Bitcoin Under Political Attack – Contentious Fork Segwit2x on 16th November
blockchaind.net
blockchaind.net
They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
This is Bitcoin's consensus mechanism and it's called Nakamoto consensus.
In turn, this means that 'Bitcoin' is whatever chain has the most cumulative work done to secure it.
Nothing is 'contentious' about this. It either has the most cumulative PoW, or it doesn't.
If the minority chain has some value it might survive. If it does, that's fine. You'll have coins on both chains and you can choose to care or not.
Also Segwit2x are trying to kill the current bitcoin chain. I wont have a problem with them if they had a replay protection but putting users in danger is contentious.
/thread
And sure, that's part of how the consensus mechanic was always meant to fuction. DAO contracts were meant to be irreversible too, but that didn't stop people from being sad and seeking a change when they were robbed.
This is all new territory and the appeal to authority by citing the white paper is less helpful than most people believe.
Distributed consensus is a non-trivial problem, and for sure certain tradeoffs were made by Satoshi to make it both distributed and permission-less.
Unless you want a benevolent dictator of some sort all you can do is set up a system that's robust from a game theory perspective.
that is the point. B2X-blocks are not valid blocks for the regular BTC-Nodes, because some of the Blocks will have a block-weight > 4000
They have to make a choice on what chain to follow just all other actors on the network. Doing nothing is a valid choice of course, but it might not bring you a desirable outcome.
If there is consensus, then all these nodes add up and have a very big economic vote!
Many people seem to forget that Bitcoin is not pure software. It is a bit more!
edit: typo
The only way you can influence which chain is the longest, without mining, is to pick a preferred chains and sell your coins on the other chain. That is your 'economic vote'.
If enough people do that, one chain will be way more profitable than the other and miners will switch over.
Is Bitcoin turning into a social experiment instead of an economical one? :)
Are you Satoshi? ;)
a. I was under the impression it was Satoshi who had put in the 1 MB size limit. This is the first attempt to increase the size. But then the article says:
"Until now, Bitcoin has been operating by simply increasing the block size whenever bitcoin needs to scale. This allows more transactions to process in a single block."
These size increases were under which BIPs?
b. "....to firing current bitcoin developers and taking over bitcoin development"
My understanding is the decentralized nature of bitcoin and the consensus mechanism meant no one can actually be fired. The worst case scenario is that I am stopped from accessing the bitcoin-core code repo but I can still rally people to take up my changes and vote (consensus) on it.
d. "Inspite of this, Segwit2x people kept pushing the hard fork on the community just to fulfill their agreement as they have the mining power support."
Wasn't that the whole point of bitcoin? Miners are needed to do most of the heavy lifting which means they have a say in what direction bitcoin goes.
Additionally, what is the mechanism to show the non-mining support for any of the changes?
c. Any links which show there is support for the current chain?
b. You are right but their is still a maintainer of the repo that merges the code in the repository and do releases. Core developers don't believe in capability of segwit2x developer i.e. just Jeff Garzik to handle this task.
c. There are two pools slushpool and f2pool that are currently supporting the original chain. Other than this several twitter polls have been done and several meetup groups have posted articles on medium denouncing their support for segwit2x. I am not good with saving links but I am sure you will find several polls with a simple google search.
d. Miners are not a part of bitcoin consensus mechanism. They are a way of safely executing the chosen decision. All issues must be raised before merging code in the bitcoin repo. By blocking the activation of segwit for over an year, miners lost the confidence from the community. Also around 40% of mining power is currently controlled by Bitmain and the rest is also dependent on them as they are the only mining hardware manufacturer.
On the size what you said doesn't seem to be true:
https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-the-bitcoin-block-size-deba...
So, it was changed back in Satoshi's era(2010). It is miners who are not obliged to fill up till 1 MB. Yes, miners can be shady to not fill the blocks and collect fees.
Frankly, it seems Bitcoin has an ever revolving door of civil wars and it is getting boring. Every time someone comes up with a different opinion, its civil war, political attack etc. There was so much noise during Bitcoin XT, then cash and now this.
If people are so concerned about miner control and 100% sure of community support, create a fork and mine it. A fair debate is fine but this kind of in-fighting undermines bitcoin from being taken seriously - 7k in price or not.
Miners ARE the bitcoin consensus mechanism. Saying anything different is ridiculous. The miners are signaling 2MB blocks in an overwhelming majority. https://coin.dance/blocks
Blockstream and 'core' are scared that the miners will finally stop using their software and take control back of bitcoin, allowing them to expand it's throughput to what other chains already have. This will alleviate the ridiculous $3-$5 fees to make the smallest transaction. Before 'core' and blockstream decided to suffocate the throughput of bitcoin so that their company could profit off of side channels, fees were a few cents.
> just Jeff Garzik to handle this task.
This is not true at all. First, Jeff Garzik was one of the very early developers of bitcoin before the current crop ousted the original group who wouldn't go a long with their plan. They are the ones that took it from something no one knew about to a working system with millions of users. It isn't only Jeff Garzik working on this task and the 'task' is mostly raising a number from 1 MB to 2 MB. There isn't anything technically difficult about it.
> I think they were soft limits which didnt require a hard fork.
The 1 MB limit was put in place as temporary spam protection and satoshi was very clear about this. Bitcoin HAS hard forked before (and many other coins have hard forked multiple times as planned upgrades that have gone perfectly smoothly).
If you are getting your information from /r/bitcoin you should know that it is HEAVILY censored. They ban anyone who has an opinion they don't like, they grey list comments they don't like, they change the sort order of threads that don't go their way, they keep their moderation logs closed and they have a long list of rules that are arbitrarily enforced as justifications for all their nonsense. Check out /r/btc or any other source of information, but not /r/bitcoin, that place is 100% toxic.
Edit: Every post speaking out about /r/bitcoin usually gets rapid downvotes with no explanation while also getting slowly upvoted over time. This seems to be no exception.
Both r/bitcoin and r/btc are terrible. You wont ever get a proper discussion for bigger blocks on r/bitcoin and r/btc has basically turned into a place for bitcoin cash and is not anyway related to bitcoin now. They even celebrate everytime bitcoin price dumps.
The only reason it is contentious is because of the 'core' group who want to profit off of crippling the main chain. If you mean that there should be a more dynamic way of choosing max block size, I agree. If you mean that there is any technical limitation to blocks being orders of magnitude larger, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary and anyone syncing with the chain can tell that it doesn't take much CPU power or bandwidth.
> Both r/bitcoin and r/btc are terrible.
/r/btc is terrible in the same way lots of subreddits become tribalistic, but /r/bitcoin is a truly toxic, censored dictatorship meant to lie to people new to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I don't think they are on the same level.
> is not anyway related to bitcoin now. They even celebrate every time bitcoin price dumps.
I don't think that is true at all. /r/btc wants core to no longer be in control, because they have done nothing but lie and censor to try to profit off of crippling something they didn't create or even help build up. The bitcoin cash circle jerk gets obnoxious but it is also a direct reaction to everything people like greg maxwell (nullc on reddit and hacker news) have done.
I actually don't care about nullc or anyone else spreading lies or anything. I just believe that core scaling plan is far more superior to what others have been demanding.
The fact is, there are already two methods of transactions off of the bitcoin chain that have evolved in the face of bitcoin being artificially crippled - other cryptocurrencies and (unfortunately) exchanges.
They even had to delay their release of 0.15.1 for this hard fork.
Are there good communities online for decent bitcoin discussion?
Developers choose which software they want to develop. Users choose which software they want to use. There's no need for a consensus. It's like every other open-source software.
However, When someone makes a new software with new rules (BCH, S2X), users are free to choose it and miners are free to mine it. Miners can't vote which version users should be using, or which version is the correct one. There is no 'correct one'. Miners vote doesn't apply there. There are now multiple blockchains and each one has miners who enforce the rules in that specific blockchain.
If there's a major user base for different versions, then there's a need for distinct names. If a majority of Bitcoin users agree to update to a new version, then it's called a 'consensus hard-fork' and the new version gets to keep the same name (and the old version dies). When the new version is a 'split-fork' (both versions has users), the new version needs a new name and the old version gets to keep its name. Miners don't have a vote in that. It's the users who choose which software they want to use and what they want to call it.
Only problem here is that because BTC mining is so centralized, small chains with same POW-algorithm are vulnerable to attacks. This leads to this situation where miners can potentially coerce users into using their version of the software.
P.s. If someone gains unfair advantage on the blockchain somehow (Blockstream etc.) and users lose confidence in Bitcoin's core developers, the majority of user base will then fork into something else and keep the Bitcoin name. There hasn't been a reason for that yet. I trust the larger Bitcoin community that it will happen if there's a legitimate reason.
Bitcoin Cash and segwit 2x have a major difference: in bitcoin cash there is replay protection (purposefully) and in segwit 2x there is not (also purposefully). Because segwit 2x is a meant to be a hard that kills the other chain off, there IS a correct chain - the chain with the highest proof of work. This is explained in the original bitcoin white paper.
Miners are signalling with an overwhelming majority that segwit 2x will be the chain with the most hash power / proof of work behind it, and because there is no change to the transaction formats, if it gains the majority of hash power, it is considered the valid continuation of the bitcoin blockchain.
As you can see what happened here, 'consensus' means more than just miners.
Additionally, the cult of bitcoin and the various sub-cults make it hard to actually be interested in bitcoin as a technology without being forced to invest ideologically by thousands of fanboys claiming all other sub-cults to be evil.
Personally, I've moved my assets into other cryptocoins and I hope I can weather the storm of bitcoin's inevitable and eventual collapse there. Hopefully.
On the other hand, bitcoin is also an interesting exercise in distributed consensus (though blockchain/PoW consensus is largely overhyped)
Other cryptocoins have improved on all these concepts or plan to develop them. Bitcoin might be remembered in the same way modern computer scientists remember the Turing Machine or the Zuse Z1.
That has to be the most laughable part of the article. "Hey guys, I posted this poll on a pro-core forum and what do you know, not a single person supported S2X...". It's like the polls posted in /r/btc about Bitcoin Cash - everyone in the bitcoin world lives in their own bubble and use those around them to validate their opinions.
The one with most people use will win, why we need to afraid of diversity?