An Open Letter to the Bitcoin Community from the Developers

[Envrin]

Geez, you just can't please some people.  They go out of their way to organize two open discussion meetings across the world, filled with some of the top technical folk in bitcoin, and you guys are still unhappy.

I don't get it.  It's like someone offering you an olive branch, and you slapping their hand away.

Which approach would you prefer?  The open discussion format such as this, or Mike and Gavin just forcing things down our throat?  I think I'll vote for this approach.

[brg444]

ok, somewhat plausible I suppose, but idiotic as you say.

We can accuse both sides of bad motives but I think one side wants main chain scaling and one wants off chain scaling.  would you agree?

It's more like one side wants optimal decentralization and security while the other side is fixated on scaling the system by externalizing costs to the ones running it.

[adamstgBit]

ok, somewhat plausible I suppose, but idiotic as you say.

We can accuse both sides of bad motives but I think one side wants main chain scaling and one wants off chain scaling.  would you agree?

It's more like one side wants optimal decentralization and security while the other side is fixated on scaling the system by externalizing costs to the ones running it.

there's a third side saying lets give ourselves some breathing room, and keep trying to find a more optimal solution.

BIP100

[danielW]

I understand that companies like Circle (who are BIP101 backers) have Goldman Sachs and Moneygram as investors  
Little bit of a conflict of interest, perhaps?

I fail to see the conflict of interest.  What does Goldman and Moneygram have to do with anything ?

Still waiting for an explanation on this one Carlton.   Has your bias on this debate degraded your thinking
to the point of spouting non sequitors?

It makes about as much sense as the blockstream conflict of interest

By keeping the 1MB limit in place, Core developers would
force transactions off the main chain as Bitcoin scales.
And Blockstream is in the business of building sidechains,
and other extensibility.  I think that is a very solid argument.
You can disagree with the conclusion but should be honest enough
to admit that the argument is at least plausible on the surface.
What Carlton is saying is just nonsense
that he can't even explain.  

The investors in circle coinbase etc want to either cripple or centralise Bitcoin. They are funding Gavin and Hearn to do that. 'Solid argument'.  Plausible on the surface.

...

Actually, both arguments are idiotic ad-hominems. Both sides need to reduce the temptation of using them. It just adds vitriol to the debate.

btw most of the people including core-devs who disagree with XT are not from blockstream

blockstream people held similar positions before blockstream

blockstream gains from making bitcoin better and bigger

blockstream gains from keeping block small is questionable and minimal if even existent. Its a very long bow to draw

there are much easier ways for core devs to make way more money then trying to keep blocks small in some hope they can make money of open source infrastructure

the core devs have a long history of being motivated primarily by privacy and tech not by money

lightning network is open source and blockstreams business model is crappy, it receives not revenue. Its essentially a way to  fund devs so they can work on common-good infrastructure. Infact its probably the best way for them to be funded yet remain independent.

ok, somewhat plausible I suppose, but idiotic as you say.

We can accuse both sides of bad motives but I think one side wants main chain scaling and one wants off chain scaling.  would you agree?

Yes, as a rough generalisation. There is also privacy decentralisation vs growing at all cost. There are a few other underlying issues and complexities also.

Maybe the different visions will require a split at some point. For now its completely unnecessary. A uniting compromise is best . Both visions should be compatible for at least the next 3-5 years.

Bitcoin is way to small for such divisions now.

We don't need/have lightning now and we don't need exponentially growing blocks either. 4-8mb for the time being gives plenty of time and would be best way too keep us united, in my opinion.

[n2004al]

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21809/open-letter-bitcoin-community-developers/

As active contributors to Bitcoin, we share this letter to communicate our plan of action related to technical consensus and Bitcoin scalability.

Bitcoin is many things to many people. However, the development and maintenance of Bitcoin is a human endeavor. Satoshi sought review and cooperation, and the subsequent work by Bitcoin’s developers has made the system more secure and orders of magnitude faster. The Bitcoin developer community is dedicated to the future of Bitcoin, looks after the health of the network, strives for the highest standards of performance, and works to keep Bitcoin secure on behalf of everyone.

We’re committed to Bitcoin and responsive to the needs of the community. For the past five years, we’ve written code and managed over 50 Bitcoin releases and reviewed more than 45 formal proposals to improve Bitcoin’s performance, security, and scalability. Technical discussions, while heated at times, are always focused on improving Bitcoin.

Much work has already been done in this area, from substantial improvements in CPU bottlenecks, memory usage, network efficiency, and initial block download times, to algorithmic scaling in general. However, a number of key challenges still remain, each with many significant considerations and tradeoffs to evaluate. We have worked on Bitcoin scaling for years while safeguarding the network’s core features of decentralization, security, and permissionless innovation. We’re committed to ensuring the largest possible number of users benefit from Bitcoin, without eroding these fundamental values.

There will be controversy from time to time, but Bitcoin is a security-critical system with billions of dollars of users’ assets that a mistake could compromise. To mitigate potential existential risks, it behooves us all to take the time to evaluate proposals that have been put forward and agree on the best solutions via the consensus-building process.

In the upcoming months, two open workshops will bring the community together to explore these issues. The first Scaling Bitcoin workshop will be in Montreal on September 12-13. The second workshop is planned for December 6-7 and will be hosted in Hong Kong to be more inclusive of Bitcoin’s global user base.

We ask the community to not prejudge and instead work collaboratively to reach the best outcome through the existing process and the supporting workshops. It’s great to already see broad excitement for the event and the high concentration of technical participants attending.

We’re confident that by working together we can agree on the best course of action. We believe this is the way forward and reinforces the existing review process that has served the Bitcoin development community (and Bitcoin in general) well to date.

We welcome your participation as we continue our efforts to bring Bitcoin into the future.

Signed,

Wladimir J. van der Laan

Pieter Wuille

Cory Fields

Luke Dashjr

Jonas Schnelli

Jorge Timón

Greg Maxwell

Eric Voskuil

Amir Taaki

Dave Collins

Michael Ford

Peter Todd

Phillip Mienk

Suhas Daftuar

R E Broadley

Eric Lombrozo

Daniel Kraft

Chris Moore

Alex Morcos

dexX7

Warren Togami

Mark Friedenbach

Ross Nicoll

Pavel Janík

Josh Lehan

Andrew Poelstra

Christian Decker

Bryan Bishop

Benedict Chan

฿tcDrak

Charlie Lee

Jeremy Rubin

Very good letter. Finally the people have heard the voice of the reason and will sit to discuss about the problem which faced bitcoin nowadays. This is the right solution and not the division. Hope that everything will go ok and will not be division. Even flaring the absence of the name of Gavin. Hope it will not be late for a pacific and overall solution.

[adamstgBit]

Very good letter. Finally the people have heard the voice of the reason and will sit to discuss about the problem which faced bitcoin nowadays. This is the right solution and not the division. Hope that everything will go ok and will not be division. Even flaring the absence of the name of Gavin. Hope it will not be late for a pacific and overall solution.

oh ya they got this don't worry.

[jonald_fyookball]

@danielW , completely agree that splintering factions of Bitcoin can't survive on their own.  We are all in this together.  

I'm amazed by how passionate people are about Bitcoin, on both sides.  I'm hoping we'll all come out on the other side of this stronger than ever.

[dopecoindude]

@danielW , completely agree that splintering factions of Bitcoin can't survive on their own.  We are all in this together.  

I'm amazed by how passionate people are about Bitcoin, on both sides.  I'm hoping we'll all come out on the other side of this stronger than ever.

I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. I hope we all can just get a long.

[freedombit]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

Edit: Bitcoin, no matter what form or forms it takes, will survive.

[jonald_fyookball]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

[brg444]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you?

[danielW]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

I have a question to you and other big-blockers. What would be a minimal compromise proposal you could live with?

For example I think what Adam Back mentioned on twitter was very fair:

I.e. 2 mb now ( in reality it would have to be about 6 months to a year from now)

4 mb  after 2 years,

8 mb after 2 years.


If that was agreed upon and pushed into core do you think that would be an acceptable compromise? Would people drop XT then?

[jonald_fyookball]

sounds reasonable, but I don't see why we should wait a year.
why not roll out 2mb in the next 4-6 weeks?

In general, my concerns would be having plenty of extra room in case there is a spike
in adoption, and not being forced off the main chain.

[knight22]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

I have a question to you and other big-blockers. What would be a minimal compromise proposal you could live with?

For example I think what Adam Back mentioned on twitter was very fair:

I.e. 2 mb now ( in reality it would have to be about 6 months to a year from now)

4 mb  after 2 years,

8 mb after 2 years.


If that was agreed upon and pushed into core do you think that would be an acceptable compromise? Would people drop XT then?

At this point I would say "maybe". I will have a better opinion after seeing the effects of the stress test.

[brg444]

In general, my concerns would be having plenty of extra room in case there is a spike
in adoption, and not being forced off the main chain.

That's the problem, you can't do that.

There is simply no reasonable way to plan for security if you make decisions based on speculative adoption assumptions

[danielW]

sounds reasonable, but I don't see why we should wait a year.
why not roll out 2mb in the next 4-6 weeks?

In general, my concerns would be having plenty of extra room in case there is a spike
in adoption, and not being forced off the main chain.

I am not sure if its good practice to roll out hard-forks in such a small time period, unless absolutely necessary.


Many people would not upgrade their client in time, inertia is big.

[freedombit]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you?

Dish is definitely receiving Bitcoin payments.

[freedombit]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

I would not be so quick to assume that real world merchants will accept "only Bitcoin." First of all, some of these merchants were doing perfectly fine before accepting Bitcoin. They got into Bitcoin for a reason.

Secondly, it is entirely possible to build a "merchant service" whereby a Seller can accept any currency that the Buyer chooses, and have it instantly converted to their own currency. All this requires is more people to adopt Bitcoin and/or any other currency out there and to grow the exchange markets. Exchanges are very critical in this entire ecosystem.

[brg444]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you?

Dish is definitely receiving Bitcoin payments.

Yeah maybe some hardcore Bitcoin dude does it but if we are being honest this use case is negligible.

[freedombit]

There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.

The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin".  They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.

In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.

This might be a good time to look at the alt coins. Are there any alt coins that eventually went offline, or do all alt coins continue to exist, even if they only have two users and near zero value?