Wondering out loud: Which should Chinese miners support - Core, Classic or another?

[Mr Felt]

@gmax - I appreciate that you've taken some time today write out these arguments in a different way than you and others have before.  You're giving me a lot to think about RE: blocksize limit.  Genuinely, thanks. 

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[DaveJones]

..
We are a Chinese BTC company that has invested a lot in mining..
..I would very much like to hear your views.

One CPU one vote.

Having 'a lot invested' means nothing, other than you are part of the problem that makes this issue more complicated than it needs to be. So, please don't try to influence others by saying you have a lot invested and expect everyone else to help with your 'investment' decisions.  

One CPU one vote: Viva Vis in Numeris

[antanst]

@gmaxwell Your posts are insightful, thank you. May I suggest putting your essays/musings in a personal blog in order for them be more accessible?

[btc2016]

Nothing really new here, but a note for readers of this thread, that do not yet know the people in the ecosystem well:

• A note about Blockstream:
  There is no good reason to believe, that Blockstream wants to make profit by crippling bitcoin, like some believe. One can argue that they (Blockstream and Core) are a little conservative for not even wanting to announce a (perliminary) date for a 2-4-8 increase in their roadmap (and not even a 2 MB increase). But being too conservative and trying hard to make sure that Bitcoin can not be easily gamed by a bad player is safer (in the long run) than wanting it to scale fast (and having 10% chance that bad players game the incentive system).
  
  It is true, that scaling fast has probably the advantage of faster user adoption. And user adoption is also important for a couple of reasons. But at this stage, it can also be a disadvantage to have a very fast user adoption, specially very "untechnical" users. The Software-Eco-system is not yet mature enough. If very nontechnical user adoption were to grow very fast, some compromises might need to be done, to not harm them (in systems like linux it is easier to discard their needs when regarded as not important, because another distribution might look at the needs of some users, but in bitcoin concensus-parts can not be changed by one part of the eco-system alone without affecting others, and when millions of users have invested in your currency, it gets a lot harder to say "Bitcoin can not change feature A and B even in the risk of loosing some new users and thus short-term marketcapitalization and maybe part of your short-term investment because decentralization is of paramount importance, so your opinion is simply not important to us"). So faster adoption could slow down the process of finding consensus (even more than the problems we have now, even though know all people know each other pretty well, and most people agree that everyone wants the best, just different ways to get there) or lead to centralized services gaining too much weight in decisions making process by having the majority of users behind them.
  
  
• A note about Gavin:
  - Gavin is pretty pragmatic.
  - Of course Gavin acknowledges, that the Core-Team (an important part being Blockstream-devs) is doing world-class work.
  - Gavin has another view on the way to move the Bitcoin protocol forward
  - some do criticize Gavin for not being more careful about scaling, but in the end Gavin is not stubborn. He does not try to win people by posting nonsense like other might do. He has NOT posted comments that Blockstream is trying to develop bitcoin only in a way that will make them profit in the future. Gavin has another view, but highly probably know that Gregory Maxwell and Pieter Wuille also want just the best. There is only a disagreement on how to make bitcoin succeed in the long run.
  - Even though Gavin and Mike Hearn have had some common view in the past, I think people (and some Blockstream devs) should not put those two always in the same bag. These are two different people, and might have (or have had) common views on some topics, but have some different views on other topics. Or even on the common viewed topics, the might diverge in the detail if you look close enough. It can often be damaging to put two people in the same pot, when in reality opinions still diverge.
  - Gavin is much more pragmatic than Mike Hearn, he seems to listen what other say, and readjusts, and keep trying to find the right balance.
  

Edit: link

[canth]

<snip>
Some people, like Mike Hearn and Gavin have pitched a future where Bitcoin runs exclusively out of large datacenters and its users are left depending on the trustworthiness of a small number of organizations scattered around the world. </snip>

Hearn is out of the picture at this point, so I think it's a bit silly to keep bringing him up. That aside, would you care to back that up your assertion that Gavin sees Bitcoin the way you describe with some evidence? Here's my counter:

http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessarily-mean-more-centralized

I chose 20MB as a reasonable block size to target because 170 gigabytes per month comfortably fits into the typical 250-300 gigabytes per month data cap– so you can run a full node from home on a “pretty good” broadband plan.

-Gavin

[HostFat]

@gmaxwell
Move Core just to 2MB and you will have killed Classic.
But your team will not do it, even if it was in the proposal of someone directly from Blockstream at the beginning of the debate.
The reason is unknown, but it falls in the conflict of interest hole, that produces many dirty answers.

Anyway, if there will be an hardfork to 2MB, you will still be able to get back the network, by releasing many features loved by "Network".
Competing teams is the best situation.

I'll be ready to switch back to Core every 10 minutes.

[LightRider]

Nothing is fair in a monetary market system.

[brg444]

@gmaxwell
Move Core just to 2MB and you will have killed Classic.
But your team will not do it, even if it was in the proposal of someone directly from Blockstream at the beginning of the debate.
The reason is unknown, but it falls in the conflict of interest hole, that produces many dirty answers.

Anyway, if there will be an hardfork to 2MB, you will still be able to get back the network, by releasing many feature loved by "Network".
Competing team is the best situation.

The reason is simple, they've found a more simple and innovative way to provide for the additional headroom that a 2MB hard fork would give.

[RoadStress]

@gmax - I appreciate that you've taken some time today write out these arguments in a different way than you and others have before.  You're giving me a lot to think about RE: blocksize limit.  Genuinely, thanks. 

Same. People need to realize that Bitcoin will never die no matter what is the block size is or how are the fees imposed or any other reason. It will simply adapt. Go Core!

[xDan]

I ask because this is the question that we have been asking ourselves a lot recently.
We are a Chinese BTC company that has invested a lot in mining and also runs an off-chain wallet service. So we have a vested interest in Bitcoin not failing. Like many Chinese miners, we believe that a simple and conservative solution to the block size question would be the best, but it seems that neither Core or Classic is willing to offer. I would very much like to hear your views.

If you really care, you should find large individual holders/investors and Bitcoin companies and ask them, since they are what support the price and will support further price and adoption increases.

Asking sentiment on a public forum so full of trolls and sockpuppets won't give you anything meaningful only vitriol and manipulations from both sides.

[nomnomnom]

Hi  ,

@gmaxwell

I agree mostly with what you wrote, but I think the plan behind bip101 was that the average internet connection will likely keep getting faster with time, even today some people have 1Gbit fiber connection at home, others are probably watching 4k netflix right now. Ofcourse it would be a tradeoff and make it harder to run a node, maybe different values should have been chosen for bip101, I don't know, but I don't think it was Gavin and Mike's intention that it can only run at datacenters.

I think incredible care must be made when rewriting the rules like that: The rules _are_ Bitcoin. The stability of Bitcoin's rules _is_ the soundness of the currency. If the rules can be easily rewritten against the will of some users by others according to political whim then what can be trusted? Is the supply fixed? Will coins be confiscated and awarded to others? If that gate is crossed then there is almost always some excuses which is "good enough"-- as was lamented in some of Bitcoin's earliest announcements.  And these changes are controversial -- see, for example, the millions of dollars of Bitcoins backing opposition to things like BIP101 and supporting core over classic. I don't believe that Core has the power to make changes prohibited by the rules of the system while they are opposed by an economically significant portion of Bitcoin's users. If it does, by way of inertia or lazyness, have that power I don't believe it has the moral authority: to rewrite the system out from under people risks walking the thin line of theft.  And if the system could really be so easily rewritten against controversy: it may bring into question Bitcoin's ability to uphold any of its properties. This is a dangerous road that should be avoided whenever possible.

The Problem is also that satoshi said, we can just raise the blocksize later if needed at blockheight xyz.

Also if I understand it correctly your roadmap also includes a hardfork later but does not specify a timeframe for it, I think this is a big part of why we have this situation right now, maybe you want to check out my pullrequest to add a rough timeframe: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/website/pull/74 or you need a scaling roadmap part2 or something.

And if you guys have other methods of increasing throughput, like extension blocks or whatever, than you need to communicate this correctly.
We non wizard-people don't know if and how this is possible, but we understand that raising the blocksize archives the goal of more throughput.

BTW: I really like bitpays idea of adaptive scaling, can't you get together with gavin and plan this safely for next year or something. I don't like the 2MB HF, because it is no longterm solution. Also sorry if this sounds angry or so, I have not slept well the last days lol, please don't take it personal.

[PaulCapestany]

I ask because this is the question that we have been asking ourselves a lot recently.
We are a Chinese BTC company that has invested a lot in mining and also runs an off-chain wallet service. So we have a vested interest in Bitcoin not failing. Like many Chinese miners, we believe that a simple and conservative solution to the block size question would be the best, but it seems that neither Core or Classic is willing to offer. I would very much like to hear your views.

Eric, if you and other Chinese miners want to get a better idea for some of the kind of thinking that is behind BitcoinClassic, you should really listen to this interview of Mr. Toomim explaining how BitcoinClassic would like to change Bitcoin's governance model (timestamp to start at would be 42:44).

[Luke-Jr]

I think the plan behind bip101 was that the average internet connection will likely keep getting faster with time, even today some people have 1Gbit fiber connection at home, others are probably watching 4k netflix right now.

Average internet connectivity improvements only give about 30% per year optimistically. BIP 101 was far more aggressive than that.

And while some minority of the world has 1 Gbit available, requiring it would be saying nobody else can use Bitcoin.
I'm only slightly rural and I can't get better than 5/0.5 Mbps yet.

[canth]

I think the plan behind bip101 was that the average internet connection will likely keep getting faster with time, even today some people have 1Gbit fiber connection at home, others are probably watching 4k netflix right now.

Average internet connectivity improvements only give about 30% per year optimistically. BIP 101 was far more aggressive than that.

And while some minority of the world has 1 Gbit available, requiring it would be saying nobody else can use Bitcoin.
I'm only slightly rural and I can't get better than 5/0.5 Mbps yet.

A minority of the world has >1Mb/s persistent internet, persistent power and a computing device capable of running Bitcoin. If some people can't run Bitcoin full nodes now, it's not a failure - nor will it be the case if some can't run it in the future.

There are literally hundreds of millions of people that have persistent home broadband sufficient to run with larger blocks. It's not relevant that you aren't one of them.

[af_newbie]

I think the plan behind bip101 was that the average internet connection will likely keep getting faster with time, even today some people have 1Gbit fiber connection at home, others are probably watching 4k netflix right now.

Average internet connectivity improvements only give about 30% per year optimistically. BIP 101 was far more aggressive than that.

And while some minority of the world has 1 Gbit available, requiring it would be saying nobody else can use Bitcoin.
I'm only slightly rural and I can't get better than 5/0.5 Mbps yet.

A minority of the world has >1Mb/s persistent internet, persistent power and a computing device capable of running Bitcoin. If some people can't run Bitcoin full nodes now, it's not a failure - nor will it be the case if some can't run it in the future.

There are literally hundreds of millions of people that have persistent home broadband sufficient to run with larger blocks. It's not relevant that you aren't one of them.

The idea is not to run nodes only on fast Internet backbones.  Remember the original idea was to have a truly distributed system.  Scaling should be slow, slightly above the hardware improvement rate.  We have plenty of Paypal wannabes and many altcoins where seemingly simple parameter change caused failures later on.

I agree with gmaxwell, changes should be carefully made, not to infringe on the original vision.  If you want to make paypal coin, go ahead, just don't call it a bitcoin.

If core loses this 'battle', I think the original bitcoin experiment will be over.  Thanks to shortsightedness of people like Gavin and Garzik.

[iCEBREAKER]

Move Core just to 2MB and you will have killed Classic Bitcoin.

^FTFY

It is an engineering requirement that Honey Badger be completely unresponsive and utterly immune to political pressure.

Given any precedent set to the contrary, Satoshi's great experiment is finished.


But don't take my word for it.  Try this on for size...


https://medium.com/@PanteraCapital/the-governance-of-anarchists-blockchain-letter-january-2016-798842f468de?source=latest---------1

Bitcoin Classic: in theory, implementing an immediate 2MB change would immediately alleviate block congestion but would require a hard fork. Hard forking carries with it certain systemic risks:

    Bitcoins received from before the fork can be spent twice, once on both sides of the fork. This creates a high double-spend risk.
    Bitcoins received after the fork are only guaranteed to be spendable on the side of the fork they were received on. This means some
    users will have to lose money to restore Bitcoin to a single chain.

In essence, if a hard fork goes bad, it will likely cause large-scale confusion and make Bitcoin incredibly difficult to use until the situation is resolved. There’s also a very real chance of total system failure if a hard fork’s deployment is not well-coordinated across the entire network.

Dan Morehead
Chief Executive Officer
@Dan_Pantera

[johnyj]

I ask because this is the question that we have been asking ourselves a lot recently.
We are a Chinese BTC company that has invested a lot in mining and also runs an off-chain wallet service. So we have a vested interest in Bitcoin not failing. Like many Chinese miners, we believe that a simple and conservative solution to the block size question would be the best, but it seems that neither Core or Classic is willing to offer. I would very much like to hear your views.

I think the most important thing is that you have to understand what you are doing and the consequence of those actions, not blindly listen to others. Because the spirit of bitcoin is that every one should make their own judgement voluntarily, not forced by anyone else. This is important for your investment, since no matter how brilliant each side talks, in case of a failure, none of them will responsible for your loss and compensate you

Like you said, when you are lacking enough information to make the decision, it is better to be simple and conservative, e.g. assume that the current situation is the best until there is evidence it is not. And when you are making a change, make sure it is as small as possible, don't make sudden moves

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

And by support and development contract.  Private sidechains can offer functionality that a global decentralized system cannot directly for fundamental reasons-- e.g. instantaneous transactions, not just thing they don't offer yet (like CT or smarter smart contracts); they're just a different trade-off.  

Regardless of what you think of crowding-- an increase in the blocksize does not guarantee its avoidance, as miners are free to impose further restrictions; and a single person with a while loop could produce unbounded amounts of 'load'. Even if I don't expect them to do so, or at least not often, they can and that's always a risk at any (plausible) size.

The kinds of block size increase that even people aggressively in factor of block size increases believe might be viable in the Bitcoin network are fairly modest, e.g. classic and "2 MB", which, as mentioned is pretty close to the proposed segwit capacity.  By contrast, a private system used between businesses, could run arbitrarily large assuming all its participants were willing and able to invest in the cluster computers and expensive bandwidth required at _every_ node. Oh the benefits of not being a permission-less decentralized system.  The space of possible systems which don't require the other benefits of a private system, don't require the benefits of a decentralized public system, and would not work in bitcoin now but would with the kind of realistically small blocksize increase, and would choose to do so.. is pretty narrow-- and isn't something that we've ever considered in business discussions.  More philosophically, the bitcoin blockchain is a precious global shared public resource with huge externalized costs that fall to all future users; it's good stewardship to not cram things that don't need to be in it, into it regardless of what the limits are.

For added color: I've never heard a prospective customer say something like "X TPS won't work but 8*x TPS will work"; they do say things like "X TPS works now, but we might need 100000*X TPS on short notice, can we have that with absolute confidence if we're willing to pour money at it?"  And that latter question can never be true when your only mechanism is dumping all your data into a in a worldwide _shared_ decentralized flooding system run by third parties whos costs you don't pay. So if then also we also avoid huge businesses setting themselves up for failure with the expectation of the 100000 fold increase peak loads that the system couldn't possibly take without a decentralization killing blocksize-bailout, I think that is good too.

But also, hold up a minute. I think we're both playing along with Mike Hearn's claim that it's all _me_ saying, or the techies (or blockstream) alone, saying that HF's are dangerous in principle  and/or that block-size matters. It's not (go check out those bitcoinocracy links-- or Jon Matonis, for an example)... and it's also not our choice (except as people who own Bitcoin, and in our individual capacity to decide what efforts we'll volunteer time on). I get targeted because I've stepped up and drawn fire so that other people can get some work done.

I'm sorry for taking things so off-topic here. This is a tangent, and I wouldn't have gone down it. But people from Bitcoin Core who were on a phone call with some Chinese miners last week told me that some of these claims about Blockstream came up multiple times.  Even if it took a "happily biased" poster here to call them out, I think some people were thinking about them and I think it's better to have addressed them head on. I hope we can talk some about actual business needs in later posts.

So essentially you are selling fee-based private sidechains with customer support ?

And limiting main Bitcoin chain in order to force customers onto your sidechains ?

Wasn't Blockstream supposed to have no conflict of interest with Bitcoin ?

Man, you BS guys all are so full of shit. This will not go unnoticed.
   

[hdbuck]

And by support and development contract.  Private sidechains can offer functionality that a global decentralized system cannot directly for fundamental reasons-- e.g. instantaneous transactions, not just thing they don't offer yet (like CT or smarter smart contracts); they're just a different trade-off.  

Regardless of what you think of crowding-- an increase in the blocksize does not guarantee its avoidance, as miners are free to impose further restrictions; and a single person with a while loop could produce unbounded amounts of 'load'. Even if I don't expect them to do so, or at least not often, they can and that's always a risk at any (plausible) size.

The kinds of block size increase that even people aggressively in factor of block size increases believe might be viable in the Bitcoin network are fairly modest, e.g. classic and "2 MB", which, as mentioned is pretty close to the proposed segwit capacity.  By contrast, a private system used between businesses, could run arbitrarily large assuming all its participants were willing and able to invest in the cluster computers and expensive bandwidth required at _every_ node. Oh the benefits of not being a permission-less decentralized system.  The space of possible systems which don't require the other benefits of a private system, don't require the benefits of a decentralized public system, and would not work in bitcoin now but would with the kind of realistically small blocksize increase, and would choose to do so.. is pretty narrow-- and isn't something that we've ever considered in business discussions.  More philosophically, the bitcoin blockchain is a precious global shared public resource with huge externalized costs that fall to all future users; it's good stewardship to not cram things that don't need to be in it, into it regardless of what the limits are.

For added color: I've never heard a prospective customer say something like "X TPS won't work but 8*x TPS will work"; they do say things like "X TPS works now, but we might need 100000*X TPS on short notice, can we have that with absolute confidence if we're willing to pour money at it?"  And that latter question can never be true when your only mechanism is dumping all your data into a in a worldwide _shared_ decentralized flooding system run by third parties whos costs you don't pay. So if then also we also avoid huge businesses setting themselves up for failure with the expectation of the 100000 fold increase peak loads that the system couldn't possibly take without a decentralization killing blocksize-bailout, I think that is good too.

But also, hold up a minute. I think we're both playing along with Mike Hearn's claim that it's all _me_ saying, or the techies (or blockstream) alone, saying that HF's are dangerous in principle  and/or that block-size matters. It's not (go check out those bitcoinocracy links-- or Jon Matonis, for an example)... and it's also not our choice (except as people who own Bitcoin, and in our individual capacity to decide what efforts we'll volunteer time on). I get targeted because I've stepped up and drawn fire so that other people can get some work done.

I'm sorry for taking things so off-topic here. This is a tangent, and I wouldn't have gone down it. But people from Bitcoin Core who were on a phone call with some Chinese miners last week told me that some of these claims about Blockstream came up multiple times.  Even if it took a "happily biased" poster here to call them out, I think some people were thinking about them and I think it's better to have addressed them head on. I hope we can talk some about actual business needs in later posts.

So essentially you are selling fee-based private sidechains with customer support ?

And limiting main Bitcoin chain in order to force customers onto your sidechains ?

Wasn't Blockstream supposed to have no conflict of interest with Bitcoin ?

Man, you BS guys all are so full of shit. This will not go unnoticed.
   

Go back whining on reddit, or vote on consider.it.

Bitcoin's sound money and security attributes comes first.

Gmax explanation is thoughtful, Core devs does not have the power, nor the will, to force contentious hardfork and break bitcoin's consensus rule.

That is all, there is nothing you or anyone can do about it.

Sorry your head got brainwashed by the full of shit socialist mainstreameries.

[iCEBREAKER]

So essentially you are selling fee-based private sidechains with customer support ?

And limiting main Bitcoin chain in order to force customers onto your sidechains ?

Wasn't Blockstream supposed to have no conflict of interest with Bitcoin ?

Man, you BS guys all are so full of shit. This will not go unnoticed.
   

Go back whining on reddit, or vote on consider.it.

Bitcoin's sound money and security attributes comes first.

Gmax explanation is thoughtful, Core devs does not have the power, nor the will, to force contentious hardfork and break bitcoin's consensus rule.

That is all, there is nothing you or anyone can do about it.

Sorry your head got brainwashed by the full of shit socialist mainstreameries.

Bitcoin's Nakamoto Consensus interprets contention as damage and routes around it.