Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

[brg444]

I have been doing most of my writing on a different thread recently. I invite everyone to join me there, even my ideological opponents.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-162#post-5549

I have found that the discussion on this thread is far more civil and constructive.

You make it sound like Core just resurrected Hitler and reinstated the third reich.

IIRC that's not planned until 0.14.

That is a very dark joke theymos, I might even go as far as to say that it is distasteful.

[brg444]

But at least you understand that BIP101 will increase the risk of centralization. However for SW proposal, I totally don't understand anything at all: By changing the bitcoin architecture, Pieter essentially change it to something else, an alt-coin. So all the talks about SW should go into alt-coin section, not here. And all this large degree of deviation from Satoshi's original design for what? A mere one time increase for capacity of light nodes, not even helping full nodes?

I've been quite surprised by your reaction to this proposal.

It's as if you're being intentionally obtuse because clearly you are making no effort at understanding SW and overexagerate its complexity.

Whether or not you agree with its motivations and underlying ideology SW is pretty straight forward.

[hdbuck]

But at least you understand that BIP101 will increase the risk of centralization. However for SW proposal, I totally don't understand anything at all: By changing the bitcoin architecture, Pieter essentially change it to something else, an alt-coin. So all the talks about SW should go into alt-coin section, not here. And all this large degree of deviation from Satoshi's original design for what? A mere one time increase for capacity of light nodes, not even helping full nodes?

I've been quite surprised by your reaction to this proposal.

It's as if you're being intentionally obtuse because clearly you are making no effort at understanding SW and overexagerate its complexity.

Whether or not you agree with its motivations and underlying ideology SW is pretty straight forward.

straight forward in cutting out the cryptographic signatures out of the blockchain... to allow more spam.

thank you but no thank you.

forkers should create their own altcoin already.

[brg444]

But at least you understand that BIP101 will increase the risk of centralization. However for SW proposal, I totally don't understand anything at all: By changing the bitcoin architecture, Pieter essentially change it to something else, an alt-coin. So all the talks about SW should go into alt-coin section, not here. And all this large degree of deviation from Satoshi's original design for what? A mere one time increase for capacity of light nodes, not even helping full nodes?

I've been quite surprised by your reaction to this proposal.

It's as if you're being intentionally obtuse because clearly you are making no effort at understanding SW and overexagerate its complexity.

Whether or not you agree with its motivations and underlying ideology SW is pretty straight forward.

straight forward in cutting out the cryptographic signatures out of the blockchain... to allow more spam.

thank you but no thank you.

forkers should create their own altcoin already.

I also enjoy the opinions of people at Qntra (or #b-a/trilema) but in this particular case I'm pretty certain they have no idea what they're talking about.

I'm not suggesting they don't understand the proposition but it seems that their response is more or less a knee-jerk reaction.

Under SW full nodes will still verify and store every signature pertaining to their respective transactions.

[RoadTrain]

straight forward in cutting out the cryptographic signatures out of the blockchain... to allow more spam.

Signatures are not cut out of the blockchain, as they are linked to the block via merkle tree, in esentially the same way transactions are linked currently. Signatures remain a consensus rule. You can an will verify them.

[VeritasSapere]

Thanks RoadTrain and brg444, you have actually answered some questions about SW that I was still wondering about. Specifically that full nodes will still maintain a full copy of all the signatures.

I do like SW though it will take a long time to fully implement and I also do not think it is a viable solution to significantly increasing the throughput of the Bitcoin blockchain by itself, which will be necessary over the short term. I would also prefer to see SW implemented through a hard fork instead of a soft fork which is how it is presently being implemented. I would also prefer to see the proposal formalized into a BIP so that it can be more thoroughly discussed and analyzed over a longer period of time. Instead of the Core developers just deciding among themselves that this will be implemented into Bitcoin ad hoc.

[brg444]

Thanks RoadTrain and brg444, you have actually answered some questions about SW that I was still wondering about.

I do like SW though it will take a long time to fully implement and I also do not think it is a viable solution to significantly increasing the throughput of the Bitcoin blockchain by itself, which will be necessary over the short term. I would also prefer to see SW implemented through a hard fork instead of a soft fork which is how it is presently being implemented. I would also prefer to see the proposal formalized into a BIP so that it can be more thoroughly discussed and analyzed over a longer period of time. Instead of the Core developers just deciding among themselves that this will be implemented into Bitcoin.

A BIP is currently in the works and I would imagined soon to be released.

As for the implementation the general consensus seems to be that a soft work would be much quicker and easier to implement than any other hard-fork proposals.

In short term Bitcoin suffers from no throughput concerns. We've yet to fill up blocks on average. Moreover the timeline for SW seems pretty reasonable and would allow for even faster deployment of large scale Lightning Network implementations.

As to time-line Luke I saw guestimated by march 2016 on reddit. Others maybe be more or less conservative.  Probably a BIP and testing are the main thing, and that can be helped by more eyes.

I think people have a variety of sequences in mind, eg some would prefer to deploy versionBits first, so that subsequent features can be deployed in parallel (currently soft-fork deployment is necessarily serialised).

Others think do seg-witness first because scale is more important.

Some want to do seg-witness as a hard-fork (personally I think that would take a bit longer to deploy & activate - the advantage of soft-fork is that it's lower risk and we have more experience of it).

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011969.html

[VeritasSapere]

Good to know that a BIP is in the works, though obviously I disagree with your assertion that we are not presently approaching network capacity, it is becoming quite clear that we are nearing that point now.

As you can see from this chart the growth in transaction volume is consistent, almost even exponential.



While the mempool also continues to fill up: https://blockchain.info/en/unconfirmed-transactions

Good to point out here that the last 7 blocks at the time of writing this where also completely full and we still have more then 7000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool waiting to be confirmed.

[Lauda]

I can give you a 10 pages proposal written in ancient chinese + arabic, and tell you this one can solve all the problems for bitcoin, would you accept my proposal? You need to first go into some university for 10 years before you understand what I'm talking about, or you simply ignore it?
-snip-

In other words, you are saying that you lack experience/knowledge in the field. This does not make the proposal that complex. There are simpler solutions, however this one is not as complex as people are saying that it is.

[BitUsher]

Good to know that a BIP is in the works, though obviously I disagree with your assertion that we are not presently approaching network capacity, it is becoming quite clear that we are nearing that point now.

As you can see from this chart the growth in transaction volume is consistent, almost even exponential.

I would suggest the tipping point where we can start to consider a fee market developing and rasing tx fee prices would be a day of full blocks(whichever the limits miners impose as ultimately they can lower the limit or reject tx's)

https://www.quandl.com/data/BCHAIN/AVBLS-Bitcoin-Average-Block-Size

We are still not there yet but it is also perfectly reasonable to take Gavin's suggestion that we should prepare for capacity limits beforehand. I take a middle view and suggest we should be prepared to implement a hard fork to raise the limit as a temporary bump (perhaps 2-4-8 ) if we have a day of full blocks and the fee market starts to raise prices unreasonably with negative effects on our ecosystem.

Paypal and Visa sometimes have outages , and it wouldn't be the end of the world if bitcoin had a brief hiccup and I like the pressure to incentivize more creative solutions (segwit/ln/relay network/ect...) that the fear is creating. Embrace the Fear and use it to solve problems in new ways.

[brg444]

Good to know that a BIP is in the works, though obviously I disagree with your assertion that we are not presently approaching network capacity, it is becoming quite clear that we are nearing that point now.

As you can see from this chart the growth in transaction volume is consistent, almost even exponential.

I would suggest the tipping point where we can start to consider a fee market developing and rasing tx fee prices would be a day of full blocks(whichever the limits miners impose as ultimately they can lower the limit or reject tx's)

https://www.quandl.com/data/BCHAIN/AVBLS-Bitcoin-Average-Block-Size

We are still not there yet but it is also perfectly reasonable to take Gavin's suggestion that we should prepare for capacity limits beforehand. I take a middle view and suggest we should be prepared to implement a hard fork to raise the limit as a temporary bump (perhaps 2-4-8 ) if we have a day of full blocks and the fee market starts to raise prices unreasonably with negative effects on our ecosystem.

Paypal and Visa sometimes have outages , and it wouldn't be the end of the world if bitcoin had a brief hiccup and I like the pressure to incentivize more creative solutions (segwit/ln/relay network/ect...) that the fear is creating.

People who need it will still be using Bitcoin even if fees a 100x larger than what they are today. This is really a non-issue.

[VeritasSapere]

Good to know that a BIP is in the works, though obviously I disagree with your assertion that we are not presently approaching network capacity, it is becoming quite clear that we are nearing that point now.

As you can see from this chart the growth in transaction volume is consistent, almost even exponential.

I would suggest the tipping point where we can start to consider a fee market developing and rasing tx fee prices would be a day of full blocks(whichever the limits miners impose as ultimately they can lower the limit or reject tx's)

https://www.quandl.com/data/BCHAIN/AVBLS-Bitcoin-Average-Block-Size

We are still not there yet but it is also perfectly reasonable to take Gavin's suggestion that we should prepare for capacity limits beforehand. I take a middle view and suggest we should be prepared to implement a hard fork to raise the limit as a temporary bump (perhaps 2-4-8 ) if we have a day of full blocks and the fee market starts to raise prices unreasonably with negative effects on our ecosystem.

Paypal and Visa sometimes have outages , and it wouldn't be the end of the world if bitcoin had a brief hiccup and I like the pressure to incentivize more creative solutions (segwit/ln/relay network/ect...) that the fear is creating.

People who need it will still be using Bitcoin even if fees a 100x larger than what they are today. This is really a non-issue.

I seriously think that your understanding of economics is lacking. If fees became 100x larger it would kill the majority of use cases for Bitcoin, it would certainly drive the majority of users away to less expensive alternatives.

Again, a fee market does not fix this, a fee market simply priorities who is able to use Bitcoin and who is not able to use Bitcoin. There are losers in a fee market that become priced out.

Transactions will also start to become more unreliable as the blocks begin to fill up as well.

I am also intrinsically opposed to artificially "forcing" a "fee market" this early in Bitcoins development.

Transaction-fee levels are not in any general need of being artificially pushed upward. A 130-year transition phase was planned into Bitcoin during which the full transition from block reward revenue to transaction-fee revenue was to take place.

[BitUsher]

People who need it will still be using Bitcoin even if fees a 100x larger than what they are today. This is really a non-issue.

Not necessarily, Bitcoin exists as the most respected and secure crypto-currency in existence at the moment. If I was getting hit with 30 cents to 40 cents each time a few negative consequences would occur-

1) I wouldn't be able to brag to peers how cheap bitcoin is compared to cc or debit cards to tx in . P/R problem.
2) I would consider using centralized off the chain solutions like coinbase to eliminate these fees which defeats one of the primary raison d'être of bitcoin.
3) I may consider using more fiat and alts for txs with lower fees.

Bitcoin is great but lets not assume invulnerability as its still young , immature , and risky currency with plenty of competition.

[brg444]

I seriously think that your understanding of economics is lacking. If fees became 100x larger it would kill the majority of use cases for Bitcoin, it would certainly drive the majority of users away to less expensive alternatives.

No it's not. You just live in a bubble outside or reality where the payment network is the majority use case for Bitcoin.

Jump out of your delusion for a minute and consider that it's not.

Only a marginal percentage of the money supply is in circulation. The rest is being held in cold storage.

The indisputable principal use case of Bitcoin at this stage is as a speculative store of value. That is: either people hold it or trade it on exchange for different fiat currencies. These use cases are not deterred by transaction fees.

Everything else is a major distraction that has largely been responsible for the current situation. Naive people such as yourself has been misguided into thinking Bitcoin, right now, is somehow a competitive payment network and that we should unconditionally strive to sell this zero-fee, instant tx to everyone listening.

I think that something the Bitcoin community has to be honest about, at least amongst ourselves is what Bitcoin is about today and what we would like it to be. Sometimes we make it look like it's about things we want it to be in the future. The truth is when we look at the volume of people buying the "stock" of Bitcoin and the flow of people buying their first bitcoin. It's mostly about buying & holding. It's totally fine, it's a decent use case. It's not a two-sided market : for me to buy & hold it doesn't require a counterparty to accept Bitcoin. I simply have to agree to a price that someone is selling. It has been working for 3 years and I think we can depend on that. It's not some theory, some hypothesis, it's working and it can keep working

[VeritasSapere]

I seriously think that your understanding of economics is lacking. If fees became 100x larger it would kill the majority of use cases for Bitcoin, it would certainly drive the majority of users away to less expensive alternatives.

No it's not. You just live in a bubble outside or reality where the payment network is the majority use case for Bitcoin.

Jump out of your delusion for a minute and consider that it's not.

Only a marginal percentage of the money supply is in circulation. The rest is being held in cold storage.

The indisputable principal use case of Bitcoin at this stage is as a speculative store of value. That is: either people hold it or trade it on exchange for different fiat currencies. These use cases are not deterred by transaction fees.

Everything else is a major distraction that has largely been responsible for the current situation. Naive people such as yourself has been misguided into thinking Bitcoin, right now, is somehow a competitive payment network and that we should unconditionally strive to sell this zero-fee, instant tx to everyone listening.

I think that something the Bitcoin community has to be honest about, at least amongst ourselves is what Bitcoin is about today and what we would like it to be. Sometimes we make it look like it's about things we want it to be in the future. The truth is when we look at the volume of people buying the "stock" of Bitcoin and the flow of people buying their first bitcoin. It's mostly about buying & holding. It's totally fine, it's a decent use case. It's not a two-sided market : for me to buy & hold it doesn't require a counterparty to accept Bitcoin. I simply have to agree to a price that someone is selling. It has been working for 3 years and I think we can depend on that. It's not some theory, some hypothesis, it's working and it can keep working

I disagree with your conception of Bitcoin, you are treating it like a get rich quick scheme. Everyone just holds until they sell for fiat right? That is unsustainable and it is a zero sum game. I believe Bitcoin is the future of money and more. Bitcoin is a currency and a commodity just like the gold and silver coins of ancient times. Which have served humanity as currency for the majority of our known history, there certainly is precedent for this concept to say the least.

[brg444]

People who need it will still be using Bitcoin even if fees a 100x larger than what they are today. This is really a non-issue.

Not necessarily, Bitcoin exists as the most respected and secure crypto-currency in existence at the moment. If I was getting hit with 30 cents to 40 cents each time a few negative consequences would occur-

1) I wouldn't be able to brag to peers how cheap bitcoin is compared to cc or debit cards to tx in . P/R problem.
2) I would consider using centralized off the chain solutions like coinbase to eliminate these fees which defeats one of the primary raison d'être of bitcoin.
3) I may consider using more fiat and alts for txs with lower fees.

Bitcoin is great but lets not assume invulnerability as its still young , immature , and risky currency with plenty of competition.

Another mislead and very lost sheep  

1) You shouldn't have started in the first place. Bitcoin is a miserable experience and absolutely unable to compete with centralized payment networks in terms of fees and convenience. That will change eventually, but right now they're not even comparable.

2) The primary raison d'être of Bitcoin is not that you should secure your everyday transactions under nearly 1 exahash of hashing power but that you are able to safely store your wealth in an asset that cannot be debased. If you find convenience in the user-friendly and cost effective solutions provided by off-chain solutions why would you not use them? It doesn't stop you from storing your capital in Bitcoin.

The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".

3) That is really the only sane way to go about it... Ever heard of Gresham's law  

[brg444]

I seriously think that your understanding of economics is lacking. If fees became 100x larger it would kill the majority of use cases for Bitcoin, it would certainly drive the majority of users away to less expensive alternatives.

No it's not. You just live in a bubble outside or reality where the payment network is the majority use case for Bitcoin.

Jump out of your delusion for a minute and consider that it's not.

Only a marginal percentage of the money supply is in circulation. The rest is being held in cold storage.

The indisputable principal use case of Bitcoin at this stage is as a speculative store of value. That is: either people hold it or trade it on exchange for different fiat currencies. These use cases are not deterred by transaction fees.

Everything else is a major distraction that has largely been responsible for the current situation. Naive people such as yourself has been misguided into thinking Bitcoin, right now, is somehow a competitive payment network and that we should unconditionally strive to sell this zero-fee, instant tx to everyone listening.

I think that something the Bitcoin community has to be honest about, at least amongst ourselves is what Bitcoin is about today and what we would like it to be. Sometimes we make it look like it's about things we want it to be in the future. The truth is when we look at the volume of people buying the "stock" of Bitcoin and the flow of people buying their first bitcoin. It's mostly about buying & holding. It's totally fine, it's a decent use case. It's not a two-sided market : for me to buy & hold it doesn't require a counterparty to accept Bitcoin. I simply have to agree to a price that someone is selling. It has been working for 3 years and I think we can depend on that. It's not some theory, some hypothesis, it's working and it can keep working

I disagree with your conception of Bitcoin, you are treating it like a get rich quick scheme. Everyone just holds until they sell for fiat right? That is unsustainable and it is a zero sum game. I believe Bitcoin is the future of money and more. Bitcoin is a currency and a commodity just like the gold and silver coins of ancient times. Which have served humanity as currency for the majority of our known history, there certainly is precedent for this concept to say the least.

No.

Everyone just holds until fiat is worthless.

I don't give a damn what you believe it. I am explaining to you clearly what the current market use for Bitcoin is. There is no debating this.

It's clear your conceptions of economics are misguided or outright ignorant. You might be experienced in obtuse political babble but it's clear economy is not your strong suit.

Have a look at this list here and consider how little of the top holders are concerned with transactions:
http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100

[BitUsher]

1) You shouldn't have started in the first place. Bitcoin is a miserable experience and absolutely unable to compete with centralized payment networks in terms of fees and convenience. That will change eventually, but right now they're not even comparable.

I typically find tx in btc easier than cc for the most part. It is also cheaper than using any of my merchant processors, and allows me to save 20% -25% off amazon from regulatory arbitrage.  You can use bitcoin as a high speculative asset and I will enjoy its utility right now.

The primary raison d'être of Bitcoin is not that you should secure your everyday transactions under nearly 1 exahash of hashing power but that you are able to safely store your wealth in an asset that cannot be debased. If you find convenience in the user-friendly and cost effective solutions provided by off-chain solutions why would you not use them? It doesn't stop you from storing your capital in Bitcoin.

That is one raison d'être of bitcoin, but not the sole reason... I invite you to read the white paper if you haven't already.

3) That is really the only sane way to go about it... Ever heard of Gresham's law  

Sure , but bitcoin doesn't exist in a vacuum, as there is plenty of competition. Its security and network effect can be difficult to overcome if an alt becomes slightly better one day , but if one was significantly better in most aspects I and others would flock to that alternative as people leave fiat to bitcoin.

Bitcoin is only a good store of value based upon its scarcity and utility or future promise of utility. Remove the latter and all you have is a scarce but worthless asset.

[VeritasSapere]

People who need it will still be using Bitcoin even if fees a 100x larger than what they are today. This is really a non-issue.

Not necessarily, Bitcoin exists as the most respected and secure crypto-currency in existence at the moment. If I was getting hit with 30 cents to 40 cents each time a few negative consequences would occur-

1) I wouldn't be able to brag to peers how cheap bitcoin is compared to cc or debit cards to tx in . P/R problem.
2) I would consider using centralized off the chain solutions like coinbase to eliminate these fees which defeats one of the primary raison d'être of bitcoin.
3) I may consider using more fiat and alts for txs with lower fees.

Bitcoin is great but lets not assume invulnerability as its still young , immature , and risky currency with plenty of competition.

Another mislead and very lost sheep  

1) You shouldn't have started in the first place. Bitcoin is a miserable experience and absolutely unable to compete with centralized payment networks in terms of fees and convenience. That will change eventually, but right now they're not even comparable.

2) The primary raison d'être of Bitcoin is not that you should secure your everyday transactions under nearly 1 exahash of hashing power but that you are able to safely store your wealth in an asset that cannot be debased. If you find convenience in the user-friendly and cost effective solutions provided by off-chain solutions why would you not use them? It doesn't stop you from storing your capital in Bitcoin.

The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".

3) That is really the only sane way to go about it... Ever heard of Gresham's law  

I use Bitcoin as a currency almost on a daily basis and I find it much easier and convenient compared to other payment solutions. I often buy my diners from this site: http://www.thuisbezorgd.nl/en/

Using a Airbitz wallet on an android smart phone, while using Bitpay as a payment processor it is incredibly fast, easy and convenient. I even find it to be superior compared to the other payment options that are available to me. My life and experience serves as a counterfactual to your obviously flawed statements.

I often find that the small blockist perspective is very bearish on Bitcoin, keep telling us how fragile, and unpractical Bitcoin is. I disagree, Bitcoin is great and it can do all of the things that you say it can not.

[Cconvert2G36]

But at least you understand that BIP101 will increase the risk of centralization. However for SW proposal, I totally don't understand anything at all: By changing the bitcoin architecture, Pieter essentially change it to something else, an alt-coin. So all the talks about SW should go into alt-coin section, not here. And all this large degree of deviation from Satoshi's original design for what? A mere one time increase for capacity of light nodes, not even helping full nodes?

I've been quite surprised by your reaction to this proposal.

It's as if you're being intentionally obtuse because clearly you are making no effort at understanding SW and overexagerate its complexity.

Whether or not you agree with its motivations and underlying ideology SW is pretty straight forward.

straight forward in cutting out the cryptographic signatures out of the blockchain... to allow more spam.

thank you but no thank you.

forkers should create their own altcoin already.