Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

Segwit2x was only "anti-developer" if you only consider the "bitcoin core" developers. There were many developers quite interested in larger block size for many years, since before the February 2016 "Bitcoin Roundtable" in Hong Kong. Segwit2x had over 90% of the hashpower of the bitcoin world voting for it, at one point a couple months before it was to activate. Hashpower is heavily tilted towards large mining pools, many of them in China, but it is still the best measure of consensus and support the network has. That's a major tenet of Bitcoin in the first place. (Though I wouldn't say "only miners matter" nor "only users matter", the network really needs both to work.)

I think that the survival and modest success of Bitcoin Cash eroded the initial overwhelming support for Segwit2X. Though if you mostly read /r/bitcoin I'd say you have a very warped view of what happened ;)

View on HN

> There were many developers quite interested in larger block size for many years

Yet, they weren't around when it came time to make it happen.

> Segwit2x had over 90% of the hashpower of the bitcoin world voting for it

Yet, it had a deeply flawed software development process.

> it is still the best measure of consensus and support the network has

Yet the miners stated that they would only mine the fork for 12 hours, do you know why? Because they would have been mining at a (relative) loss. Really undermines this measure of consensus. Maybe the best measure is the market price of the coin.

> I think that the survival and modest success of Bitcoin Cash eroded the initial overwhelming support for Segwit2X.

Basically, Bitcoin Cash is what Segwit2x should've been: an honest, replay-protected coin for people who think a money's value comes from its base layer payment system's transactions per second.

> Yet, they weren't around when it came time to make it happen.

Bitcoin XT had a mechanism for larger blocks in mid 2015. There were multiple BIPs and implementations for larger blocks besides that in 2016. It didn't matter much because of the stickyness of the original/default bitcoin implementation which is controlled by developers employed by blockstream, which was always intended to profit off of "sidechains" enabled by segwit and necessitated by small block sizes. (For anyone less familiar, keep in mind the first versions of the original implementation were written by Satoshi and then maintained by Gavin Andresen, one of the developers now on the "outside".)

Segwit2X was a compromise, arrived at through much effort at the Hong Kong meeting in early 2016 and again at the New York meeting in early 2017. It does appear that any compromise was futile and hopeless.

What developers were included in the NYA? Wasn't it just a bunch of suits? Like, only businesses and miners?

> Hashpower is heavily tilted towards large mining pools, many of them in China, but it is still the best measure of consensus and support the network has.

I'm not convinced by this argument at all. Consensus in the network is derived by the traders who give Bitcoin its value, not the miners. If anything, the miners are on the opposite end of the equation as they have to sell their mined coin to pay for their mining expenses (since silicon and electricity are typically purchased in fiat currency).

Look at the exchanges for consensus, not the miners. The miners are effectively slaves to the system. I don't understand why it's so common to give them so much weight.

First, miners also invest in the future of the coin when they invest in building up a mining operation for it.

Second, if most miners stop mining a coin, it can kill it. At least the next few blocks will take a very long time to be confirmed. Just as importantly, the security of the system is reduced because a large miner could theoretically overwhelm the remaining hashpower and execute a "51% attack" for some short-term profit. It's unlikely, but the confidence in the coin is partly based on it being impossible.

> Second, if most miners stop mining a coin, it can kill it.

This won't happen though. Miners are out to make a profit, full stop. They mine whatever currency is most profitable, so hash power follows price. Bitcoin has over half of the total cryptocurrency market cap. So long as Bitcoin itself is highly valuable, the miners will naturally follow along as well. And as some miners temporarily defect (thus incurring massive hourly losses in opportunity costs from mining less valuable currencies), transaction fees on Bitcoin simply go up higher, making each block worth significantly more reward, thus tempting the defectors with ever-increasing profits to defect back to mining Bitcoin. There is no mining cartel.

> but it is still the best measure of consensus and support the network has

is it? another measure is futures trading. 2x futures traded at ~%15 the value of btc immediately before the cancelation.

That's a measure of what people expect, which is a very different kind of "consensus" from what people want.

Hashpower doesn't matter. Miners follow price which follows economic demand. Mining is at the very end of the chain of causality, not at the beginning or middle of it.

The failure of the Segwit2X fork exemplifies this perfectly. If hashpower truly were as important if you say it were, then Segwit2X wouldn't gone ahead with >90% hashpower support (software bugs notwithstanding). Instead, it was called off for lack of consensus within the community, and the miners stuck around afterwards anyway. That 90% figure isn't nearly as important as you're making it out to be.

I would say it's a circle of causality with no beginning or end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com