Bitcoin Upgrade in November 2017 at Block 494,784
segwit2x.github.io
segwit2x.github.io
(I have my opinions, but more important to warn people who may be mislead by the title)
> Blockstream employees have for years been extremely vocal opponents of increasing Bitcoin's block size
Yes, for many years, years before Blockstream even existed!
Edit: note that these very same developers are also pushing for segwit, which doubles the block size and the on-chain transaction capacity of the bitcoin network. It's quite odd to say they're "opponents of increasing Bitcoin's block size" given that they want to double it. What they're really against is specific proposals for increasing the blocksize, proposals which break compatibility and introduce a chain-split risk for no good reason.
1) segwit is not "doubles the block size", effective increase is ~1.7x _AFTER_ full adoption and switching everyone to the new tx format (which is impossible for next few years). Also, it's one-time bump, can not be repeated if necessary
2) they're "introduce a chain-split risk" precisely by going against community. Without this shitshow almost zero risk upgrade was expected
Yes, it is a one-time increase, but one that is sufficient for now. Let's start by doubling the block size first, collect more data, then decide how to further increase the blocksize as the need arises.
2) I'm not seeing that they're going against the community. The technical, business and wide bitcoin community are all looking forward eagerly for segwit's activation.
Edit: also, in the case of a hard-fork, users who don't upgrade gets cut off the network entirely. is it not preferable to keep them a part of the network, with somewhat higher fees but a functional wallet otherwise?
> but one that is sufficient for now
not really - see above.
2) > The technical, business and wide bitcoin community are all looking forward eagerly
Do they understand segwit activation provides zero benefits at moment of said activation?
3) Overall, we're in the stage of planned bitcoin deconstruction. Gladly, there are no way to kill cryptocurrencies - even if bitcoin going to die, someone else will take it's place (related: see "bitcoin market share" chart)
P.S. We're talking about wrong problem. "How exactly 2MB blocks should be implemented" is surely wrong direction of talks. Yet we're here for like two years and counting. Whole ecosystem could be progressed by a lot during this time
Also anyone who upgrades immediately gets the benefit of lower fees. Their transactions are halved in size, from the fee calculation perspective.
Knowing Rusty personally and given his long history as a FLOSS contributor, it is at least clear to me that he's speaking from his own perspective and not because Blockstream is paying him too.
Rusty, I'd suggest to replace that with "a significant number of current bitcoin developers". There are Bitcoin Developers who may support the 2MB fork. "The current bitcoin developers" don't really make any centralized decisions on what to support or not.
I'm also aware of no person with more than 5 years experience developing the Bitcoin protocol or it's implementations who have ever been in support of it.
Lots of people are supportive of various capacity increase things without being supported by the reckless last minute backdoor dealing. More comments can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6h612o/can_someone...
Jeff Garzick is a developer?
This is a haiku.
Here are his recent commits: https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commits/segwit2x
Bitcoin-core != Bitcoin.
That's misleading. The fork isn't supported by the developers of the Bitcoin Core wallet, but it is supported by the developers of the Bitcoin Classic, Unlimited, and BTC1 wallets.
Your entire argument boils down to a no true Scotsman logical fallacy. ie: these people disagree with me therefore they are not Bitcoin developers.
A month old hastily made fork of Bitcoin Core which has not yet ever had a release (just lots of release candidates), unless I missed a recent announcement.
> who is in fact a Bitcoin developer and has been for a very long time.
Nonsense, Jeff hasn't been a Bitcoin developer for years. I believe he's mostly been involved with Ethereum for a long time.
People aren't saying he isn't a developer because they disagree, but because showing up and making a toy software fork doesn't grant you credibility or experience. ... and, in fact, he's shown that he doesn't have it pretty thoroughly, for example his code only managed to actually increase the blocksize a couple hours before his first release candidate because he completely misunderstood how it worked.
The sad part is that if that if they do what they are signaling, the difficulty adjustment of Bitcoin will take many months, and only 2-3 blocks will be mined every day until then.
The remainder of the miners who don't agree with this plan have likely already moved to mining Bitcoin Cash, which has no Segwit and 8 MB blocks. I doubt there will be anyone interested in mining a Segwit/1MB fork, it will be technically obsolete.
The miners did it anyway. The bitcoin reference client is not supporting this, and claims that 90% of miners will split are completely unverified (and, to be fair, unverifiable).
The best available evidence is mined blocks, as they are unforgeable. Despite being under no obligation to do so, >90% of miners are currently explicitly endorsing the 2x agreement in their blocks[1]. Any claim that miners will fail to do what they continue to explicitly say they will do should be met with skepticism.
[1] See "Segwit2x (intention)" here: https://coin.dance/blocks
Most mining pools set that for you, BTW. And there has been some (unverifiable) claims that the main mining manufacturer, Bitmain, is pressuring their customers on this.
> Any claim that miners will fail to do what they continue to explicitly say they will do should be met with skepticism.
On the contrary, it's clear we're going to get a split, and in the past we've seen miners mine pretty much exactly according to exchange range on each side of the fork.
Annoyingly, lite clients won't be able to choose, because the BTC1 dev refuses to use the hardfork bit (the sign bit of nVersion in the block header) to flag their fork. Lite clients, unlike full nodes, follow the most-work chain without checking; since they anticipate hashrate majority, they seem to be trying to leverage that into a user majority.
It's going to get messy :(
That's unlike a full node, which fully validates every block and transaction on the bitcoin network on his own. Full nodes will insist on following the network rules they're familiar with, regardless of what the miners say.
I still think this is a good thing. The Bitcoin Core developers have restricted the Bitcoin network for too long. Perhaps this will serve as a wake up call.
Personally I still think Bitcoin Cash was the right move. Segwit adds a lot of complexity and technical debt, bigger blocks were really all that's needed as evidenced by how quickly BCC dealt with the transaction backlogs. Unfortunately the market didn't agree.
Crap, I just found out about the fake "bcoreproject" twitter account, which of course, claims this as a pinned post. And then the fake "nullc_" twitter account (nullc is the common nick of Greg Maxwell, blockstream CTO and core supporter).
I feel saddened and a little dirty that this is A Thing :(
:(
Restricted it how?
How so? The very definition of a softfork is that its backwards- and forwards- compatible. Segwit is a softfork that is backwards- and forwards- compatible.
The mining community seems split between strong segwit supporters and large block supporters. Segwit alone was not able to achieve consensus and would never have activated. Segwit2x was a compromise that conceded segwit in exchange for an increase in the block size.
If the goal of the miners is to increase centralization by increasing the block size, they had the opportunity to switch to Bitcoin Cash when it forked. Note that I don't completely buy the centralization argument, especially when we're talking about a 2MB -- it's not like 1MB is some magical number handed down by Ganesh. The main risk of the increase has always been the attendant dangers of a hard cork.
I'm a Bitcoin Cash supporter, but even I'll admit that Bitcoin Cash is a direct attack on Bitcoin (Core), that was not entirely successful, although more successful than opponents thought it could be.
Beyond the deceptive name, Bitcoin Cash is at worst an honest difference in views. S2X on the other hand is being promoted with extreme levels of deception and dishonesty (like the content of this article, which states it's an upgrade rather than an incompatible replacement and claims that BU and Classic are compatible full nodes when they aren't any such thing: they don't implement any of the new under-specified S2X rules, ... they don't even implement segwit.)
> about a 2MB
You're not talking about 2MB-- 2MB is the size of blocks with segwit in effect. You're talking about 4 to 8 MB, which are above what prior research indicated was supportable even while considering a subset of considerations (such as initial synchronization), _and_ while not allowing any safety margin.
Recommended read: https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-bad-governance-model-97b8e52...
And very few companies signed that New York agreement. Most of the prominent exchanges and businesses have not agreed to the 2x portion of segwit2x: http://nob2x.org/
Where is the large portion of the ecosystem that supports 2x? Where it 2x's community? r/btc had already moved on to Bcash. There's no one cheering for 2x, just an agreement that people signed in the hopes of getting segwit activated. Segwit is activated now, they're just still stuck with the agreement for now.
The situation is fairly complex, and I'm not completely unbiased. I don't know exactly what is going to happen. But Bitcoin Cash is very clearly not some generic altcoin.
This is not an "upgrade", and the Bitcoin project has outright rejected it, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support
2x doesn't even have an accurate spec and only release 'candidate' software is released for it, created by basically a single relatively inexperienced developer.
Unfortunately, the S2X developer is going around posting notices of a "bitcoin upgrade" and not making any mention of the serious opposition or the major technical risks.
Controversial Bitcoin Upgrade Attempt Planned for November 2017 at Block 494,784
This "upgrade" has not been agreed to nor has it been ratified by the majority of the community.
edit: adding a source, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support which has a column for Segwit2x
Bitcoin would be quite useless if this were the case! If the miners were the ones deciding the system's rules, why shouldn't they increase the inflation rate and pay themselves more?
The entire value proposition of Bitcoin is based on the fact that everybody validate the rules, and not even the miners can change them.
There is opposition, yes, led by another company, Blockstream, which employs the most vocal contributors to the Bitcoin Core project. However as for "the community", there is no good evidence to support a majority opinion on either side.
See the Blockstream team[0] and cross reference it with dissenting developers[1].
Alex Morcos has written a good take-down on why even if prominent companies like Coinbase are willing to fork, it doesn't really matter[2].
Personally, when Barry emailed one of the organizations I founded the messaging was as Alex put it, bullying. There was no room for discussing or changing the proposal, just, "my way or the highway". We opted not to sign the letter because of that, among other reasons.
My beef with the framing, and hence suggestion to re-title, is because this type of bullying aims to disenfranchise users. When Facebook rolls out an upgrade, as a user you are more or less along for the ride. Bitcoin is a participatory technology where everyone can have a real voice and influence, every user gets to decide if they want to opt-in to this upgrade attempt or not.
[0] https://blockstream.com/team/
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support
[2] https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-bad-governance-model-97b8e52...
I can attest at least that my own entry is accurately represented and I have not been in contact with any other developer who has expressed that they have not been able to add their own entry or that luke-jr or Theymos have otherwise misrepresented their entries.
Have you heard from anyone having such difficulties listing their opinion that this is not a good source for developer sentiment on fork proposals?
edit: At the very least, it likely suffices for the purpose which I suggested, which is to cross reference blockstream employees and non-blockstream employees?
As a technical participant of the bitcoin community and the CEO of a company in the bitcoin space (in my profile, for anyone interested), I have the same experience. The entry for our company is accurate and I'm not aware of anyone claiming to be misrepresented on that page (also, I'm not personally familiar with any technical person in the bitcoin space that supports the 2x proposal. not even one!).
I guess this is the point where you play the victim. Anyone familiar with Theymos and Luke-Jr. knows that Theymos engages in excessive censorship of /r/bitcoin and every other forum he controls.
Luke-Jr. has openly said he believes the sun revolves around the earth and has proposed that max block sizes actually be REDUCED to be only 300KB, which is of course ridiculous for any number of reasons.
The OP was being generous, don't try to pretend anything different to confuse people unfamiliar with these two.
[0] https://medium.com/@shesek/observing-forced-narratives-and-m...
Their moderation logs also aren't open so they can hide what they actually do censor. They also reorganize threads that don't go their way by most controversial, so they can further hide anything that doesn't say what they want. Claiming there is no censorship on /r/bitcoin is absolutely absurd, and if you really don't think it is true then you need to educate yourself.
90% of hash power, which is an important difference.
The key is that the current bitcoin developers have rejected this and are not supporting it. And yes, some of them founded Blockstream, but the majority are not involved with Blockstream, nor have we taken a company position on this.
Also, many of the major bitcoin exchanges, wallets and businesses aren't signed on the New York agreement [3]. Segwit2x doesn't have as strong as a consensus as its supporters try to make it appear.
[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support#Developers
[2] https://medium.com/@shesek/why-i-dont-support-the-compromise...
Miners are not contractually bound to follow any of these agreements. Usually, if they say they will support a fork, it comes with many caveats, e.g., if it seems that there is substantial enough support among users, companies, developers, and hashpower-minority miners.