Bitcoin Forum

Where's the effort to compromise? Sorry, but capacity is getting too high. A revamp of the HK agreement would be nice, but now I'm even leaning toward segwit+2mb proposal since core/blockstream aren't willing to budge or talk (AFAIK), or perhaps even thinking blocksize increase sans Segwit is the best way to go. This impasse is ridiculous and unnecessary. I used to think small blocks were better but after doing plenty of research I found out that the risks are way overstated. Imagine we could have bitcoin with big blocks and soon with RSK and sidechains Bitcoin will be incredible.

SegWit is the compromise. It increases the block size to 4MB, for no other reason than that people kept asking for it. But it seems nobody actually wants the block size increase after all, and the big-blockers were all full of hot air. No matter. If SegWit fails to gain support in its current form, it can always be re-proposed without the controversial block size increase.

I couldn't agree more, segwit + 2mb would effectively quadruple the blocksize and fix the problems we are having now for the foreseeable future. A doubling of the block size isn't going to ruin bitcoin anymore than blocks from 500kb to 1mb would. I understand people are afraid of 8 mb or higher blocksizes but 2 mb is an acceptable compromise while further negotiations for more permanent solutions can be found.

Honestly tired of this rhetoric. It's really just playing dumb when you know what is meant by blocksize increase. The accusation is that the Blockstream/Core side is trying to constrain the blocksize to 1mb forever. This is a real concern, and people want to see it lifted, and there's no reason not to. That is the fairest compromise I have ever heard for activating segwit. Pro Segwit side is being unreasonable by refusing this.

opposite is true...except for blockstream and bitfury and dcg...no one really wants segwit.

Well, segwit IS a smarter way of writing the transactions on a chain.  Technically, bitcoin's transactions are horribly designed, and do a lot of stupid things.  Segwit arranges that up to some point.  It is a better digital format of the information.  If you look at the technical improvements that Segwit brings over the design flaws in the original bitcoin transactions, I think one can only be in favour of the new format.

However I think the discussion is not about this.  I think the discussion is about the religious attitude against hard forks.  If one "gives in" to that attitude now, then we are essentially stuck *for ever* with the 1 MB block size + witness data.  For the moment, that could bring relief.  But maybe one day, the "equivalent 4 MB" will be again a limit.  And then, a hard fork WILL be needed.  Moreover, Segwit has been made more complicated as needed, just to *be* a soft fork.  It would have been cleaner as a hard fork.

There's no difference on the conceptual side between a hard fork and a soft fork: BOTH ARE MODIFICATIONS OF THE PROTOCOL.   A soft fork is not "softer" than a "hard fork".   The only difference resides in the "fighting block chain dynamics" when miners disagree.  Then a soft fork has much more power to just kill the opponent: a good majority is sufficient to suffocate the opponent ; while hard forks become truly independent coins.   In other words, hard forks are free choice elements, soft forks are "winner takes all" elements.   But both of them make a different protocol.

One can have two conceptions of crypto: one is "immutability".  A coin has an immutable protocol, which is a Nash equilibrium because of decentralization.   That coin is what it is, and will live with its protocol for ever.   Or the other is "dev-centralized evolving piece of software".   Then hard forks are not a problem: the devs centrally decide (eventually with one or other voting mechanism).

The point is that bitcoin's economic dynamics is such, that at a certain point, it will need scarcity of transactions, to make transactions expensive, because they have to pay for the mining PoW which won't be paid for any more because of goldbugonomics (no tail emission).  And for the moment, this was (accidentally) provided for with a hard limit on the number of transactions.  If one thinks one should allow bitcoin to have more transactions in one way or another, in the end, a hard fork will be needed to modify this.  

This has, in fact, nothing to do with the technical improvement of writing down the data on a binary record, which is segwit.

Hard forks are perfectly compatible with a decentralized conception of crypto.  Any entity decides to make a new coin, forking off from an existing coin, in the same way that any entity can start a new crypto currency from scratch with a new genesis block.  The only difference between a hard fork and a new genesis block is that one takes over the existing balances of the coin one forks off from.  Hard forks don't need collusion. 

Soft forks are an anti-decentralisation element, because they need a 51% collusion to succeed.

The developers and the people behind them do not care what we think. They have their own hidden agendas and if our goals with Bitcoin goes along with their agenda, it would just be a bonus for them. I have been reading endless posts about people's opinion on this matter and cannot grasp, why people might think that our opinion would matter to greedy and power hungry groups with hidden agendas. ^grrrrrrr^

Maybe segwit is a compromise, but it is the best way to make bitcoin even faster. How to increase the number of blocks but still ensure the security of bitcoin? I think segwit is the only way.

If we cant have segwit we cannot have Bitcoin unlimited also. The only choice left for consensus is the activation of segwit. Bitcoin can no longer last long having thousands of transactions pending at the mempool. If there will be no consensus and segwit will not be activated the big companies that are planning to enter the market will surely back-out. Hence we need to activate the scaled segwit and we need the consensus the sooner the better.

Except it's not segwit vs unlimited. It's segwit vs segwit with 2mb blocks. The big block side has compromised, the segwit side has not.

I'm not the one playing dumb. "Blocksize increase" means the maximum size of blocks is to be increased. SegWit increases the maximum size of blocks from 1MB to 4MB. It's not "equivalent" to 4MB, it is 4MB. Metric megabytes, in case there's any confusion. 4 million bytes, that is, 32 million bits. That's four times as much data to transfer and store forever in the blockchain, and it's understandable that not many people want to spare the bandwidth and disk space for it. That's why it was so controversial when it was first introduced.

Which is false, of course. Of all the Core devs, I think only Luke-jr is in favour of keeping blocks small. I've always been in favour of larger blocks myself, but I have to concede that Luke does have a point. Not everyone can handle bigger blocks, and the increase to 4MB may be problematic. I'm willing to support 1MB SegWit if it turns out nobody wants 4MB blocks after all.

That rhetoric...you just did it again.

Opinions matters. If no one does then greed and evil will have no barriers and a licence to do what they what.

Only those with limited closed mind could use the word only. Codings can do many ways.

Smarter doesn't always mean better. If the data goes up due to CT, then more storage is needed per transaction.

In what way?

Codswallop. 4mb every 10 minutes is nothing. I DL whole series of TV programmes that has more data than the blockchain itself. Stop worrying about poor people with 56k bandwith. One can not prevent evolution, improvement and societal advancements due to some poor people. Otherwise nothing will ever get done. If people can't handle bigger blocks then they don't have to partake in running a full node. They can use pruned version of the blockchain. Millions will have the means to run full nodes, so it isn't a problem.

segwit does not give 4mb (4x) capacity increase!!!
if..  if.. again ill emphasise this IF every single transaction inside a base block was a segwit funded keypair.. the best expectation is around 2.1mb

with all the malicious spammers,
the fact there are 46m+ native/legacy outputs,
the fact that the keypairs wont even be available right at the day of segwit activation.
the fact that not everyone wants to waste an average of $3 in fee's just to get it into a segwit keypair.
the fact that if everyone did want to do it the mempool bloat would grow rapidly.
... you will not see a block with 100% segwit utility.

just like not everyone wants to do lean transactions to help out the community to get 7tx/s for the last 8 years

so i emphasise this you wont even get 2x capacity growth..

please dont read the reddit scripted utopian fud and start running actual scenarios.. not utopian scenarios but rational realistic scenarios. and you will see segwit is a empty gesture of half promises.

people that want to maliciously spam/quadratic a block, will stick with native keypairs. so dont expect segwit to be the miracle because it does not stop native keypair functionality.

Exactly. Besides, only miners really matter, and miners are spending ungodly amounts of money already, the cost of storage isn't even registering.

Well, I already wrote a few posts about how bitcoin transactions are wasting space *uselessly* and make verification *uselessly* complicated.

I will quickly indicate what is wrong if one wanted to win room, without modifying anything to the principles, apart maybe one.

A) we keep bitcoin's rules exactly as they are:
Aa) there is no need to publish the public key.   The public key can be derived from the signature and the message (ok, very few signatures could fail, in that case, one should have foreseen it, and modify the nonce of the signature, but it is one chance in 10^36 or something if I remember well).  That's 256 (and noncompressed, 512) useless bits.
Ab) the output transaction hash (256 bits) is much, much too long.   The number of the output, on 32 bits, (4 billion outputs !!) is too long too.  Note that indicating the transaction hash is not really an element of security, it is a way to help find the right output.

But this brings us to what would have been a very good rule in bitcoin:

-> don't allow address re-usage.   This could have been in the protocol !

B) if that applies, then there is not even any need to specify any output transaction hash: 256 + 32 bits won again !  Because there's only one single output in the whole block chain that has this single input address (found by the hash of the public key, found by looking at the signature).

Moreover, forcing single-address usage would improve the cryptographic security somewhat, because the public key would never be exposed before it was useless, and many other things would be better.  There would not be any notion of transaction malleability either.

So we would only need a signature as an input.  Nothing else.  No referred-to previous transaction and transaction output, nor any public key.  And the search would be easier (just a single address).

We would win more than half of the room of an input/output pair that way, if we consider compressed keys, and even almost a factor of 3 of the uncompressed case.

This is often said, but it's not true.


The mempool wouldn't exist if unconfirmed transactions didn't serve a useful purpose; it's all about setting the price of transactions per byte. Unconfirmed transactions are dropped from the mempool in a rolling 1 week window, but it's really easy to fill up the mempool while the window is still open.

There's nothing anyone can do to stop the mempool filling up in an unsustainable way, all you need is just 1 Bitcoin output, and you can send the same output again and again and again from one address to the next ad infinitum, totally spamming the mempool. Some of the spam attacks literally were exactly that, the same BTC sent in a massive chain of thousands of unconfirmed transactions (way to make it obvious)

lol face palm ... really??

pseudocode:
if parent.output = unconfirmed then
      child.tx = drop from mempool
end if

i know no one wants to do that because that then ruins the CPFP features.. but when CPFP can also be used maliciously for other attacks we shouldnt really have that stuff in there.

Thought this problem has been settled already & September is the date to activate the segwit thing?
Please you all should consider the HUGH impression this is leaving on new Crypto users. Many would likely never comeback after their first sad experience.  
If this will take lots of money to fix am ready to donate half of what I have earned so far from Crypto.

This shld be time for big sacrifice not the time to make money or be greedy

The HK agreement was to activate segwit, then a hard fork to 2MB later on, considering that Core CAN NOT guarantee a hard fork because guess what, Core doesn't control bitcoin so it CAN NOT guarantee a HF (it depends on global community consensus).

It's the miners that broke the agreement by not supporting segwit, specially bitmain because segwit kills covert ASICBOOST (so now it's clear why they don't want a softfork for segwit).

They will either activate it or we users will with UASF.

Except Core is unwilling to compromise. It must be said...they are single handedly the ones responsible for bitcoins lack of scalability.

Complete lies. If Core supported a 2mb hardfork we would have segwit and larger blocks. What Core did was sign the agreement knowing ahead of time that they would try to pawn off Segwit as 2mb. When people saw right through this, those Core devs that signed pulled out and turned back to strangling scaling if they don't get their way. It's beyond ridiculous to say "our way or no way" in a decentralized system. Core will compromise or get forked out to their own blockstream coin.

None of this makes any sense!  Might the community be just as culpable for this stalemate as the developer teams?  It seems that lower fees and faster transactions times would better suite a wider cross section of the community, right?  What's really going on here...too many alternative facts?  What proposal will help lower fees and increase transaction speeds?  I can't even get a cup of coffee anymore, dammit!

I'm sure that the amount of transactions has greatly increased in recent months, but would anyone have an estimate of how much of this is spam? Are the blocks really full, as some have been saying?

We don't know what changes SegWit will bring while it will not come the truth. Today we can only suppose who'll it be good for bitcoin or it will not. I hope it will bring only positive changes, but with the time I can change my opinion.

A pool may have 20,000 workers and perhaps 50 of those workers are here shrilling continuously for small blocks to defend their high fees. Why? They want their investments in hardware to be paid off asap before becoming out-of-date.

Good ol big blocker shill lies.

The poll done by 21 suggest that around 75% of big players in the space want segwit and the 70.5% reject Buggy Unlimited explicitly:


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8HwIp7VwAEGPBb.jpg

https://medium.com/@21/using-21-to-survey-blockchain-personalities-on-the-bitcoin-hard-fork-1953c9bcb8ed

Not to mention nobody but Roger Ver runs nodes.

So it's pretty obvious BU is in general a failure.

UASF is working, nobody is talking about BU anymore. We are now in the acceptance phase. Everyone knows segwit is going to activated, the question now is how.

The next step is for certain miners to accept segwit as a softfork to end the covert ASICBOOST exploit, if certain miners do not cooperate, UASF will keep going up.

Accept reality or get burned.

wow 61 random votes xd . why is this relevant for the comunity?

Rofl. Not just 61 randoms. This poll was targeted at experts and personalities from the Blockchain community. On the 21.co page itself, you can see some of the people who are part of the group where the poll was made. Do some work first before trying to spam for some posts count. https://21.co/blockchain/

Adam Back (CEO of Blockstream), Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase), Nejc Kodric (CEO of Bitstamp), and others. Just some random folks right?

Btw, BillyBobZorton is right. Segwit is indeed the only right choice.

Apart from [insert several major/influential groups], no one wants SegWit.  It's the same kind of logic as "apart from Bitmain, no one wants BU", when in fact the community support is harder to gauge.

oh billy. did you even look at the article

https://i.imgur.com/w2s286r.png

So fucking what. Did you actually look at this image?


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8HwIp7VwAEGPBb.jpg

Just because some people would also be ok with other ways to scale bitcoin, doesn't mean they are against segwit, because otherwise the numbers don't add up.

75% want segwit.

70% do not want segwit.

49% replied to a vague ass question where they support some sort of undefined scaling method (which does not mean they aren't in favor of segwit too)

Once again franky1 trying to twist facts to promote his agenda.