|
The beauty of bitcoin is that anyone can create a new hard fork version any time given a little bit IT expertise, so it is just a matter of whether enough people will use that new version. And I think over 51% of hash power is enough to present the major consensus, because that is how bitcoin was designed: With over 51% of hash power, you essentially control the bitcoin network consensus. People will move to the new chain and dump their coins on the old chain to kill it in a few days
Of course any company can lead the develop of bitcoin, only one condition: They must step down if the majority of community request it. That's the only requirement any company can lead the code development, otherwise it is a hostile corporation take over and can be solved by a hard fork
|
|
|
|
Any non-satoshi white paper design, e.g. segwit, side chain, LN, they are all alt-coins, because they know that alt-coin will never succeed alone, they try to become parasite on the main blockchain, or even morph the main chain by slowly changing its architecture
-snip-
In fact there is no way to stop this kind of parasitic chain from appearing, so the mission of core devs should be defending the blockchain from being polluted, not becoming the parasite and leech the value from blockchain
Your post might seem correct to the average user, sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. You're putting a change in the Merke tree(s), sidechains and LN in the same bag. You're comparing the incomparable and calling them all altcoins (if I understood your post correctly)? You're trying to say that the 'satoshi white paper design' is the only and perfect design that should be included in/to Bitcoin? Appeal to authority? This must be a bad joke. Let's start: 1) Segwit has nothing to do with sidechains or LN as a concept (even though it carries necessary changes for LN). 2) Any altcoin could be a sidechain to Bitcoin with two-way peg and this has a wast amount of use cases; sidechain != LN 3) LN, being a second layer solution that enables two participants a theoretically infinite amount of transaction, is now a bad thing? 4) This has nothing to do with Mastercoin. If the XT with 8MB increase can be called an alt-coin, then this segwit/sidechain are all 100% genuine alt-coins. And such a large change without any formal design specification (Just read BIP 14X, those are all terrible documentations without any useful information, just redefine everything. In fact I doubt if anyone have read them, if you happened read them, just tell me where is the witness block structure architecture?  ) Someone mentioned: Respect to Satoshi writings is essential, not because he is a god or something but because that's what we were all offered and put our money and effort for believing in it. We did not put our money and mining rigs to construct infrastructure for running segwit/sidechain LN is another story, I heard that miners don't like it, since it reduce their fee income  |
|
|
|
Will Blockstream Core agree to shift to 2mb if bitcoinocracy poll indicates more coins are supporting 2mb ?
That's possible, however the poll is unlikely to indicate such. I doubt this. Majority holders are probably not yet aware of this poll. If we make an effort and make them aware and win the poll, then Blockstream might back out again and say "bitcoin is not democracy", "mere winning wont do, you need 90%+" etc. So, there needs to be clear message from Blockstream that they'll move to 2mb if they lose this poll 51:49 and give us three months to send the message across. I think bitcoinocracy poll is a quite good way to measure the economy majority interest, it can be quite handy for future change request evaluation, if the question is more human understandable Many people vote blindly or based on rumor, so there should be first some small test for investor's knowledge level and then they will be directed to different poll that suits people with different understanding of bitcoin |
|
|
|
|
Any non-satoshi white paper design, e.g. segwit, side chain, LN, they are all alt-coins, because they know that alt-coin will never succeed alone, they try to become parasite on the main blockchain, or even morph the main chain by slowly changing its architecture
It is the same thinking behind Mastercoin, but Mastercoin did not succeed because they use expensive bitcoin transactions to do useless things like smart contract (the concept of smart contract is questionable, since without law enforcement backing, the smart contract will be defaulted easily without any consequence). However, if you can use a parasitic chain to enable thousands of transactions and merge them into one bitcoin transaction, then it becomes economically feasible, and you can make a lot of money from this parasitic chain while let the bitcoin network provide the top level security
In fact there is no way to stop this kind of parasitic chain from appearing, so the mission of core devs should be defending the blockchain from being polluted, not becoming the parasite and leech the value from blockchain
|
|
|
|
I think the right direction is to let the protocol more or less fixed and spread it widely so it understood by more people. Just like IP protocol taught in many universities today If you constantly change the protocol, then all the effort that countless people have put into making educational material and tutorials/books/videos will all become irrelevant very quickly, this is a way to not become a standard People are talking about blockchain today, but then they heard that bitcoin is not blockchain anymore, it has changed to segwit chain, and maybe in future it will change its chain structure several times a day due to soft fork is totally safe |
|
|
|
In fact I doubt if anyone with different idea are still reading this forum  |
|
|
|
It does not make any sense, any fork is non-core, if you want to keep core forever then you should not do any fork, thus any change is forbidden Or you could say, any fork is a core hard fork since it is forked from core, but once you move to the new fork, core is dead And there have been several non-core hard forks winning in the race, but I did not see major holders selling bitcoin The amount of misinformation is really astounding regarding how blockchain works. I guess at this stage, no change can be done on bitcoin any more. Let's just freeze the code and prohibit any future change to it so that people get some peace in mind |
|
|
|
Huh? The bitcoin blocks are still valid bitcoin blocks when segwit is deployed. Transactions with a segregated witness will have the signature in a separate chain, but this does not change the validity of the block. The blocks and the transactions in the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.
Only upgraded nodes will know how to check the validity of transactions where the spent txout is from a transaction with segregated witness, but this won't be a problem. It won't activate until at least 95% of the hashrate support it. Any chainforks will therefore be short, and can not be hard.
It is so easy to understand: Suppose that 5% of old nodes don't understand how to verify segwit blocks, so they accept segwit blocks regardless if they are valid Now some segwit miner mined a segwit block with invalid signature data, that block will be rejected by the Segwit nodes, but accepted by old nodes since they can not verify the signature part, so the old nodes start to build new blocks upon that block, and if they add one block upon that invalid block, you have a hard fork, now two chains have different history thus will never merge |
|
|
|
The July 04 fork IS a hard fork, a few nodes with majority of hash power mined the longest chain, and the consensus did not regard that longest chain to be valid. The rule says that the longest chain should be the correct chain, but consensus says it is not. This is a perfect example that consensus decide what is bitcoin, not code.
The rule says the longest chain is only correct if it follows all the rules. Simply being the longest is not enough. The stupid miner announced support for BIP66 without actually supporting it. He lost money, and was probably thought a lesson. All nodes, both old and upgraded, were on the correct chain as soon as it overtook the malicious chain. Obviously this is the designer being incompetent in analyzing all the possible scenario before they push out a change, because they don't fully understand the complexity caused by SPV mining. Miners just passively listen to designers, they don't have the ability to detect an error in a code that is not written by them Gavin was blamed during 2013 fork, because an unexpected fork is always the fault of designer, because they pushed in a new change that caused that fork But this time it is the other way around, when a fork happens, it is not designer's fault, it is miners instead! Ok, so devs are so smart and make miners lost money and blame it on them, do you think any sane person would still listen to those devs and lose money and get blamed again? |
|
|
|
|
It's very easy to do a hard fork by your self if you just have 1% of total hash power, just compile a different incompatible version of bitcoin and mine a couple of blocks that is accepted by your client but not the rest of the network, once that block entered in your chain, you have done the hard fork
Unfortunately no one but you will be interested in that new chain and you have nowhere to exchange the coins on that fork
It is similar to any other hard fork, if no one is interested in the minority chain after the fork, then the coins on that fork will become worthless, at least much less than any alt-coin
This can be proved by the July 04 hard fork, the major hash power has mined a incompatible chain, those coins on that chain becomes useless and the miners lost 50K dollars on mining that chain
So to make sure the fork does not do any harm, you only need to make sure all the exchanges support only the major fork. And when a fork is really necessary, people will quickly reach consensus. Currently there is no such urgency so there is not enough consensus
|
|
|
|
Really? Tell me then, why would someone invest the kind of money needed to gain more than 50% of the hashrate, just to destroy the value of it? This is not as obvious to me as it is yo you.
Tell me then, why would someone invest money in a monority chain with 25% of hash power, just to make a hard fork permanent and destory the value of it? It is the major consensus decide what is real bitcoin, nothing else. Please do your home work and make sure you fully understand why a coin's value will be very close to its mining cost (e.g. total hash power)
Invalid blocks are invalid, no matter how many miners build on top of the invalid blocks. Until they cheat the old nodes to believe that they are valid, which is exactly the soft fork do. SW blocks are invalid for example, they are definitely not bitcoin blocks, but they cheat old nodes to believe that they are still valid. Unfortunately, the moment they start to cheat the old nodes, old nodes will also accept invalid SW blocks that they can not identify, that's where you get your hard fork Notice that a soft fork will also trigger a hard fork (See July 04 fork), but in a totally uncontrollable manner, because in a soft fork you don't know what kind of nodes people are running, and since that hard fork is uncontrollable, you will get much worse result than a prepared hard fork, where everyone knows exactly what will happen
The July 04 fork was not a hard fork. Chainforks happen every day. For that reason you should not accept The July 04 fork IS a hard fork, a few nodes with majority of hash power mined the longest chain, and the consensus did not regard that longest chain to be valid. The rule says that the longest chain should be the correct chain, but consensus says it is not. This is a perfect example that consensus decide what is bitcoin, not code. It is similar in 2013 fork, consensus decided 0.7 is bitcoin, not 0.8, so that even 0.8 have more hash power and the longest chain, it is not bitcoin Like you said, fork happens every day, because there is constantly disagreement in the network, but that is unavoidable, unless you want to have a communism type total domination disallow any kind of different voice, fork will always happen. You might remember that when we had the first reward halving, there was a hard fork that is permanently mining 50 bitcoin forever, but that did not create the situation you described, it just died like any other hard fork due to no major consensus |
|
|
|
Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them. Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes. If 80% of hashpower choose to be malicious and mine by non-consensus rules, and 90% of nodes are on the standard chain, some consequenses are: - SPV wallets have a 10% chance of connecting to a malicious node, users will make transactions on the wrong chain and lose money.
- The 80% will mine worthless coins, since most merchants don't accept them.
- Even upgrading to the latest version of the software won't solve any problems for users.
- You are going to get sued if you sell the 80% coins as "Bitcoin", or refuse to accept bitcoin from the consensus chain as bitcoin.
- Since people lose money and transactions are slow, and the courts are full of fraud cases, both coins will become worthless.
We already have hundreds of alt-coin exists in parallel with much less value but similar code to bitcoin. The reason majority of people don't care about them is because they believe the anti-inflation promise is given by limited total coin supply, so they support only bitcoin to make sure the coin supply is limited in bitcoin ecosystem
Follow the same logic, in the event of a hard fork that bitcoin fork into two chains, majority of people would still support only one bitcoin fork to make sure the total coin supply is limited
You obviously don't understand how Bitcoin works. Both forks will produce coins at the same rate after a couple of difficulty adjustments, no matter how many are on which side of a fork. I would never take the risk of touching coins from a hard fork in my business, and have made that clear in my FAQ, since I won't risk getting sued for selling fake coins. You obviously do not understand the economy incentives behind people who use bitcoin, only focus on technical details will let you miss the bigger picture. If a hard fork is so easy to destroy bitcoin, it is already dead long ago. It is the major consensus decide what is real bitcoin, nothing else. Please do your home work and make sure you fully understand why a coin's value will be very close to its mining cost (e.g. total hash power) Notice that a soft fork will also trigger a hard fork (See July 04 fork), but in a totally uncontrollable manner, because in a soft fork you don't know what kind of nodes people are running, and since that hard fork is uncontrollable, you will get much worse result than a prepared hard fork, where everyone knows exactly what will happen And following your logic, you will get sued because people don't even know which one is bitcoin by then, you are selling fake coins either way. Mining pools already lost lots of money during the hard fork that was caused by July 04 soft fork, they know how that tastes, so they currently strongly against soft fork https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43bgrs/peter_todd_sw_is_not_safe_as_a_softfork/ |
|
|
|
And that will trigger lots of hard fork without people even understand what is happening |
|
|
|
Either the Chinese miners plus dev would start a new fork (with majority hashpower) or they would suffer loss and humiliation as their pull requests were rejected.
Reality check: The Chinese miners (most miners, actually) are in it for the money. Majority of hashpower isn't worth sh*t if they are mining a worthless coin. If you are humiliated by a rejected pull request, you should find something else to do. Seriously. Yes, miners are mostly profit oriented, from money point of view, they would take the lowest risk approach, either never implement any change since a full block will raise their fee income, or a small change to make sure nothing changes dramatically for their business model 1. Keep the size at 1MB forever, no scaling allowed 2. Higher fee income for miners 3. Miners expand mining operation 4. More competition cause higher difficulty 5. Investors previously get coin from mining have to buy from open market 6. Price rally and attract more users 7. go to 2 At meantime all the small transaction go off-chain, there will be thousands of off-chain services popping up since only those who move more than 10 coins at once can afford high transaction fee like 0.1 bitcoin per transaction (That's 200 btc per block, miners going crazy exactly like ASIC frenzy  ) |
|
|
|
It's the authority to accept or reject that Chinese miners could conceivably wrest from Core.
It's possible that overwhelming hashpower could allow them to succeed.
You mean in a contentious hard fork situation? Ain't nobody got time for that. You're darn tootin'. When you're got more than 90% of the hashpower, it's not really contentious any more. This is just hypothetical, but imagine the other 10% consists of die-hard nutters for whom it isn't just about the money? There are already people who would like to see bitcoin become a totally anonymous and trace-less system, so that no one can really understand how money moves in this system. But they can already fork their small chain and use that new dark bitcoin, and there will be people specifically interested in those features. But to hijack the whole network hash power to support their chain will be too much, I think majority of the large actors in this industry must follow regulation due to their size and visibility |
|
|
|
All chainforks are not hardforks. Short chainforks happens every day. Usually because miners can't distribute their newfound blocks fast enough. This one was caused by a malicious miner not validating blocks, and mining on top of an invalid one. It disappeared as soon as the correctly validated chain overtook it. This only show the dangers of one miner controlling too much hashrate. All nodes, new and old, accepted the correctly validated chain as soon as it overtook the bad chain, and nobody were forced to upgrade anything. (Those who hadn't upgraded were potentially vulnerable to double spends however, as with all chainforks when you don't require enough confirmations. This is a good reason for merchants to stay up to date.) The August 2010 fork was much longer, btw. That fork was caused by a bug which had to be fixed for the nodes to reject the faulty chain. A hard fork is different. In a hard fork where the fork has a miner majority, the two chains will live on in parallel. Correctly validating nodes will never switch to the fork. The so-called "Classic", "XT", "Unlimited", etc forks are especially dangerous, since upgrading won't help either. There will just be different coins, and you have to make a choice of one of them. Due to incompetent fork developers, you can't even run one of the other coins on the same computer at the same time as Bitcoin Core, since they demand to bind to the same ports. Constantly keeping up with which fork to use this week is too much for most users, and since their SPV wallets will be rendered useless, they will probably just try to get rid of their coins ASAP. It would be sad end for Bitcoin, I think.  If some competent developer should think about forking bitcoin, he should start here and get 100% consensus first. There are many good reasons for a fork. Forking for a simple block size change is just dumb, and most people see that. Hard forks are indeed dangerous if there is no major consensus, but if there is major consensus like 80%, then it is safe. Since the minority fork will just become an alt-coin with much less value (hash power decide value due to arbitraging) We already have hundreds of alt-coin exists in parallel with much less value but similar code to bitcoin. The reason majority of people don't care about them is because they believe the anti-inflation promise is given by limited total coin supply, so they support only bitcoin to make sure the coin supply is limited in bitcoin ecosystem Follow the same logic, in the event of a hard fork that bitcoin fork into two chains, majority of people would still support only one bitcoin fork to make sure the total coin supply is limited But the problem with soft fork is that it forces minority miners to upgrade if they don't comply with new rules, otherwise they will never be able to mine any coins. This is like communist party throw people with different political ideas into prison to make sure their politics are always widely adopted by every one in the society Bitcoin community consists mostly of libertarian type of people, and it is unavoidable there will be different views, it is impossible to reach consensus 100%, so when the majority wants to move to a new implementation, the minority miner must have choice to not change, if that fork will be succeed economic wise is irrelevant, the freedom of choice is the most important reason people come here |
|
|
|
The biggest risk of centralization, when bitcoin become enough big and government want to kill it, they just need to capture those top 3 guys |
|
|
|
Of course it is not a strict benevolent dictator type of management, but still those changes are seldom communicated well with miners before they are implemented
Soft fork can cause unprepared hard fork, the July 04 fork is an example. It indicated that miners don't fully understand the consequence of BIP66, that is because they did not took part in the decision making process of BIP 66, thus they blindly follow the recommendation from core devs, and as a result, lost lots of coins
What do you mean they did not take part in the decision making? Of course they did, that was how the fork happened, when most of the miners supported BIP66 by producing the properly versioned blocks. It is just that they were SPV mining so they didn't check the validity of the invalid block they mined on which is what caused the fork. What does that have to do with then not participating the decision making? Besides, Wang Chun, the operator of F2pool, actively participates in development. He posts on the mailing list, sometimes on IRC, and sometimes on Github. He is definitely a part of the decision making process. I'm sure that several other large pool operators do the same, I just don't know their names. If they really actively participated in the decision making process of BIP66, they would have known that BIP66 might create a hard fork, thus they will reject BIP66 from the beginning. Or do much more preparation to prevent such a hard fork from happening. Just like we are now discussing the hard fork that Segwit soft fork could generate The problem is technical and language barrier, so that miners might never reach same level of understanding like core devs, thus there must be enough good communication to be sure they are totally clear of all the consequences of a change. In fact even core devs themselves can not see all the possible attack vector if the solution is too complex But this is too technical, basically the communication between core devs and rest of the community is broken because of the technical and complexity barrier, but as long as this barrier is there, there is no way to reach consensus, thus the way to reach consensus becomes politics/culture/religion. I guess that if some day Arabic countries control majority of hash power, only Muslim devs code will get their support Technical barrier is usually used in centralized organizations to enforce their decision. But in bitcoin community, it has exactly opposite effect, e.g. it makes sure that no consensus thus no decision can be made |
|
|
|
The most important is the decision making mechanism
Current mess is caused by that there is no decision making mechanism, so that all the design happens without first have a consensus based decision. When the design finished, programmers find out that there is no miners interested in their solution, this result in waste of time and human resource
But that's what BIP's are for. BIP's are design proposals, but how are they get approved? That's decision making mechanism Currently they are approved by the 5 core devs that have Git commit right, but their approval does not mean the approval of miners and other interested community members. And this is especially problematic when those 5 core devs have a conflict of interest themselves Not quite. First of all, git commit access is not a privilege at all - it is only a job of merging things which has passed peer review. Secondly, BIPs do not require approval from any Core devs. Most BIPs simply need approval from multiple software projects (Core or otherwise) which implement them. For example, lots of wallets implement BIP 13 (p2sh address format), and a number of mining programs implement BIP 22 (getblocktemplate). Softfork BIPs need approval from a supermajority of miners. For example, BIP 65 not long ago was adopted by 95% of the network hashrate. Hardfork BIPs need approval from everyone using Bitcoin. The only hardfork ever in the history of Bitcoin was in the aftermath of the 2013 crisis, with no argument against it whatsoever. We do not yet have a single example of a hardfork deployed in non-crisis situations or by planned agreement in advance, much less a contentious hardfork that has successfully been forced on a subset of the community. Of course it is not a strict benevolent dictator type of management, but still those changes are seldom communicated well with miners before they are implemented Soft fork can cause unprepared hard fork, the July 04 fork is an example. It indicated that miners don't fully understand the consequence of BIP66, that is because they did not took part in the decision making process of BIP 66, thus they blindly follow the recommendation from core devs, and as a result, lost lots of coins |
|
|
|
Conflict of interest is a problem in principle. I agree. But there's no such thing as an unbiased position.
Can you elaborate on the specific conflicts?
Just because conflict of interest will always happen in a community full of libertarian type of people, you can not use traditional top-down model decision making mechanism Consensus decision making model has been promoted before the HongKong conference, but judging from that conference, everyone is working on their own agenda blindly |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
