Comment by tobiaswk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobiaswk | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is currently not what Bitcoin was when it was created. Slow peer-to-peer transactions and high processing fees. Average fees are hovering around 60 dollars. That's an average. Unconfirmed transactions has been at over 100k for months. The mempool is also hovering around an ATH. The Bitcoin is crippled. Sentences like "store of value" are now the term used to describe Bitcoin. Very far from what the Bitcoin used to be.

I think there is a real possibility of a "death spiral of the blockchain". Fees will increase and it will become impossible to move coins on the blockchain besides the upper 10% of bitcoin holders. For traders on exchanges bitcoin seems fast; because no transactions are taking place. When you actually decide to move your bitcoins to a wallet you own you'll pay high fees... if not your transaction could take months to clear or never actually clear.

The fork that occurred on 1st August created Bitcoin Cash. This fork is much closer to what the Bitcoin was. Bitcoin Cash is this today. Removal of the segwit code (which hasn't solved anything), disabling of RBF (replace-by-fee) enabling 0-confirmation transactions again. A new DAA (difficulty adjustment algorithm). Finally increase the block size to 8MiB.

The Bitcoin has been crippled on purpose by Blockstream deep in the pockets of bankers and insurance companies. Blockstream is the main contributor to the Bitcoin development. Look at the sponsors; https://www.blockstream.com/about/#investors

Before the bankers, and their followers, got indirectly involved in Bitcoin development there never was any discussion about limiting the block size to 1MiB; in fact the opposite was discussed. See; https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/636410827969421312?lang=e.... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1314.msg15143#msg151.... https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/71h884/pieter_wuille_im....

Now all of this has led to a complete divide and clusterfuck of the community. It is an very ugly and toxic environment and is sad to look at. On top of that we now have thousands of alternative coins and blockchains.

The current version of bitcoin is crippled and completely unusable as a currency as is.

That's the Bitcoin Cash spin, which gets a fair amount of play given that one of its backers is wealthy enough to own or have investments in a lot of Bitcoin-related businesses and websites. The trouble is that it's not true.

Transaction replacement is so much a part of what Bitcoin was intended to be that Satoshi included a 32-bit field in every single transaction solely to provide ordering for replacements. (It was disabled only because the original design let people spam the network with unlimited replacements for free, which was later fixed by requiring replacements pay higher fees.) If you want to accept 0-conf transactions, you just have to check they're not marked replaceable - and the way you check is the same as in Satoshi's day.

What does break 0-conf transactions is the transaction malleability problem that Segwit was designed to fix. It's not safe to accept 0-conf transactions from people you trust entirely, or even from yourself, because third parties can invalidate them by malleating the transactions they depend on. This majorly broke outgoing payments from some Bitcoin Cash exchanges shortly after the fork and required manual intervention to fix. Satoshi's original code was even less able to cope with malleability; it got completely confused and wallet transactions tended to get permanently stuck.

Also, the new difficulty adjustment algorithm in the 1st of August fork was terribly broken. It had a design flaw that allowed miners to repeatedly drive difficulty down much lower than it should be in a relatively short period of time, then mine large numbers of blocks at the lower difficulty, creating new Bitcoin Cash at a much more rapid rate than intended. Not only that, but during the drive-down phase blocks took hours to mine, making the network almost unusable a large chunk of the time. That's why exchanges resorted to using change from unconfirmed withdrawals as inputs to subsequent withdrawals, causing chaos when someone exploited malleability. It's also why supporters were so keen on promoting 0-conf transactions as safe.

On, and the tweet you're pointing to as proof that there was no discussion of limiting the block size until the evil Blockstream got involved was written by one of the key employees and co-founders of Blockstream after he founded it. Meanwhile, the most ardently small-block of the core devs is Luke Jr who's very conspicuously refused to work for them in order to preserve his independence.

The paragraph about difficulty adjustment and transaction times is not really fair. It is true that the algorithm was broken which led to large block times, but since the network was not over capacity (as is the case with Bitcoin Core) your transaction would be included in the next block in <2 hours. This is comparable to the normal waiting time of Bitcoin.

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