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Comment by captaincrunch | Hacker News Reader

What a great way to manipulate the market.

I don't understand this desire to immediately assume bad faith in these situations. It's a complicated situation, involving a lot of actors. Yeah, probably some of them are acting in bad faith. But probably most of them are just trying to develop a functional cryptocurrency. This stuff is very hard, and having it all so decentralized only makes it harder.

Personally I was hoping for the 2x fork to succeed, or, barring that, for some kind of miracle switch over to Bitcoin Cash, which has the 8x capacity without the baggage of Segwit. But realistically this is probably the best outcome for Bitcoin for the reasons outlined in the message.

What’s your opposition to SegWit?

I can't speak for the user thefalcon you replied to, but most opposition as I understand it comes from the fact that segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure, departing from the original vision of bitcoin as a decentralized system that can't be controlled by entities like governments and banks.

>segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure

elaborate?

> but most opposition as I understand it comes from the fact that segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure

That simply isn't true. It's just a new transaction format.

Can't speak for thefalcon, but implementing Segwit (or any change) as a soft fork creates the possibility of an eventual chain re-org, as well as the possibility for non-upgraded miners to accidentally work on an invalid block. Soft forks have all the difficulties of hard forks (requiring 51% of hashing power to work), with those two additional disadvantages.

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866911

I have more of a general aversion to the actions of the (Core) people who support SegWit, including false promises, censorship, and other shenanigans like the 2x trojan horse which we've just seen play out: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/duplicates/6iecx7/if_segwit_act...

Bitcoin fundamentally attracts people who assume existing markets are run in bad faith. It's why there's so much propaganda attacking "fiat currency," and presenting Bitcoin as some kind of ethical imperative.

Most bitcoin people I've met are very much in favor of everything free market, it's the goverments / central banks they don't trust.

You're looking at a group of 6 people that have relevant influence on bitcoin. You've still got centralized trust.

The fact that 6 people tried and failed to get their way should imply the opposite, no?

For very good historical reasons.

Bitcoin markets are a simulation of what would happen if you replaced the small group of people controlling governments and central banks with a small group of internet trolls, who held 95%+ of all available currency between them.

> miracle switch over to Bitcoin Cash, which has the 8x capacity without the baggage of Segwit.

That fork (BCH) already happened. You were hoping that the vendors who stated "follow the chain w/greatest difficulty" would land on BCH? The merits just aren't there, and that's likely why miners aren't there either.

> But probably most of them are just trying to develop a functional cryptocurrency. This stuff is very hard

IMO people who haven't actually tried to do that actual development have no idea how hard it is and don't put sufficient weight on the concerns expressed by those who do. The segwit 2x proponents weren't developers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com