Hacker News Reader

Comment by r1ch | Hacker News Reader

Not really sure I follow your argument. Bitcoin Core has wanted to push Segwit and the miners agreed to it as long as a 2MB hardfork was also forthcoming. The 2MB adjustment is all part of the plan. Segwit has locked in, which while being a "soft fork", already breaks compatibility with the original "Bitcoin".

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.

View on HN

It's not true, sorry. The core developers wanted segwit, and refused to agree to another size doubling as well.

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).

> claims that 90% of miners will split are completely unverified

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

> Despite being under no obligation to do so

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 :(

What are lite clients?

Lite clients (also called SPV clients) don't fully validate the network rules, but instead follow whatever the miners say blindly.

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.

Which part isn't true? The miners and many companies were quite explicit about their conditional support for Segwit with the New York Agreement. This is not a surprise move for anyone following the scaling debate.

All of these companies already supported segwit before that. This whole show was for pleasing Bitmain, who were blocking segwit for nearly a year. The companies couldn't care less about doing an hardfork to double the capacity again after segwit, they just caved in to Bitmain's demands.

My mistake, I was under the impression Segwit2x was approved by Core.

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.

> My mistake, I was under the impression Segwit2x was approved by Core.

> I still think this is a good thing. The Bitcoin Core developers have restricted the Bitcoin network for too long.

Restricted it how?

By not doing enough to increase network throughput. We could have had a 2-8MB fork years ago and not had to worry with the transaction backlogs caused by the 1MB block limit we're now stuck with.

> My mistake, I was under the impression Segwit2x was approved by Core.

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 :(

> Segwit has locked in, which while being a "soft fork", already breaks compatibility with the original "Bitcoin".

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com