Holy Bikesheds, Batman!

Classik's internal schism(s) just got a whole lot worse.

@Bitfury has dropped a giant logic bomb on the mega-block Frap.doc coffee-chainers of the Toominista movement.  It's back to Unlimiterd for those losers!

https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/keep-calm-and-bitcoin-on-4f29d581276#.89z3s67sc

KEEP CALM AND BITCOIN ON

By Valery Vavilov, Co-Founder BitFury

I grew up in Soviet Latvia and witnessed firsthand the elimination of my parent’s life savings. All of their dreams were gone when the Soviet Union and the banking systems collapsed in 1991. Then, like a nightmare, my own investment dreams were shattered in the global financial crisis of 2008. I knew as a child, and I know even more now as an adult that we, as a global technology community, can and must do better.

I wrote my first computer code when I was 8 years young. Mathematics is the language I speak and trust. Enter the emerging idea of Bitcoin. I discovered this exciting open source technology in 2010. Together with my business partner, Valery Nebesny, we realized this new way of processing and transferring assets could actually make our world a better and fairer place for people everywhere — in developed and developing countries — all through the use of math, cryptography and thoughtful programming language based on the fundamental value of trust. Fast forward 5+ years, and the world of Bitcoin has advanced beyond our wildest expectations and continues to be a dynamic innovative ecosystem that is evolving every day.

Needless to say, it was disappointing to see Mike Hearn, a prominent contributor to the Bitcoin developer community, recently offer a lengthy blog post stating that the industry was dead and that bitcoin was a failed experiment. Perhaps the road for Hearn has come to an end, but for me and my many colleagues and fellow Bitcoin Blockchain experts, it is safe to say that we are just beginning down this incredible road and we see a promising future. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.35zknj7jk

While Mike is entitled to his own opinion, of course, I thought I would take a moment to address a few of his points with my views. I will caveat that much of what is happening in the Bitcoin space is highly technical and fairly difficult for those who have not immersed themselves in the math and science of late to fully understand.

With that, let me lay out a few facts:

FACT 1: Bitcoin Is Not an Electronic Payments System Like PayPal

Many Bitcoin newcomers view the network as yet another electronic system for instant payments, like PayPal or Visa. Right here we have a very substantial difference in opinion. Bitcoin was never designed to confirm instant payments and believing that is its function is a mistake.

As Nick Szabo, the renowned author of smart contracts wrote: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nick-szabo-if-banks-want-benefits-blockchains-they-must-go-permissionless-1518874v

“Visa and PayPal already exist, and within national borders they do what they do quite well. It’s silly to try to turn Bitcoin into yet another Visa and PayPal.”

I believe, based on the way the system was designed and developed by Satoshi, that it would be disingenuous to expect instant transaction confirmation from the Bitcoin network — it is simply not wired that way. No increase of the block size limit could help make instant Bitcoin transaction confirmation a reality.

Does this mean that Bitcoin cannot be used for instant payments? Not at all. You simply need an additional system operating on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain (with the Blockchain acting as a settlement layer). These systems already exist in custodial wallet services and Bitcoin exchanges. But the larger point is that the potential of Bitcoin is so much greater and transformative than simply hoping it can compete with PayPal.

FACT 2: Bitcoin Is Not and Should Not Be Free to Use

While the Bitcoin network dramatically lowers the cost of transactions, the reality is that the Bitcoin Blockchain is not free to use. The Blockchain is secured with an enormous amount of computing power, and transaction fees are an important incentive to keep contributing that power.

As the Bitcoin network continues to evolve, transaction fees need to grow in order to maintain a high level of security within and for the network. As BitFury has outlined in our white paper on Bitcoin security incentives http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/bitfury-incentive_mechanisms_for_securing_the_bitcoin_blockchain-1.pdf, the transaction fee market is currently actively developing. The percentage of transactions satisfying a market-based fee margin has grown from 22% in March 2015 to nearly 40% in October 2015.

Just like with instant payments, expensive on-chain Bitcoin transactions do not mean that one cannot use Bitcoin for cheap value transfer. Overlay networks, such as Lightning and sidechains, can successfully deal with this challenge while in-service ledgers already do.

FACT 3: Bitcoin Transaction Processing Is Not Presently Clogged

There is no observable evidence that Bitcoin transaction processing is presently clogged. Key statistics gathered by Statoshi http://statoshi.info/ for the past few months show the pool of unconfirmed transactions has held relatively steady at about 10,000 transactions — a significant decrease from over 75,000 unconfirmed transactions during “the stress test” performed in September 2015. Most of these transactions, according to CoinTape http://www.cointape.com/ pay zero or near-zero transaction fees.

For Bitcoin wallets with proper fee estimation logic, the clogging challenge simply does not exist. According to web-based fee estimation services, such as CoinTape, as of January, 2016, the optimal transaction fee for an average transaction is less than 0.1 USD — quite small for most use cases. The issue we do face is with “free riders” — applications with a business model relying on non-existent Bitcoin transaction fees.

FACT 4: Miners Embrace Bitcoin’s Popularity

Bitcoin miners and transaction processors such as BitFury, are likely the biggest supporters of the Bitcoin ecosystem and any suggestion otherwise is simply ridiculous. Bitcoin miners invest enormous amounts of money and efforts into developing and maintaining bitcoin mining hardware. As the Scaling Bitcoin conferences have shown, miners are generally in support of cautious increases of the block size limit — just not abrupt increases — because such sudden change could undermine the foundation of the Bitcoin network. BitFury has detailed these points in our white paper http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf

FACT 5: Bitcoin Mining Is Decentralized

Most existing mining pools are public. This means that they consist of tens of thousands of independent users who are free to join or leave the pool at any time. Private mining pools are frequently operated by firms that publicly sell mining equipment, including BitFury (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitfury-to-mass-produce-new-nm-chip-and-sell-to-public-1452010171).

Even if there were merely ten entities controlling Bitcoin mining (which there are not), this would still not be a threat. There are many Bitcoin nodes not controlled by miners, which would act as a barrier against rogue miners’ misbehavior. However, a rapidly rising block size could put most of these nodes out of work because they would simply have to switch off due to a lack appropriate hardware to perform transaction processing), paving the road to the real centralization (see [The Decentralist Perspective] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks-1442090446).

FACT 6: Mass Rule is Not Appropriate for Bitcoin

The pipe dream of some in the Bitcoin community is to govern the system by having ordinary users vote for changes by adopting the corresponding full node software. This approach is not only impractical, it is also not desirable. Most ordinary Bitcoin users do not own a full node and ironically, if they did, it is quite possible they could not afford its maintenance after a hypothetical abrupt block size increase. Users of Bitcoin should most certainly have a say in the direction of this technology, but in order to appropriately and continuously secure the Blockchain, it is responsible for all of us who are knowledgeable about the science to take a leadership role where and when it is necessary.

FACT 7: Bitcoin XT Would Not Have Solved Bitcoin’s Challenges

Bitcoin XT was considered by some a remedy for perceived problems with the Bitcoin ecosystem. However, upon closer inspection, XT leaves at least some of these challenges, and the reality is that XT would not have made transaction confirmation immediate and would not have reduced the risk of double-spending for unconfirmed transactions.

Additionally:

· XT would not have eliminated transaction fees — it would have merely delayed the development of the fee market. (The perspective of having no fees forever is much worse; as the block reward steadily diminishes, the security of the network would eventually take a nosedive.)

· XT would have done nothing about the “mining centralization” problem. In fact, it would have made things worse by pushing small mining pools out of business.

· XT would not have helped decentralization and would have made things worse by elevating the requirements to maintain a full Bitcoin node.

· XT code updates would not have differed from Bitcoin Core in the expressive means of its users — all voting rounds would still need to be introduced into the code by developers.

Bitcoin XT and its predecessor — Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) 101 — were not supported by the Bitcoin community simply because they contained too many controversial features in the areas where each mistake could cost the most in terms of Bitcoin value. These proposals were hard forks, meaning that their implementation could break Bitcoin as a system for value transfer (http://wallstreettechnologist.com/2015/08/19/bitcoin-xt-vs-core-blocksize-limit-the-schism-that-divides-us-all).

CONCLUSION

I believe in Bitcoin. I believe in the Blockchain. I know that the vast potential is just being realized. We wish Mr. Hearn all the best as he commences his work with our friends at R3CEV. It is important that we respect various input but simultaneously resist the temptation to give Mr. Hearn’s voice too much weight.

Bitcoin is not an instant payment network and not a fancy replacement for PayPal or Visa. It is first and foremost a decentralized system, which sacrifices speed in favor of security. A key feature provided by decentralization is permissionless entry for users and developers — and it is thanks to this component that Bitcoin has grown into much more than a currency and has become a platform for Blockchain innovations.

Most importantly, Bitcoin is a new world created for anyone — especially for someone like me — who didn’t grow up in a world where “trusted emissary” was a reality and the idea of “asset security” was something other people in other parts of the world enjoyed.

I believe in Bitcoin because I believe in democracy and I believe in open societies. And as Winston Churchill once said: “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all the others.” Open source projects are not perfect, but they unite the best and most innovative thinkers, and I am honored to be a part of this mission.

Request for clarification:


Is DarkSend (still) based on CoinJoin or not?

Why are the posters on dashtalk so angry about the issue?

FTFY.

My best guess is Evan is a stool pigeon, and Dash is a honey pot.

Anyone else that broke as many security regulations and money-transmitting laws as Evan would have been busted a long time ago.

If you were here to converse in good faith, you would have already researched that exhaustively-debated topic.

I admire your 'energy vampire' attempt to wear us down by repeatedly asking already answered questions and attempting to restart the conversation back at square one.

I don't think you are actually a Toominista; you smell more like a Buttcoiner here to troll.   

RBF is crucial to recover funds stuck in tx with insufficient (ie uncompetitive) original fees.  It's needed for fee markets to mature and Because other Reasons, which you would have already looked up if you weren't just here to troll and FUD.

RBF is a soft fork, so there's nothing you Tooministas and Blockstream haters can do to stop it.

When you cry for your hopeless lost fantasy of 0-conf tx, it gives me great pleasure.

Do I need to post the nipple rubbing cable company guys again, or have you got the message?   

Then it's also premature for Tooministas to declare victory over Core.

But they have been doing exactly that.

Did you likewise scold the TumorBlockers, or are your criticisms reserved for the small block militia?

The idea of Gavin whining about "toxic" people is a howler, given his palling around with Mike "Yellow Peril" Hearn and their instigation of an ugly Grand Schism.

Luke-Jr (among other exemplary contributions) just gave us a slick soft-fork SegWit implementation that kills 10 birds with one stone, and obviates the need for a lousy, perfunctory jump to 2MB blocks.

What has Gavin done for us lately?  Besides hanging out in smoke-filled rooms in an attempt to subvert Bitcoin's diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient properties.

Luke-Jr >> Gavin

Or not...




You pumped Dash into the ground.  Good job!

https://dashtalk.org/threads/kyle-hagan-is-no-longer-part-of-the-development-team.3225/#post-33461

Wow, the Evan's Gate cult enforcers act like Scientology when it comes to threatening anyone that dares to leave the compound.

WTF is with a community that threatens young children because they don't like a parent's "tone?"

The FBI should be having a very frank discussion with Evan and that Light creep.

Classic will have the honor of being the first coin designed by Sybil attack!   

First Hearn becomes a laughingstock, now Classic.  What a great start to the new year!

F2Pool CTO discusses thresholds with core devs: 75% not enough. Wants 95%

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6451#issuecomment-172346251

Tooministas deeply saddened.

Can we get this translated into Chinese for the benefit of f2pool, before they do something foolish and regrettable?

https://t.co/3IY2PKIjsX

The Scaling Announcement Bitcoin Core Should Have Made

By the Bitcoin Core Developers (a complete list of signers can be found below)

We’re here to talk about scaling and the roadmap we’ve set for Bitcoin Core.

As with any roadmap, we’ve heard your feedback and we want to continue to hear it, so please keep it coming.

We’ve had extensive conversations with all of you — from the miners to the wallets and exchanges to everyday community members — and want to make it clear that we’ve listened to everything you have to say with regards to the growth of the bitcoin blockchain and evolution of Bitcoin core.

We feel we have a fair grasp of what your needs are and are well-equipped to examine them against the constraints of the Bitcoin network and the software that powers it, and determine how best we can make everyone happy and ensure that the system is fully operational and is able to scale.

Part of this work means looking at a variety of increases to the Bitcoin block size and doing extensive analysis and testing to determine the effects that each of these increases would have.

As many of you may be aware, we have to be aware of two facts:

    Increasing the capacity of the bitcoin blockchain is critical. Bitcoin needs to grow and support more and more users, and each of these users needs to have access to relatively low transaction fees.
    Block size increases should not be taken lightly and it is imperative they be carefully tested beforehand. Block size increases impact many aspects of the Bitcoin network and do have the potential to reduce decentralization and network stability.

It is clear that both of these are largely in conflict with one another, and so they will have to be weighed against one another and a compromise will need to be reached.

Just because we have the need to support certain levels of usage, doesn’t mean we should dare to compromise either the stability of the system or the level of decentralization that makes Bitcoin so unique and powerful. And just because we have a fear of the effects of block size increases does not mean that we should fail to subject such increases to real world tests and do everything we can to increase the system-wide capacity.

Bitcoin will scale, but it will require a combination of efforts and it will be a gradual process. So we need to come together and agree on the tradeoffs we’re making and we need to be patient.

Last, we need to be civil and respectful of one another and make sure we all come together to push Bitcoin forward.

We’ve done some extensive real world testing on many global test beds, including Princeton University’s Planet Lab, the largest in the world. From this we’ve concluded that 8MB blocks are simply too large to be considered safe for the network at this point in time, considering the current global bandwidth levels.

So while many of us may want to shoot for the stars, we must agree that it is more important to ensure that the network remains healthy and strong.

At the same time, it is important that we push for an increase that is as big as we can safely handle, and we believe that Adam Back’s 2–4–8 proposal that scales the block size to 4MB after 2 years and then to 8MB after 4 years is the plan of action that is the most ambitious while still being safe.

In addition, it seems we can do even better in terms of performance by sticking with 2–4–8 but allowing non-fully-validating nodes to ignore approximately half of this data. This would be a big improvement that would alleviate the pressure that we’ll be putting nodes by scaling the block size. The improvement is being called Segregated Witness and involves separating signatures out from the main block and putting them into a Merkle tree that only fully-validating nodes have to see.

We want to roll this plan out slowly and carefully, and we believe the best course of action is to first roll out Segregated Witness so we can get a quick win on an approximately 2x data capacity increase. This would involve removing signatures from the main portion of blocks, which would double the number of transactions that can be fit into the current 1MB limit (this means the effective limit would be 2MB).

Next, we plan on shifting gears to prepare for the hard fork that would put Adam Back’s 2–4–8 proposal into place alongside Segregated Witness, where the limits would be scaled to account for the optimizations made by Segregated Witness (the limits would be approximate limits that would continue to include signature data).

Beyond this, in order to prepare for the two bumps over the next 4 years and ensure that orphan rates don’t increase, we’re working on integrating efficient relay techniques like the relay network and IBLT, so that most block data is disseminated throughout the network even before a block is found.

Further, we’ll be working hard on preparing for the hard fork that will need to come with the second increase. We’ve bought a bit of time considering that the cleverness of Segregated Witness will allow us to do the first doubling with just a soft fork, which will reduce risk in the short run. And of course, this hard fork should not be taken lightly as hard forks in general do pose a significant risk of network fracturing, which could result in a significant monetary loss for stakeholders.

In summary, this roadmap is meant to do the best possible job to address the growth needs felt by all Bitcoin stakeholders, while ensuring the stability and decentralization of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

We want to stress that Bitcoin Core is comprised of a group of volunteers that don’t always agree themselves and many discussions amongst us and Bitcoin stakeholders were required to get us all on the same page.

We have thought long and hard about this proposal and think it is the best of both worlds. But we still want to hear from you about this roadmap and get your input. We are committed to continuing to engaged fully and publicly with the wider community.

The future of Bitcoin is about all of us and we need to work together to push it forward.

Thank you,

The Bitcoin Core Developers

Szaboshi Backamoto used a mix of American and British English.

Szabo is American, Back is British.

Can't we just be happy the Genesis Block isn't in French?   

That is a list of people who support Core's scaling roadmap.  The "incisive point" is that you are a liar that claimed "nobody wants" Core's approach.


The list of core contributers is much longer and may be found at github.

The cult enforcers are attacking the wrong person here.  Picking a fight with a journalist is a Very Bad Idea, especially if it's over a ridiculous issue like lack of fealty (ie blind loyalty) to sponsors.  Did they expect Amanda to lie, either explicitly or by omission, about Monero being her preferred anon coin?

Maybe she should have an entire episode explaining why Monero is preferable to Dash and all other anon coins!   

DailyDecrypt is a platform that can dismantle the Dash scam piece by piece.  It could start with the shady instamine and trusted third party Masternodes, then move forward to what CoinJoin inventor Greg Maxwell said about Daftfield's broken, Darksend-rebranded version of his innovation.  Next comes the Peter Todd segment, exploring Dash's "bad crypto" and "cargo cult bamboo" version of GreenAddress (rebranded as InstantX).

At the very least, DailyDecrypt will hesitate to deal with the creepy, whiny, aggressive, high-maintenance DashHole community ever again.

A list of Core supporters that prove you are liar:

    Adam Back
    Alex Morcos
    Aaron Voisine
    Ben Davenport
    Ben Gorlick
    Bram Cohen
    Bryan Bishop
    BtcDrak
    Charlie Lee
    Christian Decker
    Cøbra
    Cory Fields
    Craig Watkins
    Daniel
    Daniel Kraft
    David A. Harding
    David Vorick
    Dev Random
    DexX7
    Douglas Huff
    Eric Lombrozo
    Glenn H Tarbox
    Gregory Maxwell
    Gregory Sanders
    James Hilliard
    Johnathan Corgan
    Johnson Lau
    Jonas Schnelli
    Jouke Hofman
    Lawrence Nahum
    Luke Dashjr
    Mark Friedenbach
    Eric Martindale
    Manuel Aráoz
    Marco Falke
    Matt Corallo
    Midnight Magic
    Michael Ford
    Nicolas Bacca
    Nicolas Dorier
    Obi Nwosu
    Patrick Strateman
    Pavel Janik
    Peter Todd
    Pieter Wuille
    Randy Waterhouse
    Rodolfo Novak
    Ruben de Vries
    Suhas Daftuar
    Theymos
    Thomas Kerin
    Wang Chun
    Warren Togami
    Wladimir J. van der Laan

Please pout more about now "Nobody Wants" Core's scaling roadmap.  It's funny!   

Nobody Wants a contentious hard fork and subsequent catastrophic consensus failure, except XT/Unlimited/Classic dead-enders (but you guys don't matter, because Bitcoin is not a democracy).

The people who matter support Core.  Here, have some Fact Welfare you poor, low-information Toominista.

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases

Why don't you follow your role model Mike Hearn's example, and ride off into the sunset?

You've got the whining part down, now you just need to GTFO.   

OK shorena, time for you to reference that quote.   

They don't know yet.

The Tooministas won't be able to compromise and resolve the schism, leading to a Classic Classic versus New Classic fork.

The process will repeat for CLTV and SEGWIT, so we may look forward to Classic Classic++, New Classic Ultra, etc, etc, etc.

So many bikeshed permutations, so little time for vanity combinatorics...