Coinbase CEO disagree with "The Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus Proposal"

[LFC_Bitcoin]

When it comes down to it does anybody really give a shit what he thinks?

Well, he is the CEO of the most valuable bitcoin company, with more than 2 million users, if someone knows what bitcoin companies need to grow it's him, so I guess his opinion should be taken into consideration.

He can't be trusted. Coinbase is everything bitcoin wasn't intended to be. See these quotes -

Wow Brian Armstrong is such a jerk!

To me it's looking like he's telling everyone to not agree with consensus simply because he feels it doesn't meet his requirements.
Coinbase is a bank!Let's face it!
And imo Core's roadmap is threatening his business model. That guy is against Lightning Network and especially against confidential transactions as this could hinder Coinbase's ability to track bitcoin uses and therefore to comply to AML regulations.

Coinbase has never been on the same side of Bitcoin nor decentralization as the majority. I've always suspected this, but the strong push from Armstrong towards another implementation just suggests that he is unable to push his own agenda. Even his CTO signed various statements supporting Core roadmaps and whatnot. He does not have adequate knowledge to be able to state that, Segwit as the first solution, would be a mistake (what would he base his opinion on, bias?). He's still trying to push forward the joke that does not even have a proper team of developers. However, this post might cause something similar to this:

Does this mean all of the major mining pools are in favor of this?

Yes, over 80% of the hashrate.

What is a "female idea"? Why not ask for "ideas" based on race, hair color, age bracket and sexual orientation while you're at it? Ideas stand on their own merits, not the identity of the person proposing them.

Nonsense. It has been proven that the performance of work groups is increased when there is diversity (the more women -> better). That's what the person meant (I hope).

[c789]

Is he still pushing for the blacklisting of IP addresses? If so, then forget it.

Also, I don't like how they block/reject some Bitcoins based upon how the Bitcoins have been used. This destroys the fungibility property of Bitcoin (some Bitcoins are worth less than other Bitcoins). I like a lot of what Coinbase does but these two issues are a big problem for me.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=747596.0

[adamstgBit]

everyone that disagrees with coinbase wanting to back peddle and continue the blocksizebitchfest while bitcoin bleeds out, needs to withdraw there bitcoins from coinbase to cold storage.

[DannyHamilton]

the whole 2mb block size debate has been going on from summer 2015 and core want to make people wait until summer 2017..

Actually December 2015.

actually before that. but it was only in december that it got turned and twisted into a core vs competitor political debate.

People have been discussing and debating increasing the block size ever since the 1 MB limit was first put into place.  This is a discussion that has been going on since October 2010.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347

Everyone seems to think that the discussion started when they first heard about it. Nobody ever seems to think the discussion might have started before that.

[pawel7777]

...
Also, I don't like how they block/reject some Bitcoins based upon how the Bitcoins have been used. This destroys the fungibility property of Bitcoin (some Bitcoins are worth less than other Bitcoins). I like a lot of what Coinbase does but these two issues are a big problem for me.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=747596.0

It's the same thing as banks freezing/closing your account due to suspicious activity. If you want to trade on regulated exchange, that's the kind of shit you'll be getting. If it was up to them, they'll likely accept every coin and every customer, as it directly converts to more profit. But they do need to comply with law.

[mayax]

When it comes down to it does anybody really give a shit what he thinks?

Well, he is the CEO of the most valuable bitcoin company, with more than 2 million users, if someone knows what bitcoin companies need to grow it's him, so I guess his opinion should be taken into consideration.

2 mil users? are you joking? all the BTC users are around of 2 millions   

[hdbuck]

forget about HF already. give up. wont happen.

[European Central Bank]

2 mil users? are you joking? all the BTC users are around of 2 millions   

This figure gets thrown around alot. I think it's Coinbase wallets. I doubt that means verified individuals. They could supply that figure if they wanted to. I guess it's gonna blow their cool if they do.

[Quickseller]

I thought block increase was summer 2016...

We are fucked!

No major adoption for another 1.5 years, that's like an eternity in Internet time!

Segwit gives you almost the same amount of increase in transaction capacity as a 2 MB block size limit. What are you complaining about?

SegWit needs to be adopted by the userbase in order for the transaction capacity to actually increase. Also, if an attacker (similar to the one from last summer) wanted to fill the blockchain with spam transactions then they could make a lot of non-SegWit transactions that fill blocks up with transactions whose signatures are counted towards the 1 MB limit.

Transactions are still instant. They will still be instant. How quickly you want it to confirm is up to the sender and the market. Which leads me back to my first question: will fees be prohibitively high? How do you know? How do you know that people won't batch micropayments, send less transactions that inefficiently use block space? In the future, of course, there will be LN for such things.

Transactions are not instant, if your transaction is to get confirmed in the next block then you must wait on average 5 minutes for a transaction to be (mostly) irreversible (no it is not 10 minutes because if blocks are found on average every 10 minutes, and you send your transaction at a random time, then on average you will send a transaction 5 minutes after a block was last found). If however there are more transactions then there is capacity for transactions (eg every 10 minutes there are 1.001 MB worth of transactions sent) then the backlog of transactions to get confirmed will grow infinitely, as will the fee required to get a transaction to ever confirm (not just quickly).

One reason why, for the most part it is somewhat safe to accept 0/unconfirmed transactions is that transaction volume is low enough so that transactions will eventually get confirmed, provided a sufficient fee is included, so as long as a sufficient fee is attached to a transaction then the receiver can be confident that the transaction will get confirmed, as well as the fact that nodes will reject and not relay any transaction that conflicts with a transaction already stored in it's mempool making it difficult for most people to double spend a transaction even when it is 0/unconfirmed. However RBF will change that once 0.12 is released.

RE: the topic -- I think that Brian has a lot of good points (I would say that I agree with him on all of his points). Like him, I would question the timeline of the HF and would question why we would simply not use the code that is already available in Classic.

Coinbase would have the effective ability to veto any HF proposal as it is a significant enough of an economic player in Bitcoin to have this "veto card". I don't think they would veto a HF that increases the max block size to 2 MB next year, I believe that he is looking for a quicker timeline.

[btcxyzzz]

What do you think guys ? I personally agree with him about the second point "2. July 2017 is too far away to raise the block size"

Too far & possibly even a LIE!

[Kakmakr]

This CEO wants to throw his weight around, because USA users have to use his service to buy and sell Bitcoin legally. He also wants to fully regulate Bitcoin and strip it from all pseudo anonymity with all the KYC and AML bullshit. He follows the same goals as Mike Hearn and Gavin to strip people from their financial privacy. < Supporting XT and Classic >

Coinbase in my opinion, is just another Microsoft that collects information from it's user and regulate how and when they can use it. < Account banning, when they use the service for things they do not like, eg Gambling >   

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

This CEO wants to throw his weight around, because USA users have to use his service to buy and sell Bitcoin legally. He also wants to fully regulate Bitcoin and strip it from all pseudo anonymity with all the KYC and AML bullshit. He follows the same goals as Mike Hearn and Gavin to strip people from their financial privacy. < Supporting XT and Classic >

Coinbase in my opinion, is just another Microsoft that collects information from it's user and regulate how and when they can use it. < Account banning, when they use the service for things they do not like, eg Gambling >   

Well gambling in the US is not generally legal, so if they want to keep their FinCEN status etc. they kind of have to do that.

If you want to do things that the government may not see as legal, run a wallet on your local computer and send bitcoins bought from coinbase to your local software wallet.

Then use that to make your transactions.

I thought that would be common sense.

[Jet Cash]

1Mb or 2Mb - there isn't really much difference in computing terms. My view is that more 1Mb blocks is a far better solution than just taking the simplistic approach of increasing blocksize. What has come out of this whole debate in my oppinion, is the attempt by a few people to try to control Bitcoins growth and direction. For this reason alone we should resist the 2Mb immediate change. Also, as somebody has pointed out, we should switch away from large malignant companies who are trying to force changes on the philosophy of Bitcoin.

It seems to me that there are considerable long term benefits in supporting core. 2Mb blocks are a temporary attempt to solve an anticipated problem, and there would appear to be no long term benefits from its immediate implementation.

[Amph]

forget about HF already. give up. wont happen.

why? they are doing it with core directly now, plus segwit added on top of that

[franky1]

1Mb or 2Mb - there isn't really much difference in computing terms. My view is that more 1Mb blocks is a far better solution than just taking the simplistic approach of increasing blocksize. What has come out of this whole debate in my oppinion, is the attempt by a few people to try to control Bitcoins growth and direction. For this reason alone we should resist the 2Mb immediate change. Also, as somebody has pointed out, we should switch away from large malignant companies who are trying to force changes on the philosophy of Bitcoin.

It seems to me that there are considerable long term benefits in supporting core. 2Mb blocks are a temporary attempt to solve an anticipated problem, and there would appear to be no long term benefits from its immediate implementation.

first of all the ramifications of trying to make a block average at every 2 minutes or 5 minutes will affect so much more things.. so lets not mess with that.
lets concentrate on allowing more transactions to be let in during the 10 minute period rather than messing with the scarcity rules and difficulty rules.

secondly its not a fight over who has control. because ultimately NO ONE should have control. everyone should be able to builld in bitcoin and expand it if the community think its a great idea..

but for you to want blockstream to dominate and control bitcoin.. then you my friend have swalled the wrong pill and gone down the wrong hole.

blockstream in summer of 2015 when the debate reescalated could have put in the couple lines of code and have a 1 year grace period meaning that we would be about to get the 2mb buffer activated.. but no, they wanted the hardfork in 2017 all along. and they instigated the year long debate to delay any action. even now they are trying to not add the code in their next release (april) and try to keep debate going until july. just so that the hard fork happens in their planned agenda.

again bitcoin should have no controller. bitcoin should work without having to trust anyone. so dont join the core fanclub because then your missing out on what bitcoin truly is.

i agree they do have some talented programmers. but that alone should not be a reason to denounce any idea's of expansion that are not core inspired.

dont think of it as a gavin vs blockstream or hearn vs blockstream..

think of it as community 2mb vs blockstream delays and planned agenda.

no one ever said that 2mb+segwit was bad. but many many people said blockstream having overall veto power on what can be implemented or not and when it can be implemented is a bad thing.

the most funny part of blockstreams agenda. is when talking about any code that is not their own intellectual property, they try to call it magic fairy dust that doesnt work because there is no problem, or would caause a nuclear disaster thats not needed... but when they talk about segwit, they are happy to admit there is a problem.. and when they talk about LN they again are happy to admit there is a problem. and when they talk about sidechains they are happy to admit there is a problem.. but not if any of the millions of bitcoin users came up with the idea first. and thats what makes it so hilarious and hypocritical of blockstream fanboys, that they make it so obvious and think that people cant see it

[Lauda]

1Mb or 2Mb - there isn't really much difference in computing terms.

Yes there is. The validation time is quadratic, meaning that a transaction could be constructed that would take over 10 minutes to validate. Gavin proposed a workaround for this (limitation) and Segwit has a solution that makes the validation time scale down (to linear IIRC).

It seems to me that there are considerable long term benefits in supporting core. 2Mb blocks are a temporary attempt to solve an anticipated problem, and there would appear to be no long term benefits from its immediate implementation.

You don't need no solution right now. We are going to have Segwit released in April. This will give the needed capacity boost among other things. The HF should be deployed (hopefully) in 2017.

Too far & possibly even a LIE!

It is not too far && they lose credibility if they don't deliver, ergo such assumptions are foolish.

[bitbitch]

does the "consensus" solution hurt the Coinbase business model and road map?

i'm trying to get inside Brian's head to understand his behavior.

[valta4065]

2 mil users? are you joking? all the BTC users are around of 2 millions   

This figure gets thrown around alot. I think it's Coinbase wallets. I doubt that means verified individuals. They could supply that figure if they wanted to. I guess it's gonna blow their cool if they do.

I'm sure it's not verified individuals.

It's already hard to believe it's 2 millions wallets so 2 millions people? That's more the number of bitcoiners worldwide...

[Jet Cash]

1Mb or 2Mb - there isn't really much difference in computing terms.

Yes there is. The validation time is quadratic here meaning that a transaction could be constructed that would take over 10 minutes to validate. Gavin proposed a workaround for this (limitation) and Segwit has a solution that makes the validation time scale down (to linear IIRC).

Apologies, I was too general in making that statement. I was referring more to the physical computing aspects, rather than the impact in the Bitcoin environment. I did read about the possibility of creating spam text to clog the validation process, and there is also the probability of miners submitting empty blocks, which does nothing to help speed up confirmations. I assume there is also the possibility of some miners including dodgy transactions to reduce their computing requirements, and the detection of these will clog up processes.

Just out of interest, why isn't BIP6 being used to determine the desirability of a 2Mb block?

[pedrog]

2 mil users? are you joking? all the BTC users are around of 2 millions   

This figure gets thrown around alot. I think it's Coinbase wallets. I doubt that means verified individuals. They could supply that figure if they wanted to. I guess it's gonna blow their cool if they do.

I'm sure it's not verified individuals.

It's already hard to believe it's 2 millions wallets so 2 millions people? That's more the number of bitcoiners worldwide...

STATS

3,300,000
USERS

5,000,000
WALLETS

42,000
MERCHANTS

8,000
DEVELOPER APPS

https://www.coinbase.com/about