security to the network.
The artificial barrier to the number of transactions essentially causes the world to waste electricity while at the same time slowly killing bitcoin. If the barrier were always kept just slightly above the demand for transactions however, bitcoin would operate completely healthily and the (nice low) fees would always provide just enough incentive for miners to continue to mine... by definition!
If you read /r/btc on reddit you can see a forum that in uncensored, unlike the HEAVILY censored and 'curated' (threads that don't go the way the mods want are sorted by controversial first) /r/bitcoin. Anyone on /r/bitcoin that says something alluding to censorship is banned and has their posts deleted. Anyone who mentions bitcoin unlimited is banned. The moderation logs are not open.
Have you ever received anything from blockstream?
It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see
Greg Maxwell: 46
Jorge Timon: 17
Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development)
Mark Friedenbach: 0
Patrick Strateman: 31
Warren Togami: 6
Adam Back: 0
Greg Sanders: 32
Glenn Willen: 0
Total commits for listed Blockstream developers: 295
Wladimir Van Der Laan: 210
Marco Falke: 170
Corey Fields: 152
Jonas Schnelli: 87
Suhas Daftuar: 73
Alex Morcos: 65
fanquake: 56
Pavel Janik: 45
Total commits for listed non-Blockstream developers: 858
So about 35%. 15% if we remove Pieter, but I can confidently say everyone at Blockstream is hugely proud of his contributions and in no way shape or form are we interested in diminishing his accomplishment. From my perspective he has been the single most important contributor to Bitcoin development for many years now.
In short, this narrative is a huge disrespect to every other contributors building the software we all depend on. The obsession of certain people to lend power to specific individuals is simply an attempt to shut down their ideas by attacking their character.
--
I would add that most of the Core contributors working at Blockstream had been contributing before the company was founded and certainly did not "infiltrate the Bitcoin development team".
The previous lead developer had barely contributed anything before he quit out of his own volition after a series of failed attempt to politicize Bitcoin and force through a contentious hard fork. The last straw was of course when he was naively led to believe that notorious scam artist Craig Wright was Satoshi.
With regards to the "off-blockchain" solutions you refer to. Here's a couple of facts:
Fact 1: The Lightning Network was created by Bitcoin developers not involved with the Core project
Fact 2: No Core developer is involved in a business whose revenue model revolves around the success of the Lightning Network
Fact 3: There is very little profit to be made from operating the Lightning Network infrastructure/protocol.
Fact 4: The Lightning Network will happen regardless of the outcome of the current contention.
Fact 5: Bitcoin developers have no control over the consensus code being enforced by independent peers participating in the network. Bitcoin is a voluntary system.
What I can say is within this thread that both sides have spewed either enough propaganda or perhaps truth or perhaps their truth or maybe alternate truth, see my point is, there is enough confusion in all this bickering that I'll never trust Bitcoin again.