I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too much, but it doesn't really seem as though increasing to 2mb really make such a big difference?
Am I missing something?
Segwit2X was never about a blocksize increase, it was meant to seize control from the Bitcoin Core developers and switch development from the original Bitcoin repo to the newly created Bitcoin1 repo controlled by Jeff Garzik. It was not open to the Core developers and incompetently run, it was built on an old version of the software and resulting bugs were disingenuously blamed on Core developers.
Had this been a success it would have signaled the transfer of control of Bitcoin from the many developers and contributors to corporate banking and wall street interests. it would have been the end of decentralized crypto network open to many and the start of a corporate controlled network open to only a few.
Segwit is a technical failure as it was implemented in a soft fork as a hack. It's scaling is inefficient. Did you see the capacity increase when it got activated? It was abysmal.
https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-...
It also decreases the security of the network:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoFb3mcxluY
> Had this been a success it would have signaled the transfer of control of Bitcoin from the many developers and contributors to corporate banking and wall street interests. it would have been the end of decentralized crypto network open to many and the start of a corporate controlled network open to only a few.
Now who's pushing conspiracy theories?
The main actors against a block size increase are Core developers who are also part of a company called Blockstream. Blockstream's business model is about selling side chains. But why use side chains if you can use on chain transactions instead? Well if you limit on chain scaling users would be forced on to your side chains...
The movement against the Segwit2x upgrade was so fierce precisely because it threatened to offset Core as the de facto Bitcoin client, making them loose their power.
They profit heavily from censorship on the bitcoin mailing list, the "bitcoin" subreddit and bitcoin.org. Their consistent propaganda and abuse has now caused the miners and businesses to back down on the Segwit2x upgrade, which would have been a certainty with 95% hashpower and business support.
Keep these things in mind and you should get a better picture.
Yet there is no attempt to quantify by how much. The damage done to Bitcoin by full blocks is much more than what a potential increase to 2MB would cause. This zero tolerance policy rhymes extremely poorly when the fees makes Bitcoin more expensive to use than to run a full node.
> It would also set a precedent that miners are in control (or alternatively it could be interpreted as no-one is in control).
Miners are in control because the real power lies with them. The problem is that they aren't coordinated and so status quo is favored.
First of all, if Segwit2x did succeed then Core could swallow their pride and simply update Bitcoin Core’s consensus rules to match btc1’s, and I think most users would prefer to continue to run Core.
Second, if Bitcoin is eventually widely used it would need more than doubling of the block size to scale, even with sidechains or LN. Also, scaling isn’t the only use for sidechains.
Third, many of Blockstream’s founders and team are long-time Bitcoiners and cypherpunks. I’d like to believe they would not compromise Bitcoin for the benefit of their company alone, but perhaps that’s naïve.
If you prefer baseball over football, but all your friends are playing football, would you rather join your friends, or play by yourself?
The value of full nodes is widely understood by bitcoin contributors [0][1][2]. Increasing the block size directly increases the amount of resources required to run a full node. Increased bandwidth requirements is especially a problem.
It is up to the candidate (s2x), not the incumbent (core) to show that no, it won't be harder to run full nodes, or to show that you can have just as much security by running an SPV node. Because the candidate has failed to back up their proposal with evidence that security is not harmed, the proposal should not move forward.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/fu...
I had understood that SPV nodes store only the merkle root of all the transactions in each block, so as I understand it should be able to verify whether a given transaction is valid or not?
> SPV nodes (such as some mobile clients, and Multibit) place a blind trust in the majority of miners, without checking validity of the blockchain they produce. It still requires a majority of miners to mislead an SPV node, but they can make it believe anything (including "You received 10000000 BTC!"). The reason why this does not happen is because full nodes would not accept such blocks, and assuming a large portion of the ecosystem does rely on full nodes, miners who do this would not see their blocks accepted by the larger economy, resulting in them wasting money.
Further, on this page, you can read about security considerations between light clients and full nodes: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security
Basically, a network comprised of only SPV nodes and miners places the SPV nodes at the mercy of the miners. Because of how centralized and state-controlled mining is (see Russia and China), this would be a very easy way for states to attack bitcoin.
Thanks for the links :)
The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split.
Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization just because non-holders want low transaction fees (that can be very easily be created by a centralized system)
> The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split.
Yet there's no research to remotely suggest a meager increase to 2MB would have any effect. Compact blocks and Xthin (and recently Graphene) also improves on this immensely.
> Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization
Typical black and white thinking. Bitcoin must have a primary use case that's not a store of value otherwise it will crash down when no new money is injected.
> just because non-holders want low transaction fees
Yeah because non-holders are the ones who want to use Bitcoin as was always intended. Pure holders are only in for the speculation.
The title of Bitcoin's whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" not "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Store of Value System".
The last hard fork was on Oct 15, 2017. It did not split the chain, it went smoothly and added great new features. Ethereum has had many hard forks. Only the DAO one was controversial. Using hard forks to upgrade the network is smooth and works great.
why?