I flagged the post. The title makes it appear that the blog post is unbiased, but reading through, it's clearly biased and trying to paint a rosy picture from the "classic" side.
To give some pointers:
1. Most bitcoiners still support Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core users are upgrading from 0.11 to 0.12 pretty fast that 0.12 has now more nodes than classic: https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/
2. The Classic nodes are mostly new and XT nodes: https://coin.dance/nodes Users are not really moving from bitcoin core.
I don't think there's an unbiased opinion anywhere. I've tried to figure out what this "classic vs core" debate is, but everyone seems pretty polarized.
Thanks for the summary. Seems like a very small difference, and I'm inclined to agree with Classic, so much so that I have no idea how people can be so divided on this.
Consider for a moment the quote that the person or persons known as Satoshi put into the genesis block; many people feel that bitcoin is not broken and not in any danger from the current block size, and do not favor having a process - any process - wherein sufficiently agitated groups can change the basic rules of the game should they garner enough popular support.
This is the "if it ain't broke" crowd. It comprises the majority of early bitcoiners. The notable exceptions are the large, VC-funded businesses that have a specific vested interest in bitcoin being used for widespread retail transactions, a task it is horrendously suited for, even with any arbitrary block size.
I'm not sure if you are being serious but all three of your points are bogus to some extent.
1. The link you provided clearly shows classic and core 0.12 tied for the number of nodes. Support for Classic is much higher than reflected in that chart because there is an ongoing DDOS against classic nodes. Just a few days ago there was over 2,000 Classic nodes. You are also leaving out all the nodes that are voting for a block size increase but aren't classic nodes like Bitcoin Unlimited, and some remaining XT nodes. Once you account for all these factors support for Classic or a block size increase in general is higher than core 0.12 by double or more.
2. Bitcoin Classic has only been out for a week or two of course classic nodes are 'new'. Further a lot of people running classic are doing it in parallel with core before making the switch. Several large high profile mining operations have said as much.
3. Renting hash power has always been a huge sector of the Bitcoin mining industry rented hash power is no more or less legitimate than any other kind. Classic has only been out for a couple weeks and we are just seeing large miners start to mine classic blocks starting this past week. The likely scenario is that they will switch to a 50/50 scenario to start before going 100% classic as a mitigation against DDOS attacks.
I think the question any observer should ask themselves is if core has such massive support as you and others claim then why do they resort to illegal tactics like DDOSing alternative node implementations and similar dirty tricks?
It's not clear. A reddit comment by one of the self proclaimed perpetrators says he was paid in order to DDOS nodes with classic in the user agent string. At the same time employees of Blockstream (aka: members of Bitcoin Core's dev team) deny that there are any DDOS attacks taking place[1]. It wouldn't surprise me if Blockstream was somehow behind this but no one is going to publicly admit to such an obviously illegal act.
Agree, all 3 of my Classic Nodes have been taken offline several times last night. Everyone BUT Bitcoin Core says this is happening and has evidence. The only ones denying the crime seem to be most guilty.
Maybe, but now they're flinging DDoS attacks at each other. This is not the regulation-free utopia everyone was sold on over the past few years.
Frankly, it reminds me of nothing more (to cite a video game in about as serious a way as I can) than Rapture in Bioshock -- something that seemed like a good idea only until the first meaningful disagreement, and then fell apart completely.
People were simply denied service at their previous, exceptionally-cheap rates they had become accustomed to paying.
This is like saying that you are subject to ddos when a concert you want to see sells out. You either fork over the premium on the market, or you don't participate.
Um, no. This isn't about block size exhaustion. According to the article (I didn't do any research of my own to corroborate) proponents of various sides are throwing real DDoS attacks at bitcoin nodes and/or web content friendly to the "others".
Yes, I am running three Bitcoin Classic node and all three have been attacked in the last 24 hours. The attack seems to be only uni-directional at this point, Core trying to shut down Classic nodes.
> This is not the regulation-free utopia everyone was sold on over the past few years.
Coercion in the Bitcoin community comes from free-market forces and not a state monopoly on violence, correct? What other definition of "regulation free utopia" would there be?
> We’d think we finally overcame the attack, to then only be hit again.
Here's an interesting difference with digital versus fiat currency. In one you find counterfeiters (if you can) and generally put them in prison, which raises the cost of that business. Is it even illegal to hack Bitcoin?
I bet you can count on one hand the amount of people ever prosecuted for DDOS.
And would a jury convict someone like this of anything other than a slap on the wrist? To people my parents age they think of it like kids playing pranks on each other.
You're question was if it was illegal. It pretty clearly is. People are prosecuted and convicted of computer crime on an increasingly frequent basis to think you would be able to get away with disruptive behavior like that in the long term because you think common people don't view it as real crime is naive. I also see no evidence this is true.
There's a question of intent though. If someone hits bitcoin with a DDOS with the intent of extracting money out of the system, I'm pretty sure that a jury would decide that this was stealing/fraud/etc. regardless of the method.
As someone who has been closely following the Bitcoin community since 2011, I am baffled by the toxicity of the blocksize debate and the resistance even against a moderate blocksize increase.
Bitcoin is not a system for those who favor changing the rules while the ball is in play.
Furthermore, the terms "war" and "toxic" seem tremendously overblown. It was just a fork of some software that hardly anybody, in the scheme of things, really uses.
Maybe we should get the neovim guys some of this press frenzy, eh?
That's funny about the debate. Both sides accuse the other of changing the rules. Large-blockers want to increase a parameter in the code. And small-blockers want to change Satoshi's implicit plan of increasing it as necessary.
Satoshi's assumptions in the early days about how easy it would be to make major changes to Bitcoin have very little relevance now that it's in widespread use. I think he was also planning to re-enable the disabled opcodes and various other things that are unlikely to ever happen because they'd cause a hard fork.
The opposite is the case. Satoshi's assumptions are relevant as they are the basis for the expectations people have. Departing from these visions is what upsets a lot of users, and rightly so.
Wait a minute! Are you telling me that after all this, the supply of bitcoins is, ultimately, like all fiat currency, controlled by the will of human beings?
I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't know the answer to that question, but if, as it sounds, someone or group could just change the blocksize, that, based on my simple understanding of math, seems to indicate an ability to alter the supply-demand curve for the commodity.
Block size has nothing to do with the supply of Bitcoin. It has to do with the transaction throughput of the network. No one has ever proposed a change the Bitcoin supply. The original Bitcoin release from Satoshi set the block size at 32MB (it's currently at 1MB) so increasing the block size to 2MB as is being proposed by classic would bring Bitcoin closer to it's original implementation.
Perhaps your comment is genuine but when people say stuff like "if we increase the block size next they will want to increase the money supply!" I feel like they are trying to hood wink less technically adept Bitcoin users into supporting their small block view.
After reading the article, I get that now, but is there a difference? If there are 1,000,000 bitcoins and you can only use 100,000 of them per day in transactions, then there are only 100,000 bitcoins in supply. I understand there may be more than one bitcoin per transaction, however, the fact remains. The supply of bitcoins, via the ability to use bitcoins to transfer value, is controlled by human beings.
The consequence is identical. Is it not? Perhaps, the consequence is the opposite? If there is no ability to transact with the currency, the currency has no value?
I'm seriously ignorant, you can tell, but I would like to understand. Perhaps my questions can help reveal the answer? If not only to me, then to the community? Is that too scary? The truth? Too scary?
No. The proof of work requirement constrains the money supply. It's a hard constraint. The block size constraint was never designed to constrain the money supply by constraining the number of transactions per day. It is adequately constrained by the proof of work.
No, the consequence of increasing the block size is not related in any way to the money supply of Bitcoin. That argument has no merit.
Bitcoin's value is limited by small block size though. A large part of the value of BTC is the value of the total transactions done through it. Limiting the number of transactions will severely limit the price in in the long term. BTC will probably lose out to an alt coin if the transaction back log due to the small block size continues and is not resolved sooner rather than later.
Thanks for clarifying that blocksize controls only transaction volume. I get that now. I didn't when I made my original post.
I think, still though I'm not articulating my point well enough. Fiat currency fails 100% of the time because it is controlled by humans. My understanding thus far was that bitcoin was controlled by physical limits in the real world, that of electricity, compute power, ultimately: Math.
Now, here, we are not talking about the supply of bitcoins themselves, but rather, the number of transactions with them that can occur.
That too is a factor in the value of a currency. It's not just the supply of currency that affects the value, but whether or not the person receiving that currency believes in its value, in this case, they must believe they can themselves use that currency to conduct future transactions.
It is this belief, in the case of bitcoin -- transactability for the lack of a better word, that is controlled by human beings -- and this is the same failing that has caused the collapse of every fiat currency in history prior to the US Dollar.
Now I'm learning that bitcoin has not solved this problem and I can't understand how bitcoin will survive this failure.
For a money to survive, it must be bound by physical laws beyond the reach of humans to change. It is human fallibility that is the culprit behind all fiat failures in history. We must invent a currency immune to the decisions of humans to solve the problem that has plagued fiat throughout history.
Gold is very dense. There are physical constraints making it difficult to transact large amounts of it.
Even though humans can constrain the transaction throughput of bitcoin, bitcoins or other crypto currency, will probably, eventually, converge on a solution where the possible tx rate is far larger than we can use. Tx rate limiting won't be a feature of any crypto coin that survives. You're just observing the effects of imperfect initial engineering. I wouldn't draw broad conclusions about the impossibility of successful cryptocurrencies based on this current limitation.
I'm not a gold bug, but technology can enable us to use micro or even nano-ounces of gold. We used to use half-pennies too. Canada doesn't even use pennies anymore.
Just store both olympic sized swimming pools of gold in the same place and put numbers in accounts that represent the weight owned by the person.
We typically think about ounces of gold, but we could go down to the atom if necessary, theoretically anyway.
The difference between government issued currencies (what you call fiat) and Bitcoin is that. Policies controlling Government currencies are decided by a small group of people generally well connected to banks and other wealthy interests (ie: a central bank with an appointed board of governors)
Bitcoin's governing rules on the other hand are enshrined in software and can only be changed through a democratic consensus process. It's a big step forward over fat cats deciding monetary policy in smoke filled back rooms.
It's not what I call fiat, it's the definition of fiat. I thought bitcoin was not a fiat currency, but in fact it is, because it's value is controlled by supply and demand based on the decisions of humans.
I am now convinced that bitcoin will, like all fiat currencies, inevitably fail. It doesn't matter if its value is controlled by one human or a democratic process controlled by humans, it is controlled by humans and humans are fallible, therefore bitcoin will fail.
There is no question of this. The only question is, When?
Democracy doesn't require consensus and it doesn't require coding. Bitcoin is not democratic, and it is definitely not a big step forward over monetary policy being decided by people who have been appointed by democratically elected officials (which is what we have now).
- There are a lot of exchanges that don't involve direct transactions on the blockchain (buying and selling BTC is nonlimited in terms of quantity or time).
- There are many altcoins, claiming to do certain things better such as proof of work or block size etc., however, the most convincing argument for using BTC seems to be the current market capitalization. As such, it is understandable that the Core wants to introduce the least amount of distraction possible, i.e. go against improvements whatsoever.
Can anybody please explain why increasing block size would mean more centralization?
AFAIK, blocksize is about the size of each transaction (think "packet") while computing bitcoins. The bigger the size, the more data can be stored here.
For example, you could have a bot monitor blockchain data and see that when someone sent payment to your NewShoeStore address, parse the metadata in the block to get their size, color, brand etc.
Some group could not just change the blocksize. Instead, what can happen is that someone publishes a piece of software implementing a protocol - call this Bitcoin 2.0 - that can process all previous blocks correctly, but relaxes the rules for future blocks. People can then choose whether or not to run this piece of software.
However, Bitcoin is only useful because of the consensus on what the protocol is - so in practice, people must generally run whatever everyone else is running. At the moment, there's a general consensus that everyone should be running software implementing the same protocol as the latest version of the Bitcoin software implemented by a certain group of people. That could, theoretically, change if the majority of the community doesn't like some change to the protocol, forcing the dissenting minority to follow along with them.
Only miners get a vote, because they validate all blocks.
The design of Bitcoin is such that what a majority of the miners want, happens. The two top miners have just over 50% of the mining power, and the top four pretty much do most of the mining. The top four or five miners are all companies in China. They've issued joint statements in the past, and what they say, goes.
The "core developers" and the Bitcoin Foundation don't matter, although they sometimes act like they do.
> Only miners get a vote, because they validate all blocks.
No, everyone validates all blocks. (Or at least they theoretically should.) Otherwise you could get miners lying about whether they've validated a block. Changing the Bitcoin protocol is essentially creating an altcoin - the only difference is that the money distribution is "pre-seeded" with everything that's happened on the Bitcoin network so far. If all users move along, the altcoin succeeds and the "original" Bitcoin fails.
If everyone except the current miners decided to follow new rules, the miners would be forced to follow - there's not much point mining a currency which nobody will accept in exchange for goods, services or other currency.
"altcoin" is a highly misleading term for that. That term already means "a cryptocurrency unrelated to bitcoin", typically having a different genesis block, subsequently an entirely different chain, and often further differences.
We already have a term exactly for what you're talking about: a hard-fork (or just a fork if you like).
On either side of the fork is bitcoin, not the "original" bitcoin and an "altcoin".
You're also incorrect in other ways. In the case of most forks, you fork via voting by "x% of the last 1000 blocks were mined by this implementation". Because of that, if everyone except the current miners use the alternate implementation, the new "fork" will never activate.
That's because forks are not altcoins, but typically run on the same exact chain, behave compatibly with each other (prior to activation), and wait for consensus in mined blocks (to activate).
That method of voting does mean that only miners get a vote. It's not because they validate all blocks, but rather because mining a block is the same as voting in basically all fork-consensus-algorithms so far.
You're conflating two fundamentally different kinds of forks. The ones activated through voting were soft forks, where old nodes still accepted all blocks mined by the new ones, and the voting was to ensure that enough miners would enforce the new rules to overtake any chains created by the old nodes and bring everyone back onto the same chain - that is, it was necessary to ensure there wasn't a permanent fork. This simply doesn't apply to hard forks because by definition, the old nodes will not accept the newer fork no matter how long it grows. Calling it "voting" is kind of a misnomer - it's a purely technical measure to make sure soft forks don't break Bitcoin when they activate.
"voting" is a technical concept used in many distributed systems; even if it's a purely technical concept that term is correct.
Voting also applies in hard-forks. Case-in-point, XT/classic both had activation thresholds and voting.
Splitting the chain is not really useful unless you have a large majority with you for both technical and non-technical reasons, and so you vote.
Soft-forks and hard-forks aren't so different in the happy-case. They both extend the same original chain, they both have concerns about two competing chains existing and wish to avoid that, they both change the validation layer in some way (though to lesser and greater extents).
> On either side of the fork is bitcoin, not the "original" bitcoin and an "altcoin".
The point is that on one side you have the original protocol in use, and on the other side you have a different protocol in use. Both of them are called Bitcoin and use the same database up to the point of the fork, but they're not the same protocol in much the same way that Dogecoin is not the same protocol as Bitcoin - someone who attempts to use the pre-fork protocol will not be able to achieve consensus with someone attempting to use the post-fork protocol.
> In the case of most forks, you fork via voting by "x% of the last 1000 blocks were mined by this implementation".
That is not the only way to implement a fork. As I say, you can fork the chain simply by convincing enough users to use your fork - there's no hard requirement for any miner-level voting to be done at all.
The bitcoin protocol is doing whatever the most popular bitcoin client does. After a fork it's the same.
> but they're not the same protocol in much the same way that Dogecoin is not the same protocol as Bitcoin
What you're arguing is essentially that "EMCA6 is not javascript because it supports features the previous javascript didn't, much the same as ruby does".
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. They're the same cryptocurrency both before and after the fork. Dogecoin is not. Can you see how that term is not a good term when we have a better one?
Also "achieve consensus" there is absolutely incorrect. The correct term is "will have to update their software, else they will be incompatible". Software updates are normal, and we don't demand that each program rename itself every time it updates.
> That is not the only way to implement a fork
That's the only way anyone's trying to fork though. Yes, gavin said he'd just do a hard-cut over, but he didn't and it'd be a bad idea.
Forking the chain is only useful if the economic majority and miners come along, else your chain will be less secure and less useful (also, double spending problems etc).
> EMCA6 is not javascript because it supports features the previous javascript didn't, much the same as ruby does
Or, rather, ECMAScript 6 is not ECMAScript 5 because you can write code in the former that doesn't work in the latter, and probably vice versa on edge cases. They are separate languages. If you continue writing in ECMAScript 5, you're missing out on all the nice ECMAScript 6 libraries.
But with Bitcoin it's even worse - if you continue using pre-fork Bitcoin, you cannot reach consensus and thus transact with people using post-fork Bitcoin. They're not precisely the same protocol, by definition - they bare the same name but they're not the same protocol, they are different protocols and for the fork to win, the first protocol dies. The name is irrelevant to this.
Similarly, HTTP 2.0 isn't the same as HTTP 1.1, and claiming one is equivalent to the other is nonsense, even if they bare the same name.
I'd also argue that if the amount of hash power put into the network can be derived from the value of the network (trivially provable), the result of the economic majority choosing to adhere to different rules is that either the miners will follow or new miners will pop up quickly as there's a demand for them.
Yeah, we obviously agree that two different protocols are different protocols.
I'm not saying pre-fork and post-fork bitcoin are equivalent, or the same protocol version. That's a strawman. the term "Bitcoin" is obviously different from "ECMAScript 5/6" and "HTTP 1.1/2.0" in that it's not a version of a protocol/standard. Bitcoin is a term for the overarching thing, just like "Javascript" and "HTTP" are overarching terms for those, encompassing multiple standards etc.
Again, "altcoin" already has a term unrelated to protocol. "altcoin" means a cryptocurrency that is not closely related to bitcoin.
You're talking strictly about protocols and versions there (which, btw, bitcoin should just version its protocols), but that's not what "Bitcoin" means to the common man.
You're making my argument for me by comparing "HTTP 2.0 isn't HTTP 1.1", but they're both HTTP, not gopher or ftp.
With 51% of the hashing power you can asymptotically do whatever you want with the recent transactions. Including erasing some of them and so allowing double spending, or blocking all the transactions. It's much easier if you have more than the 51%.
With the 70% you can do more interesting stuff, like using a 35% to mine in the fork/altcoin you like and use the other 35% to block the other fork/altcoin so no one can make transactions in it.
With the 90% you can play games, like mining during the day as usual, and do fancy stuff at night. From 0am to 4am, keep a 10% as protection against attacks, and use the other 80% to mine empty blocks in the other chain, starting from the last block you mined last night. So in 4 hours with a 8x hashing power is enough to catch up with the other chain and then when they get up in the morning they will see all their transactions reverted.
Assuming that the amount of hash power put into a blockchain is something that can more-or-less be derived from the value of that blockchain, the result of a fork with less hash power than it "should" have is that it will attract more miners until it has the same amount as the network pre-fork.
It makes absolutely no difference by how much the block size is increased, it would always be an incompatible fork of the network, and that's contentious. That making a "small" change is some kind of compromomise is a lie told by one side.
The 2013 hard fork had a couple of advantages over anything proposed since. Firstly, the only change it made was to modify the block acceptance rules to be what everyone had thought they were all along, so it was completely uncontentious. Secondly, the unintended block size limit it removed was an artifact of the DB library that Bitcoin used and could not be guaranteed to be the same on all clients - the choice was to hard fork in a controlled manner now, or risk a spontaneous and unplanned hard fork later. Even though technically speaking it would've been easy to bump the 1MB block limit at the same time, no-one considered it because it would've been a recipe for chaos.
If you look below the surface at what is going on it becomes pretty clear. Essentially one well funded Bitcoin company, Blockstream, has managed to hire a majority of the current top Bitcoin Core contributors. They also control discussion on a handful of the historically important forums for discussing Bitcoin and censor any comments critical of Core or supporting a blocksize increase. Blockstream has a business plan that revolves around providing private blockchain services. For whatever reason they feel like in order to be successful they need to limit Bitcoin's block size so that it is very expensive and inconvenient to use Bitcoin. They have 55 million in funding and probably feel like they have a lot at stake. Hence they are playing very dirty to try and kill Bitcoin's first mover advantage so they can essentially privatize Bitcoin under their corporate banner.
It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.
That's... not what the consensus seems to be. How is it that those "historically important forums" have been talking about block size increases for so long if they are being "censored" on this topic....? Maybe they aren't being censored at all despite the accusations. This could be trivially verified by searching "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin block size XT classic". Perhaps if you did as much digging as you claim, you would find that the censorship accusations are mostly false. Also, theymos isn't a Blockstream employee, great job digging though....
(BTW, I am a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list.)
Are you really claiming that there hasn't been any censorship in the Bitcoin subreddit? If I remember correctly, even gmaxwell has himself said in Reddit that he has found Theymos' censorship excessive.
They will remove ANY non-negative post dealing with non-Blockstream (Core) Bitcoin or any other internet currency. This group is despicable that they are trying to take over like this.
If you follow any of the posts in /r/btc you will find people frequently posting before and after screen shots of their censored posts advocating for a block size increase or an alternative node implementation such as classic.
There was also a post talking about how Theymos went to great lengths to modify the CSS for the /r/bitcoin sub in order to reorder the comment threads and make it appear as if posts from certain users are highly up voted when they are in fact heavily down voted.
I'm aware that Theymos isn't a direct employee for Blockstream. That doesn't mean he isn't receiving financial compensation or some sort of other quid pro quo for supporting the Blockstream agenda.
"This could be trivially verified by searching "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin block size XT classic"
I'm sure that will return a lot of results of people trashing any increase in blocksize and saying negative things about alternative node implementations those kinds of comments are encouraged and promoted.
Edit: since you are a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list you are probably also aware that there is censorship going on in that forum as well...
I took the simple pragmatic approach: I used the tiny amount of Bitcoin I had for purchases, specifically Namecheap renewals/extensions.
Does it seem to anyone else that among the defining characteristics of people heavily involved in Bitcoin are "poor social skills" and "does not work well with others?"
I'm strongly reminded of "I’m a Former Green Beret and Here’s How I Would Bring Down Bitcoin"[1] (which I see is so popular it was just re-posted to HN after a week). Only, instead of "bring down," the objective is control; much more money to be made that way, I suppose.
I suspect that Bitcoin's lasting value, at this point, will be as an object lesson in what happens to decentralized, open-source projects (particularly those that have placed themselves "beyond regulation") once they start to have direct, and significant, monetary value. I don't think that it will teach libertarians to love strong government, but perhaps it make the views of such crowds, overall, more nuanced and less absolutist.
74 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 59.3 ms ] threadTo give some pointers:
1. Most bitcoiners still support Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core users are upgrading from 0.11 to 0.12 pretty fast that 0.12 has now more nodes than classic: https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/
2. The Classic nodes are mostly new and XT nodes: https://coin.dance/nodes Users are not really moving from bitcoin core.
3. Classic has only 3% of hash power. They are even trying to rent hashing power to generate classic blocks: http://nodecounter.com/mining_donation_fund.php
Classic: Implement 2MB blocks ASAP
This is the "if it ain't broke" crowd. It comprises the majority of early bitcoiners. The notable exceptions are the large, VC-funded businesses that have a specific vested interest in bitcoin being used for widespread retail transactions, a task it is horrendously suited for, even with any arbitrary block size.
1. The link you provided clearly shows classic and core 0.12 tied for the number of nodes. Support for Classic is much higher than reflected in that chart because there is an ongoing DDOS against classic nodes. Just a few days ago there was over 2,000 Classic nodes. You are also leaving out all the nodes that are voting for a block size increase but aren't classic nodes like Bitcoin Unlimited, and some remaining XT nodes. Once you account for all these factors support for Classic or a block size increase in general is higher than core 0.12 by double or more.
2. Bitcoin Classic has only been out for a week or two of course classic nodes are 'new'. Further a lot of people running classic are doing it in parallel with core before making the switch. Several large high profile mining operations have said as much.
3. Renting hash power has always been a huge sector of the Bitcoin mining industry rented hash power is no more or less legitimate than any other kind. Classic has only been out for a couple weeks and we are just seeing large miners start to mine classic blocks starting this past week. The likely scenario is that they will switch to a 50/50 scenario to start before going 100% classic as a mitigation against DDOS attacks.
I think the question any observer should ask themselves is if core has such massive support as you and others claim then why do they resort to illegal tactics like DDOSing alternative node implementations and similar dirty tricks?
Who is the "they" here? Mining operations that are in support of core? Core developers that oppose the change?
[0]http://www.blockcy.com/bitcoin-classic-nodes-under-ddos-atta... [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4835fp/blockstreamgmax...
Frankly, it reminds me of nothing more (to cite a video game in about as serious a way as I can) than Rapture in Bioshock -- something that seemed like a good idea only until the first meaningful disagreement, and then fell apart completely.
People were simply denied service at their previous, exceptionally-cheap rates they had become accustomed to paying.
This is like saying that you are subject to ddos when a concert you want to see sells out. You either fork over the premium on the market, or you don't participate.
Coercion in the Bitcoin community comes from free-market forces and not a state monopoly on violence, correct? What other definition of "regulation free utopia" would there be?
Here's an interesting difference with digital versus fiat currency. In one you find counterfeiters (if you can) and generally put them in prison, which raises the cost of that business. Is it even illegal to hack Bitcoin?
And would a jury convict someone like this of anything other than a slap on the wrist? To people my parents age they think of it like kids playing pranks on each other.
Oh dear. Have many people been killed?
Furthermore, the terms "war" and "toxic" seem tremendously overblown. It was just a fork of some software that hardly anybody, in the scheme of things, really uses.
Maybe we should get the neovim guys some of this press frenzy, eh?
I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't know the answer to that question, but if, as it sounds, someone or group could just change the blocksize, that, based on my simple understanding of math, seems to indicate an ability to alter the supply-demand curve for the commodity.
Perhaps your comment is genuine but when people say stuff like "if we increase the block size next they will want to increase the money supply!" I feel like they are trying to hood wink less technically adept Bitcoin users into supporting their small block view.
The consequence is identical. Is it not? Perhaps, the consequence is the opposite? If there is no ability to transact with the currency, the currency has no value?
I'm seriously ignorant, you can tell, but I would like to understand. Perhaps my questions can help reveal the answer? If not only to me, then to the community? Is that too scary? The truth? Too scary?
Bitcoin's value is limited by small block size though. A large part of the value of BTC is the value of the total transactions done through it. Limiting the number of transactions will severely limit the price in in the long term. BTC will probably lose out to an alt coin if the transaction back log due to the small block size continues and is not resolved sooner rather than later.
I think, still though I'm not articulating my point well enough. Fiat currency fails 100% of the time because it is controlled by humans. My understanding thus far was that bitcoin was controlled by physical limits in the real world, that of electricity, compute power, ultimately: Math.
Now, here, we are not talking about the supply of bitcoins themselves, but rather, the number of transactions with them that can occur.
That too is a factor in the value of a currency. It's not just the supply of currency that affects the value, but whether or not the person receiving that currency believes in its value, in this case, they must believe they can themselves use that currency to conduct future transactions.
It is this belief, in the case of bitcoin -- transactability for the lack of a better word, that is controlled by human beings -- and this is the same failing that has caused the collapse of every fiat currency in history prior to the US Dollar.
Now I'm learning that bitcoin has not solved this problem and I can't understand how bitcoin will survive this failure.
For a money to survive, it must be bound by physical laws beyond the reach of humans to change. It is human fallibility that is the culprit behind all fiat failures in history. We must invent a currency immune to the decisions of humans to solve the problem that has plagued fiat throughout history.
Even though humans can constrain the transaction throughput of bitcoin, bitcoins or other crypto currency, will probably, eventually, converge on a solution where the possible tx rate is far larger than we can use. Tx rate limiting won't be a feature of any crypto coin that survives. You're just observing the effects of imperfect initial engineering. I wouldn't draw broad conclusions about the impossibility of successful cryptocurrencies based on this current limitation.
Just store both olympic sized swimming pools of gold in the same place and put numbers in accounts that represent the weight owned by the person.
We typically think about ounces of gold, but we could go down to the atom if necessary, theoretically anyway.
Bitcoin's governing rules on the other hand are enshrined in software and can only be changed through a democratic consensus process. It's a big step forward over fat cats deciding monetary policy in smoke filled back rooms.
I am now convinced that bitcoin will, like all fiat currencies, inevitably fail. It doesn't matter if its value is controlled by one human or a democratic process controlled by humans, it is controlled by humans and humans are fallible, therefore bitcoin will fail.
There is no question of this. The only question is, When?
- There are a lot of exchanges that don't involve direct transactions on the blockchain (buying and selling BTC is nonlimited in terms of quantity or time).
- There are many altcoins, claiming to do certain things better such as proof of work or block size etc., however, the most convincing argument for using BTC seems to be the current market capitalization. As such, it is understandable that the Core wants to introduce the least amount of distraction possible, i.e. go against improvements whatsoever.
Can anybody please explain why increasing block size would mean more centralization?
For example, you could have a bot monitor blockchain data and see that when someone sent payment to your NewShoeStore address, parse the metadata in the block to get their size, color, brand etc.
However, Bitcoin is only useful because of the consensus on what the protocol is - so in practice, people must generally run whatever everyone else is running. At the moment, there's a general consensus that everyone should be running software implementing the same protocol as the latest version of the Bitcoin software implemented by a certain group of people. That could, theoretically, change if the majority of the community doesn't like some change to the protocol, forcing the dissenting minority to follow along with them.
The "core developers" and the Bitcoin Foundation don't matter, although they sometimes act like they do.
No, everyone validates all blocks. (Or at least they theoretically should.) Otherwise you could get miners lying about whether they've validated a block. Changing the Bitcoin protocol is essentially creating an altcoin - the only difference is that the money distribution is "pre-seeded" with everything that's happened on the Bitcoin network so far. If all users move along, the altcoin succeeds and the "original" Bitcoin fails.
If everyone except the current miners decided to follow new rules, the miners would be forced to follow - there's not much point mining a currency which nobody will accept in exchange for goods, services or other currency.
We already have a term exactly for what you're talking about: a hard-fork (or just a fork if you like).
On either side of the fork is bitcoin, not the "original" bitcoin and an "altcoin".
You're also incorrect in other ways. In the case of most forks, you fork via voting by "x% of the last 1000 blocks were mined by this implementation". Because of that, if everyone except the current miners use the alternate implementation, the new "fork" will never activate.
That's because forks are not altcoins, but typically run on the same exact chain, behave compatibly with each other (prior to activation), and wait for consensus in mined blocks (to activate).
That method of voting does mean that only miners get a vote. It's not because they validate all blocks, but rather because mining a block is the same as voting in basically all fork-consensus-algorithms so far.
Voting also applies in hard-forks. Case-in-point, XT/classic both had activation thresholds and voting.
Splitting the chain is not really useful unless you have a large majority with you for both technical and non-technical reasons, and so you vote.
Soft-forks and hard-forks aren't so different in the happy-case. They both extend the same original chain, they both have concerns about two competing chains existing and wish to avoid that, they both change the validation layer in some way (though to lesser and greater extents).
The point is that on one side you have the original protocol in use, and on the other side you have a different protocol in use. Both of them are called Bitcoin and use the same database up to the point of the fork, but they're not the same protocol in much the same way that Dogecoin is not the same protocol as Bitcoin - someone who attempts to use the pre-fork protocol will not be able to achieve consensus with someone attempting to use the post-fork protocol.
> In the case of most forks, you fork via voting by "x% of the last 1000 blocks were mined by this implementation".
That is not the only way to implement a fork. As I say, you can fork the chain simply by convincing enough users to use your fork - there's no hard requirement for any miner-level voting to be done at all.
> but they're not the same protocol in much the same way that Dogecoin is not the same protocol as Bitcoin
What you're arguing is essentially that "EMCA6 is not javascript because it supports features the previous javascript didn't, much the same as ruby does".
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. They're the same cryptocurrency both before and after the fork. Dogecoin is not. Can you see how that term is not a good term when we have a better one?
Also "achieve consensus" there is absolutely incorrect. The correct term is "will have to update their software, else they will be incompatible". Software updates are normal, and we don't demand that each program rename itself every time it updates.
> That is not the only way to implement a fork
That's the only way anyone's trying to fork though. Yes, gavin said he'd just do a hard-cut over, but he didn't and it'd be a bad idea.
Forking the chain is only useful if the economic majority and miners come along, else your chain will be less secure and less useful (also, double spending problems etc).
Or, rather, ECMAScript 6 is not ECMAScript 5 because you can write code in the former that doesn't work in the latter, and probably vice versa on edge cases. They are separate languages. If you continue writing in ECMAScript 5, you're missing out on all the nice ECMAScript 6 libraries.
But with Bitcoin it's even worse - if you continue using pre-fork Bitcoin, you cannot reach consensus and thus transact with people using post-fork Bitcoin. They're not precisely the same protocol, by definition - they bare the same name but they're not the same protocol, they are different protocols and for the fork to win, the first protocol dies. The name is irrelevant to this.
Similarly, HTTP 2.0 isn't the same as HTTP 1.1, and claiming one is equivalent to the other is nonsense, even if they bare the same name.
I'd also argue that if the amount of hash power put into the network can be derived from the value of the network (trivially provable), the result of the economic majority choosing to adhere to different rules is that either the miners will follow or new miners will pop up quickly as there's a demand for them.
I'm not saying pre-fork and post-fork bitcoin are equivalent, or the same protocol version. That's a strawman. the term "Bitcoin" is obviously different from "ECMAScript 5/6" and "HTTP 1.1/2.0" in that it's not a version of a protocol/standard. Bitcoin is a term for the overarching thing, just like "Javascript" and "HTTP" are overarching terms for those, encompassing multiple standards etc.
Again, "altcoin" already has a term unrelated to protocol. "altcoin" means a cryptocurrency that is not closely related to bitcoin.
You're talking strictly about protocols and versions there (which, btw, bitcoin should just version its protocols), but that's not what "Bitcoin" means to the common man.
You're making my argument for me by comparing "HTTP 2.0 isn't HTTP 1.1", but they're both HTTP, not gopher or ftp.
With the 70% you can do more interesting stuff, like using a 35% to mine in the fork/altcoin you like and use the other 35% to block the other fork/altcoin so no one can make transactions in it.
With the 90% you can play games, like mining during the day as usual, and do fancy stuff at night. From 0am to 4am, keep a 10% as protection against attacks, and use the other 80% to mine empty blocks in the other chain, starting from the last block you mined last night. So in 4 hours with a 8x hashing power is enough to catch up with the other chain and then when they get up in the morning they will see all their transactions reverted.
A fork with little hash power is very insecure.
It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.
(BTW, I am a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list.)
There was also a post talking about how Theymos went to great lengths to modify the CSS for the /r/bitcoin sub in order to reorder the comment threads and make it appear as if posts from certain users are highly up voted when they are in fact heavily down voted.
I'm aware that Theymos isn't a direct employee for Blockstream. That doesn't mean he isn't receiving financial compensation or some sort of other quid pro quo for supporting the Blockstream agenda.
"This could be trivially verified by searching "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin block size XT classic"
I'm sure that will return a lot of results of people trashing any increase in blocksize and saying negative things about alternative node implementations those kinds of comments are encouraged and promoted.
Edit: since you are a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list you are probably also aware that there is censorship going on in that forum as well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44nzxt/continued_censo...
Blockchain and other advancements aside for many people this has, in fact, always been about money.
Does it seem to anyone else that among the defining characteristics of people heavily involved in Bitcoin are "poor social skills" and "does not work well with others?"
This is only an issue because the network is growing at a rapid rate, aka a "good problem" to have.
I suspect that Bitcoin's lasting value, at this point, will be as an object lesson in what happens to decentralized, open-source projects (particularly those that have placed themselves "beyond regulation") once they start to have direct, and significant, monetary value. I don't think that it will teach libertarians to love strong government, but perhaps it make the views of such crowds, overall, more nuanced and less absolutist.
-- [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11191416