Bitcoin Forum

I understand that the New York Agreement had consensus to implement Segwit and 3 months later Segwit2x, which will imply software upgrade by miners and users. But now, lots of people including Bitcoin Core devs are pointing in other directions to solve scalability such as Lightning Network.
So, are we going to have a hard fork by the end of this year and a split between Bitcoin Core people and Big Blockers?

Maybe yes, and maybe no, depend on how much blocks will signaling segwit2x. But, according to https://coin.dance/blocks, Segwit2x (intention) has reached 92,2%. Since core developers don't want to support 2Mb hard fork, then the new idea is Bitcoin Core 0.15.0 which automatically disconnect nodes running Bitcoin-ABC and the Segwit2x fork. So, hard fork likely to be happen in November and we will have another bitcoin chain split.

So, if this happens, Bitcoin (the real Bitcoin) would have to run with 8% of current Mining Power?

Let's see some actual code and some actual opinions and testing before it's declared a fact. We do of course know what Core will think already.

The people who are signalling aren't stupid. They're all in it for the money. They're not going to risk that money if it's looking too disruptive. It'll only take one or two having  a doubt before the entire house of cards collapses.

Then we're kind of back to square one with the added attraction of BCH for the big blockers to bully everyone with.

The whole point of the NYA was to avoid a hardfork chainsplit and activate SegWit.

Bitmain's viabtc has hardforked already and SegWit will be active on the 21st of August.

Bitmain via its proxie viabtc has already broken the agreement.

I see no reason why NYA should be upheld anymore.

I guess we'll find out soon...

Think of it like this:

The miners will attempt to HF or SF.

We can:

Follow along and do nothing

UASF like last time and try to prevent this

Change the POW algorithm and screw over all SHA miners, forcing them to BCC.


Nothing official has been said yet but I see more scummy things happening again soon. Keep an eye out for Bitcoin news, keep your head in things and you'll know as soon as all of us know. I personally just want Lightning in so we see some real improvements and less of this politically charged bullshit.

NYA's role was to do one thing. To get rid of the Core developers. That is why they are fighting with all their might to block the hard fork to 2mb block sizes because they know that will be the end of them as stewards of the network. They can still contribute, but their influence is not as great as they are today.

It will not happen. Besides, there is BitcoinCash if some people want bigger blocks. If the big blockers want Segwit, they can activate it there too. Bye bye.

I don't get why people are against 2MB. I mean granted hard forking is risky, but if most of the community gets behind it, like most of the community got behind segwit, then the risk isn't that great. Bitcoin needs to scale MASSIVELY in the next few years! And doubling the capacity will help. Why would you not want to scale bitcoin??? Segwit helps but only so much, doubling the capacity will help a bit more. Lightning Network will help a bit more. There will probably need to be more scaling solutions in a two or three years. But those are gonna be needed a lot sooner without an increase to 2MB.

it is New "York" Agreement. as in New York the city where they made the agreement apparently...

correct. that is how SegWit was activated through BIP91 and then led to a 100% support for BIP141. otherwise SegWit support was stuck at 30-40% and a huge threat of split was being introduced in the name of UASF which could cause a lot of problems.

they never changed position as far as i know. they were always against the 2 MB hard fork and wanted to push for things like LN from the start and keep the block size to 1 MB.

we can't predict if it will or won't happen but that is the plan so far and this plan has a high enough support which makes it a good assumption that it will happen.
and it is not exactly "big blockers", they got out to bitcoin cash and are having fun with their 8 MB now. LOL


to be honest i don't get it either. i mean i have read some stuff that GMaxwell said but it is not convincing.
and politically 2MB proposal can be the best thing, it prevents the community to split, it brings devs, users and miners together once again, and it successfully flushes out people like Roger Ver and his 8 MB BCC out of the picture.
but if denied the effects will be worse in my opinion.

They just want to create FUD so that they can open a window for us to buy more bitcoins.

But I remember seeing a graphic were 2mb would result, in the long run, in a 1tb block folder, which is too much for storage.

With 8MB blocks there is no need to implement segwit and increase capacity further. Moreover, now BCH and BTC will follow different paths, including development.

here is a "graphic" for current 1 MB block size which shows the current blockchain size as 127 GB which grows about 50 GB per year with 2 MB it will increase less than 2x because blocks won't be full from day 1.
in other words 1 TB will take about 20 years with 1 MB
and it will take about 10-12 years with 2 MB (worse case scenario is 8 years which is the year 2025)

According to the news is a fact if nothing changes. But 3 months is a lot and some agreement may be reached.

Make your bets about what is going to happen in the 2x day

Thanks for the clarifications. Is SW2x really the best solution? Isnt SW + LN enough to solve scalability problems without having to produce a Hard Fork?
 

Does anyone know what the best solution is any more? There are two diametrically opposed ideas. Core is looking to the future at the expense of the present and possibly vice versa for 2x.

And since we still know pretty much nothing about how an LN will operate in terms of routing and gateways I think it's a little early to describe is as the answer to all our prayers.

Bigger blocks looks a lot simpler from the outside to the uninformed.

Big blockers solution (to think that problems must be solved adding more space) leads to 4x, 8x and who knows what in the (unnecesary) way to the visa's 2000 tps. Not the best solution since we need to reduce some weight on the Blockchain and off-chain tecnologies allow us to do that.
Not an expert but we already have a 150 GB history ledger and this keeps growing ...

Nothing will happen. It seems to me that after the hot heads saw the sad fate of the bitcoin cash will be much easier to reach consensus. The unit will be increased and nothing would happen. Can be price fluctuations in this moment, but this all users are already accustomed to.

Yepp. Totally agree. This is not about scaling. It's power grab and will desperately fail.
The core community is pretty much anti authoritarian. And the more these suits spread their bs, the less and less likely it is that they will have any significant follower base with this hardfork.
Therefore, if they really should do it, this hf will be big fail and all those guys will have lost lots of credibility in this space and harmed their reputation even more when they have done already.
Government like strategies and attacks will not succeed here!

If nothing changes then it is a fact, unless things change or no one decides to mine the fork version.

But still lots of time so lots of things can happen

Will we have a dip to 3000-3100 till August 21st? Yes or no?

I cannot think on a reason to have a dip. Once SW is activated the price should go up.

I don't think Segwit2x is going to happen. They're already campaigning against it. Take a look at the following thread on Reddit for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6sqthc/to_signal_nonsupport_of_segwit2x_add/

I'm wondering if they will still be able to push it through without breaking off another group of support again.

Are you sure your opinion is true?
Can you explain helps me the reason make the price of Litecoin after SegWit activited, it falldown -50% the highest price before SegWit? :)

It's still too early to talk about what's going to happen in the future. In fact, I do not care about that, the only thing that bothered me was the value of bitcoin, with constant changes, bitcoin carrying unstable steps, it was not good for everyone.

Don't worry after segwit2x activation bitcoin value seems settled around 3500$. Please check the value now. I expect bitcoin to touch the next peak with some months.
You cannot just confirm that bitcoin price is unstable. It is fluctuate from 2013 to now.

I don't understand peoples issue with a 'large' ledger...
Bitcoin blockchain is less than 3 BluRay movies... What's the big deal?

yeah the "blockchain will get too big" argument really doesn't hold water. Scalability is much more important for the future of bitcoin than miners having to buy some extra disk space. Especially considering the cost of disk space will go down a lot quickly than the size of the bitcoin ledger increases. Honestly I think a 4MB block size would be ideal. That plus segwit would I think mean bitcoin's transaction capacity would be close to 8x what it is now. That plus Lightning Network operating for services that do a lot of transactions would mean bitcoin could probably scale for a good number of years without any new solutions needed. But even 2MB is pretty good. It makes no sense to not increase the block size. With segwit alone we might run into full blocks again in a year or so, which would be bad for everyone.

For me not the storage is not the problem, but downloading the blockchain, i dont want to be downloading for days.

But its not activated yet, it was just signalled.

Activation is due August 21st, after a grace period for the miners to update their software.

I have a feeling there will be a dip, its just difficult to speculate how much it will fall.

We're going through the way to activate segwit but the second step of the New York agreement is 2Mb hard fork, as core developers don't want to support 2Mb block size limit and have planned to develop bitcoin core 0.15.0 that will automatically disconnecting any network node which runs the segwit2x fork. Then we will likely have a chain split sooner rather than later, it would allow more freedom for people to choose the best proposal of scaling solution.

I'm up in the air on the whole thing. At a glance, I look at who is supporting Segwit2x (including the vast majority of miners) and it seems like a sure thing. But time and time again, the ecosystem continues supporting Core in the face of contentious change. Segwit2x is the least contentious of block size proposals yet (at least given its support from major economic nodes and miners), but the fact that Core opposes it makes it quite contentious on its face.

If I had to guess: We will see some defectors from the Segwit2x camp over the next couple months. As we approach the fork, FUD will be at all time highs and things will look very uncertain. Then the 2x fork will flop like BCC and yes, we will have 3 chains (BTC and 2 altcoins), but BTC will not be dethroned. I'd give this scenario 10:1 odds. Part of me actually wants some drama so we can get a deep dip to accumulate more coins, but I won't plan on it.

But you do not understand, Segwit is not a scaling solution. It was originally a fix for the malleability problem of Bitcoin. BitcoinCash will the something of the same to fix the same problem. There is already a proposal called Flexible Transactions and some people in the BitcoinCash community are arguing that it is better than Segwit.

i am sorry i can not answer that because i am not yet convinced about it myself.
there are good arguments for and against the 2MB hard fork but i am not convinced why it couldn't work. and a hard fork is not a bad thing, we saw the 100% support for SegWit and the hard fork can essentially have the same amount of support, in which case nothing bad will happen with enough time and a good plan.

and as for LN, that is a good solution and will help bitcoin a lot in the future but that is a second layer transaction and shouldn't be used "instead" of on chain in my opinion but only "on top of it". and that is one of the reasons for suggestion of 2 MB.

Fixing transaction malleability is necessary for the Lightning Network. So yes, Segwit is a scaling solution. It will also enable all sorts of future optimizations, like Schnorr aggregation and MAST, which can further optimize transaction size. This is all part of scaling. Particularly the Lightning Network; we need to take transactions off chain (or otherwise look into things like sharding and tree-chains).

My take on "flexible transactions" was that it was just a kludged version of Segwit for a hard fork implementation.

Yes this is quite likely because the block size debate is not over yet, core is against increasing block size while miners want bigger blocks to get maximum transaction fees when mining a block.

IF there will be hard fork by end of the year than that might create bigger chaos on the market compared to what we had on august 1st.