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[Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps

Mike Belshe mike at bitgo.com
Wed Nov 8 16:58:41 UTC 2017
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The Segwit2x effort began in May with a simple purpose:  to increase the
blocksize and improve Bitcoin scalability. At the time, the Bitcoin
community was in crisis after nearly 3 years of heavy debate, and consensus
for Segwit seemed like a distant mirage with only 30% support among miners.
Segwit2x found its first success in August, as it broke the deadlock and
quickly led to Segwit’s successful activation. Since that time, the team
shifted its efforts to phase two of the project - a 2MB blocksize increase.

Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin.  Although we
strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we
believe is even more important: keeping the community together.
Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for
a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path
could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was
never the goal of Segwit2x.

As fees rise on the blockchain, we believe it will eventually become
obvious that on-chain capacity increases are necessary. When that happens,
we hope the community will come together and find a solution, possibly with
a blocksize increase. Until then, we are suspending our plans for the
upcoming 2MB upgrade.

We want to thank everyone that contributed constructively to Segwit2x,
whether you were in favor or against. Your efforts are what makes Bitcoin
great. Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen,
and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide.


Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik
Voorhees

--


*Mike Belshe*
*CEO, BitGo, Inc*

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-November/000685.html

Common sense prevails  :)

now few people can change some future of bitcoin (cancel coins and start new one  ::) ::))

In my mind this is quite sad.
I think it is obvious that we need to upgrade, a smooth upgrade for our community. BTC would grow with smaller fees, it would get bigger recognition as payment not just as investment.

I think we should all take this as good news. Indeed, common sense and impending logic prevail. Shame that it had to take public denouncements from Bitcoin.org and signatories to leave to mount the pressure on this decision, but in the end, the email sounds quite all right. No sensationalism, just a concession. United Bitcoin stands... for now.

P.S. The big block supporters are really taking out their hate on the signers of this email... Twitter, everywhere. I don't believe I've ever seen Jihan Wu called a traitor, by his own supporters too.

It isn't obvious at all.

The blocksize has already been "upgraded", 2 months ago. And the new limit's not even close to full yet.


And that makes it sound like constantly full blocks necessarily requires an increase; there are good arguments that the blocks should always be as close to full as possible for a proper fee market to work.

---

So saying "it's obvious" without even saying why doesn't really add much to the conversation. But here's what Mike Belshe (whoever he is) said:


So even S2X representatives are tacitly admitting that the S2X fork wasn't needed right now anyway. 4MB is the blocksize today, and the 8MB (and not 2MB as the S2X people even now incorrectly state) increase proposed by Segwit2x would only invite problems when even 4MB isn't being used yet.

And once again, Bitcoin and it's community have demonstrated that social engineering (i.e. armies of paid liars cowering behind their anonymous forum handles) is the only weapon anti-Bitcoin wrecker have really got. And they keep failing. This is the 5th time (Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Cash and then S2X) that big blocks forks have tried and failed, and:

• Bitcoin Cash is now the Bitcoin with the magic big blocks (8MB max) that supposedly solves everything. And no-one's even using it (blocks are consistently less than 1MB)
• Bitcoin itself now has 4MB max blocks, twice the size of the "it's only 2MB FFS!!!" screechers' wishes. And no-one's even using it (blocks are consistently less than 2MB)

Note that despite 4MB blocks in Bitcoin, big block psychopaths still refer to Bitcoin as "the 1MB Bitcoin".

I am on a quick business trip barely able to catch up with the recent crypto news and tonight I discover that segwit 2x has been called off. Could this day possibly become even better? This really feel like a victory to me, bitcoin has shown once more that it's able to avoid another big obstacle. The corporations who were pro segwit 2x probably realized it wouldn't succeed with such a harshly divided community.

No doubt you have good knowledge base and understanding about block chain.
Allow me to ask a question, than what would be the best solution for decreasing transaction fees to rational level? Rational being that it could be rational to use these transactions in every day payments.

But the issue here is that the upgrade could break the system again. I think we are doing good for now and this activation does really need to go. Again on the technical perspective, the block size hasn't been fully utilized I believed. And the consensus of the community is that we don't really need to have a upgrade at the moment. We all know what's the rationale behind by those big blockers pushing this but at least, common sense has prevailed as what other posters have said. Let's see what's going to happened in the next couple of days, we can't only speculate where the price is moving (right now is still going up).

Yes, we need an upgrade to resolve transaction problems, but not necessarily to sacrifice one thing for another.
Just like they said; Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin.
Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something
we believe is even more important: keeping the community together.

In time, to meet scale demand of hundreds or thousands transactions per second, we have to upgrade block size or change basics nodes such as 10 minutes to process a new block to added to the end of chain. But, as long as segwit be able to resolve current market transaction, no need to upgrade. But, still; this is quite sad.

So well said.
As segwit tx percentage increases we see more and more benefits from effective block size.
The rhetoric is still around 1mb blocks from many people which is just totally not true.
The 2x campaign was based on a false dilemna - "2x or bitcoin will never scale".
Bitcoin does need to scale. In the future.
There will be many opportunities and solutions.
The key is they need to be based on consensus not bullying by one group with an ulterior to control the bitcoin brand.
Now I expect the old "coffee debate" arguments and "L2 problems" arguments will intensify.
Certain people seem to have a need to constantly find a future problem and pretend it has to be done NOW with their solution.

Upgrade is indeed needed but apparently we don't need an upgrade since the majority of the community doesn't have major concerns or problem on current upgrade (segwit), This is only my opinion and that's how i see the situation. Upgrade is not needed as of now.

We will need to do upgrades or improvements as we continue.
But this is the evolution of the tech, not some imminent need to avert disaster.
And 2x was not an upgrade, even if some people tried to sell it that way.

It is not so sad. If you want faster transaction, you can use bitcoin cash.

One solution exists already (Segwit 4MB blocks), but it's not fully adopted yet. It will take time for Segwit to have it's full impact on fee reduction, as the majority of everyday payments on the Bitcoin Network must be using Segwit addresses for it to work most effectively. Every time the old addresses are used, they consume 2-4x the block weight that Segwit transactions do, limiting blocksize closer to the old 1MB max (which is still in place for old style transactions). So, start using Segwit wallet software and Segwit addresses ASAP to help accelerate the process, and encourage others to do the same.


Really though, 2nd layer networks are the ultimate solution to high fees and the transaction rate. The big mistake that all the on-chain scaling advocates make is that their position is fundamentally untenable, as on-chain scaling isn't actually possible any time soon (certainly not with today's internet, and some argue that it will never be feasible).

On-chain is also not suitable for regular everyday purchases, you can't buy a cup of coffee then wait between 1 and 60 minutes for the transaction to clear, coffee shops and stands could have huge queues of people waiting for their coffee for the next block to get mined so that their transactions confirm. Then the coffee shop has to serve all those annoyed, caffeine-starved people really quickly! (and they'll probably all be extra cranky, waiting probably made them late for something) So on-chain doesn't work well for buying things where you need a quick turn around. 2nd layer networks on top of Bitcoin can be designed to clear instantly, without having to wait for blocks to be found by miners.

And the capacity of 2nd layer Bitcoin networks can be many orders of magnitude higher than the on-chain Bitcoin network. This could take alot of strain off the on-chain, and a new price equilibrium between fees would emerge. Transaction fees for the Lightning Network, to give an example of a 2nd layer Bitcoin network, can be far lower than miners charge for on-chain, as the costs needed to run Lightning nodes is an insignificant fraction of what's needed to mine Bitcoin blocks with included transactions. There's no good reason why Lightning transactions can't have free fees (although some larger routing nodes might try to charge fees if they offered purchase insurance or some other additional service)

Some people have predicted about it.
Segwit2x is such a bait to activate segwit, after a long, endless debate about bitcoin scalability.
At least we have segwit which a good upgrade for now to resolve unconfirmed transaction that can last for days.
As too many pros cons about upgrade block size, and segwit could handle current market transactions, it's fine to suspend 2x hard fork.

Sadly nothing of your techno sales blah has same security than old SegWit free on-chain transactions and allowing blocks up to 8MB is no issue at all.

I'm sorry that the situation has not received its development. This means that we will continue to be in a situation of uncertainty. It reminds me of the ostrich position. Hide your head in the sand is not an option. We need to develop bitcoin as a currency. Without currency had functionality had the opportunity to trade without exchanging for Fiat.

Do you have any idea why Segwit adoption has stalled in the last ~3000 blocks?

http://segwit.party/charts/#
(pick the "since activation" option)

After a steady rise the percentage of Segwit transactions compared to all BTC transactions peaked at roughly 18 % and then
was followed by a really steep decline (down to nearly 9 % of all transactions). Currently, it hovers around 10 % of all
BTC transactions.

Have some big exchanges or payment providers stopped using Segwit addresses? I really have no idea what could have
caused this steep decline. I would have assumed the adoption would continue gradually over time, because obviously people
and service providers are incentivized to make use of Segwit addresses due to cheaper fees.

I thin the Segwit transaction uses more block space comprared to the conventional transaction. So people do not use that if they want decentralization.

It's predictable. I of course like a normal person support reducing fees for transactions but it seems to me that such a global change should be implemented only after all stakeholders reach agreement. I hope that these problems will not affect the price of bitcoin.

Probably there was a bump in adoption once the first Segwit wallet software (Armory) was released, but that's gonna be a relatively small wave of enthusiastic and confident power users (I think Bitcoin Core can also use Segwit with CLI, but that's gonna make up a fairly small proportion of overall Segwit users). Electrum have now also released Segwit wallet software, but there's a limit to how much transacting can go on between early adopters. More time is needed until a majority of users and services are using Segwit as standard practice.



Most services haven't switched over to Segwit addresses (many are waiting for the Bitcoin Core implementation to be released). So I don't think many of them have been using Segwit since it activated.

it will be upgrade as soon as all "triggers" will be developed and prepared being the best.