Examine some pieces of propaganda for altcoins Bcash ABC and Bcash SV critically, one can draw certain conclusions about their motivations. The reasoning often resorts to appeal to emotion, conjectures and clear cut cases of ad-hominems towards the other side.
From the Bcash ABC website:
In October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous whitepaper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”. In 2009, he released the first bitcoin software that powered the network, and it operated smoothly for several years with low fees, and fast, reliable transactions.
Unfortunately, from 2016 to 2017, Bitcoin became increasingly unreliable and expensive. This was because the community could not reach consensus on increasing the network capacity. Some of the developers did not understand and agree with Satoshi's plan.1 Instead, they preferred Bitcoin become a settlement layer.
By 2017, Bitcoin dominance had plummeted from 95% to as low as 40% as a direct result of the usability problems.2 Fortunately, a large portion of the Bitcoin community, including developers, investors, users, and businesses, still believed in the original vision of Bitcoin1 -- a low fee, peer to peer electronic cash system that could be used by all the people of the world.
On August 1st, 2017, we took the logical step of increasing the maximum block size, and Bitcoin Cash was born. Anyone who held Bitcoin at that time (block 478558) became an owner of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The network now supports up to 32MB blocks with ongoing research to allow massive future increases.
1: It is not particularly hard to show that Satoshi's vision is not in par with the way Bitcoin Cash deals with the issue of scaling. But even with that, purporting that they are true deciles of Satoshi is an appeal to authority and also emotion.
2: It's impossible to provably attribute bitcoin's market dominance to this. There's a plethora of factors and even claiming that the scaling debates played a major role on how bitcoin performed among other cryptos in the market is a projection.
The way BCashSV go about pursuing what they supposedly perceive as "Satoshi's Vision" by hard-forking to not accept certain technologies BCashABC is introducing and increase the block size limit.
BcashABC did not support the enabling of CTOR and Oracles.
CTOR being a technology that supposedly reduces attack vectors and changes block creation. More on it
here.
'Oracles' was dubbed as a foundation for smart contracts by
BCashABC supporters, it's basically basic scripting functionality, but it can't query outside sources.
The most important change is probably a large increase by BCashSV in the block size to 128MB from 32MB in ABC.
BCashABC is supported by Roger Ver (and other notable parties like Jihan Wu, Bitmain, OpenBazaar). BCashSV is created by Craig Wright's company, nChain.
What do they get wrong about Satoshi's vision? Quoting Satoshi directly:
Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:
We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your
proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
For transferable proof of work tokens to have value, they must have
monetary value. To have monetary value, they must be transferred within
a very large network - for example a file trading network akin to
bittorrent.
To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one
must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which,
naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past
transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If
hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of
bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section
to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.
The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi's suggestion for increasing the capacity of the bitcoin network was that users could use non-full clients to use bitcoin. Only mining pools and 'specialized hardware' would need to run clients for full validation.
However, in all of Satoshi's
online footprint, none of his messages indicate that all of the scaling should happen on-chain. In fact, Satoshi makes a strong point that bandwidth costs and limitations could be prohibitive in the following years for allowing the decentralization of the network with a high capacity of transactions on-chain.
Fact of the matter is, we're not yet at a stage where bandwidth costs would make it acceptable to maintain a fairly decentralized network for bitcoin. If pools and service providers can't operate full-nodes on site, then the bitcoin network becomes easier to censor, and easier to take down. For the time being, user-hosted nodes are vital to bitcoin's survival and that would be at least until technologies can be developed to support scaling and the use of external applications built utilizing bitcoin's network, but not fully storing all information on it.
Satoshi points out that users should be free to use only the information of the blockchain they need by utilizing a client only including block headers. BCash supporters were against SegWit because they claimed that (in the future) it would not allow transaction processing on the user-level, making it more centralized and trust based. But in reality, with their alternative of bigger blocks, if the network was to receive any real use, storing the blockchain would become prohibitive in a matter of days for home users. This could make the network's size much more limited in a matter of days. Data storage and bandwidth costs are not yet ready to support such large data flows and they might not be for a decade to follow as well. In fact, many countries don't even have data-centers that could support such hosting in competitive prices. Rendering anyone who would like to use ANY functionality of the network liable to much higher costs.
What's worse is that by introducing on-chain scaling for the support of smart contracts, BCash ABC is bound to bring blockchain bloat to new highs. Ethereum has smart contracts and a network receiving actual use. Their block size excheeded 1TB this year, and requirements to run a node validating transactions are increasing at a constant rate. Additionally, there's only one client that can support Ethereum nodes. As of September, here are the minimum system requirements to run one:
A SSD able to perform: 68 MB/s of random writes and 30.9 MB/s of randoms reads on average. +112GB of capacity (24/09/2018).
13–14GB of RAM
A CPU able to handle a lot of interrupts
SourceAnd bear in mind that both ETH and BTC have much higher average block sized (data use rate) than BCHABC. That is, if you take average 10/min block sizes from ethereum to bring it on the same playing field with others due to its much faster block generation target.
The argument against SegWit has for long been that it would be bad for decentralization. SegWit, in fact, opens up the way for off-chain transactions to be more efficient. This way small, every day transactions won't have to be permanently stored in the blockchain, with participants in the network still being able to host nodes on their own.
The alternative of on-chain scaling presented by Bcash is more centralized in two levels. First of all verification will not be able to be performed by users once the chain starts receiving use. And secondly, trustless service and mining use will be restricted to territories where nodes can be hosted. This way making censorship attacks on users easier and also decreasing the overall decentralization of the network.
As of pro BCash arguments appealing to Satoshi's 'vision', other than the fact that satoshi's vision isn't clearly pointing to one side, it's clear by looking at the original messages of Satoshi that the BCash 'vision' strives further away from any originally intended use for blockchain than SegWit and off-chain scaling. Satoshi made it clear that 'specialized' computing could be used for processing transactions. This vision is not prohiobitive of off-chain solutions as BCash supporters would like us to believe. Instead, Satoshi made it clear that the network should wait for data storage and transfer costs going down significantly before scaling blockchain capacity, which is very much against the BCash gospel which calls for enabling massive on-chain scaling right now. Which would also hurt decentralization.
Conclusions:Both BCashABC and BCashSV beneficiaries are taking a dishonest approach to promoting their altcoins. If given the benefit of the doubt and examined critically, approaches to scaling from both are bad.
BCashABC introduces scripting and aims to enable its own version 'smart contracts' through that, all under a smaller block size cap than SV. However, any use of smart contracts would increase the average blockchain growth rate in spite of the lower block size cap. In par with Ethereum having a large blockchain growth rate.
BCashSV increases block size significantly, but rejects scripting for use in on-block 'smart contracts'. Theoretically, with an even larger block size, the network could scale more, but realistically speaking it's a fragment of an already fragmented network. If that block size increase will receive any use, is something that only time will tell. But with the network coming out of a fork, it sounds unlikely.
Bitcoin Core with SegWit is the closest we have to Satoshi's vision at the moment and also the alternative able to maintain the best decentralization for the bitcoin network. Satoshi had indicated that large-scale chain scaling should only happen when infrastructure could reasonably support it. And he had also made clear that running certain aspects of a node on dedicated servers was acceptable to enable the network to scale. BCashABC and BCashSV creators both project a warped perception of Satoshi's vision and are also offering solutions that are worse in terms of decentralization.
