Epic, monstrous post of Jihan Wu (AntPool)

[sturle]

If Bitcoin has to be scaled via hard forks pushed by a small group, or if a small group (i.e. 2 miners) can block scaling by blocking a size change, then Bitcoin has to fall under control of a very few number of players to succeed.  This contradicts your previous stance.

Of course any small group of people do not represent the consensus, that's why we need a large scale vote and count everyone's opinion through miners vote with their hash power, and service providers asking their customers (you can not fake hash power, and you can not fake long term users on platforms)

Who cares what the miners think?  Miners can't change the consensus.  To change consensus, you must update every bitcoin node on the network.  Otherwise you get what is known as an altcoin.

Currently for those who voted with their hash power, classic has the majority hash power.

A falsum.  If this pie was true, "Classic" would have forked their altcoin already.  And they may already have.  I don't think many people would notice, except for the handful of people who actually use "Classic".

[QuestionAuthority]

If Bitcoin has to be scaled via hard forks pushed by a small group, or if a small group (i.e. 2 miners) can block scaling by blocking a size change, then Bitcoin has to fall under control of a very few number of players to succeed.  This contradicts your previous stance.

Of course any small group of people do not represent the consensus, that's why we need a large scale vote and count everyone's opinion through miners vote with their hash power, and service providers asking their customers (you can not fake hash power, and you can not fake long term users on platforms)

Currently for those who voted with their hash power, classic has the majority hash power, and even user number is several times more than core users. And for those who don't vote (currently over 90% of mining hash power has not voted yet) it means they don't care, we can assume that they want bitcoin to run on its historical trajectory (non-full blocks and low fee), so they can also be assumed to support classic. Or, we can assume that they don't command enough knowledge to do the vote, so their vote can not be counted. But since in bitcoin's world no one is responsible for your financial loss, I think everyone who is enough serious about his investment should participate in the vote

wow

can you post the source of this graph please.

It's a scammer trick. That's the vote distribution on the tiny little baby pool that Slush still runs. That stupid graph only represents 3% of the hash rate. There is so much misinformation being thrown around here it's a wonder anyone can make a decision on whether their own bladder is full enough to take a piss.

[mkc]

Ant pool mentioned was implementing some kind of voting mechanism, any follow up on this?
I do think some voting mechanism is needed, anybody with Bitcoin can vote.

[Lauda]

It's a scammer trick. That's the vote distribution on the tiny little baby pool that Slush still runs. That stupid graph only represents 3% of the hash rate. There is so much misinformation being thrown around here it's a wonder anyone can make a decision on whether their own bladder is full enough to take a piss.

I've called them out on misleading charts before, but they always try using some straw-man arguments to get away with it. There is clearly a very low amount of supporters for Classic. Additionally, if you have read a recent article called "A date with Sybil" then you would know that the nodes are run by less than 300 people (according to the analysis).

I do think some voting mechanism is needed, anybody with Bitcoin can vote.

Well it could work without a mechanism. Miners could easily show support (or "vote") by changing their pool.

[alyssa85]

The elephant in the room is the fact that 75% of all mining is currently controlled by just 4 pools: F2Pool, AntPool, BTCCPool, and BitFury.



So a small number of large mining pools can dictate by consensus among themselves which version is used to mine, and therefore which version is carried forward. The devs, merchants, users, and investors have little to say in this. The pools are only answerable to their clients, who can only vote with their feet and move to another pool. Bottom line: the large mining pools will do what is in their best interest to maintain the status quo and market share.

Wow, I didn't realise it was that concentrated. And most of that is in China too. What if the Chinese govt went full retard like the Venezuelan govt and arrested all the miners. Mining really needs to be spread out evenly across the globe so there is no single point of failure.

[Quickseller]

If Bitcoin has to be scaled via hard forks pushed by a small group, or if a small group (i.e. 2 miners) can block scaling by blocking a size change, then Bitcoin has to fall under control of a very few number of players to succeed.  This contradicts your previous stance.

Of course any small group of people do not represent the consensus, that's why we need a large scale vote and count everyone's opinion through miners vote with their hash power, and service providers asking their customers (you can not fake hash power, and you can not fake long term users on platforms)

Currently for those who voted with their hash power, classic has the majority hash power, and even user number is several times more than core users. And for those who don't vote (currently over 90% of mining hash power has not voted yet) it means they don't care, we can assume that they want bitcoin to run on its historical trajectory (non-full blocks and low fee), so they can also be assumed to support classic. Or, we can assume that they don't command enough knowledge to do the vote, so their vote can not be counted. But since in bitcoin's world no one is responsible for your financial loss, I think everyone who is enough serious about his investment should participate in the vote

wow

can you post the source of this graph please.

It's a scammer trick. That's the vote distribution on the tiny little baby pool that Slush still runs. That stupid graph only represents 3% of the hash rate. There is so much misinformation being thrown around here it's a wonder anyone can make a decision on whether their own bladder is full enough to take a piss.

I would not go as far as to say it is a scammer trick, although it is a bit misleading considering slush's share of the total network hashrate. AFAIK most other pools do not allow for such voting, so it would not be accurate to say that the entire 97% of the miners that do not mine on slush are against classic, nor are they for core, it is that they do not have a mechanism to vote. Another pool that (somewhat) allows miners to vote is f2pool and roughly 4.5% of miners there are "voting" for classic, although miners there need to change the settings on their miners which is a more complex process then changing settings on an account, and voting for core is essentially the default setting for people who were mining prior to this option being enabled.

[pereira4]

I think he made a couple of very good points:

1) Logically the devs should have very little power over the direction of BItcoin, and the users (as a whole) should have a lot of power over the direction of Bitcoin

2) The maximum block size needs to be increased immediately

3) Major Bitcoin related companies (AntPool included) need to carefully consider their position and cannot make any rash decisions

4) That the blockstream core devs seems to have a severe bias when looking at evidence and information

5) The the moderation policies of r/bitcoin and bitcointalk do not reflect the ideals of freedom of expression and the free flow of information that is believed in by much of the bitcoin related community

The evidence and information says that increasing the blocksize now is a bad idea, and potentially ever. We can't live off constant hard forks to temporarily pay less fees for onchain transactions because that's as stupid as it gets, that's why we must focus on additional layers to scale a protocol just like it has always been done.

Bitcoin is not a democracy, thats why it has survived this long. Idiots that have no deep knowledge in how to scale a protocol have 0 say on this.
In any case, run nodes for whatever you want to support (as long as they aren't fake nodes like most of the Classic ones).

[Quickseller]

I think he made a couple of very good points:

1) Logically the devs should have very little power over the direction of BItcoin, and the users (as a whole) should have a lot of power over the direction of Bitcoin

2) The maximum block size needs to be increased immediately

3) Major Bitcoin related companies (AntPool included) need to carefully consider their position and cannot make any rash decisions

4) That the blockstream core devs seems to have a severe bias when looking at evidence and information

5) The the moderation policies of r/bitcoin and bitcointalk do not reflect the ideals of freedom of expression and the free flow of information that is believed in by much of the bitcoin related community

The evidence and information says that increasing the blocksize now is a bad idea, and potentially ever. We can't live off constant hard forks to temporarily pay less fees for onchain transactions because that's as stupid as it gets, that's why we must focus on additional layers to scale a protocol just like it has always been done.

Bitcoin is not a democracy, thats why it has survived this long. Idiots that have no deep knowledge in how to scale a protocol have 0 say on this.
In any case, run nodes for whatever you want to support (as long as they aren't fake nodes like most of the Classic ones).

BIP 101 would have increased the maximum block size "today" and then subsequently increased maximum block sizes in the future at a sustainable rate.

There is little reason why someone would want to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and for the most part, this is not how Bitcoin has ever been used.

There is not any evidence that suggests increasing the maximum block size today is a bad idea. Even if such an increase is "not needed" then there will be no harm in increasing the maximum block size because current modern computers and current modern broadband connections would be able to handle 2MB blocks. BTW, if you are against increasing the maximum block size today, then you should also be against SegWit because SegWit will increase the amount of data transmitted each time a block is found.

The idiots that you describe are the ones that give Bitcoin it's value because they are the ones who are using it. If you go against the wishes of these idiots for too long then there will be no reason why Bitcoin will have any value.

There is no such thing as a fake node, just because a node is run off of a VPS does not make it "fake", it means that the owner of such node is using the resources of a data center to run a node for one of potentially many reasons. It is probably a bad idea to run a classic node from your home because if you do, there is a decent chance that your ISP will get DDOS'ed and everyone in your area will potentially lose internet access (this actually happened to someone running an XT node).

[ATguy]

The elephant in the room is the fact that 75% of all mining is currently controlled by just 4 pools: F2Pool, AntPool, BTCCPool, and BitFury.

Wow, I didn't realise it was that concentrated. And most of that is in China too. What if the Chinese govt went full retard like the Venezuelan govt and arrested all the miners. Mining really needs to be spread out evenly across the globe so there is no single point of failure.

It is not so bad, to the 4 pools are connected many individul miners who can change the pool if some pool misbehave. Im not fammiliar with the 4 pools, but Slush pool (about 3% of Bitcoin hashpower) have about 5000 active users (15000 mining worker units) working at any time...

[Bitcoinpro]

There is so much misinformation being thrown around here it's a wonder anyone can make a decision on whether their own bladder is full enough to take a piss.

 then we need a bladder piss test

[SebastianJu]

I think he made a couple of very good points:

1) Logically the devs should have very little power over the direction of BItcoin, and the users (as a whole) should have a lot of power over the direction of Bitcoin

2) The maximum block size needs to be increased immediately

3) Major Bitcoin related companies (AntPool included) need to carefully consider their position and cannot make any rash decisions

4) That the blockstream core devs seems to have a severe bias when looking at evidence and information

5) The the moderation policies of r/bitcoin and bitcointalk do not reflect the ideals of freedom of expression and the free flow of information that is believed in by much of the bitcoin related community

The evidence and information says that increasing the blocksize now is a bad idea, and potentially ever. We can't live off constant hard forks to temporarily pay less fees for onchain transactions because that's as stupid as it gets, that's why we must focus on additional layers to scale a protocol just like it has always been done.

Bitcoin is not a democracy, thats why it has survived this long. Idiots that have no deep knowledge in how to scale a protocol have 0 say on this.
In any case, run nodes for whatever you want to support (as long as they aren't fake nodes like most of the Classic ones).

Even though I agree with forwarding with things like segwit, you saying that increasing the blocksize should never happen is a plain stupid statement. You clearly see the amount of transactions are rising all the time. Still you await somehow that scaling will happen. Well, you might think of not using bitcoin, and pushing bitcoin "papers" around like it's planned with Lightning network. Though that is not scaling the bitcoin network. It is outsourcing.

There is no evidence at all that increasing the blocksize is a bad idea. Everything stated against is "believe". Though that is true for both sides of course. Well, the increase side has the past on his side. It clearly was never a problem having blocks that could be potentially way bigger. Now that the blocks are full, and the lightning network wants to get his place in the game, it is suddenly a big problem.

I hear this "bitcoin is not a democracy" so often. Well, guys that claim that sound like some persons back from middle age. "The king will rule, long life the king." As if the king can never take foolish decisions. In any way... it is a very backward directed view in sight of development of mankind.

Or maybe those stating this feel like some form of anarchists? We do what we want. If you don't comply then live with it since we rule. Which turns it to not being anarchistic anymore of course.

Regarding fake nodes. If someone wants to call them this way... I have read that there is a not small amount of such fake nodes sat up with core nodes. Guess those are legit then because... this is no democracy. Screw those damn rebels who copy core and spread an unlicenced wallet copy.

[Lauda]

BIP 101 would have increased the maximum block size "today" and then subsequently increased maximum block sizes in the future at a sustainable rate.

That BIP is horrible. Bitcoin can't support a doubling every two years.

There is not any evidence that suggests increasing the maximum block size today is a bad idea. Even if such an increase is "not needed" then there will be no harm in increasing the maximum block size because current modern computers and current modern broadband connections would be able to handle 2MB blocks.

There's that attack vector that a 2 MB block size limit opens up, but I guess that would be considered as "not evidence". Additionally, it gets worse the further up you go.

BTW, if you are against increasing the maximum block size today, then you should also be against SegWit because SegWit will increase the amount of data transmitted each time a block is found.

Not really, no.

There is no such thing as a fake node

Yes there is.

[exstasie]

The idiots that you describe are the ones that give Bitcoin it's value because they are the ones who are using it. If you go against the wishes of these idiots for too long then there will be no reason why Bitcoin will have any value.

Considering these idiots are complaining that the sky is falling because they need to pay ~$.04 in fees per transaction, I'm guessing they aren't the ones using it. Further, I'd guess they don't hold very many bitcoins at all. But who's to say? Well, there's always Bitcoinocracy....

[SebastianJu]

The idiots that you describe are the ones that give Bitcoin it's value because they are the ones who are using it. If you go against the wishes of these idiots for too long then there will be no reason why Bitcoin will have any value.

Considering these idiots are complaining that the sky is falling because they need to pay ~$.04 in fees per transaction, I'm guessing they aren't the ones using it. Further, I'd guess they don't hold very many bitcoins at all. But who's to say? Well, there's always Bitcoinocracy....

I think you never really gave it a thought what will happen when we would stay at having bitcoin reach a full block threshold and transaction amount still is rising. I guess you imagine something like slowly rising fees, right? In fact it will be exponentially rising fees because everyone has to compete against an always rising amount of transactions. Everyone does want to get his confirmation. You will have paypal fees in no time.

The attack vector against 2MB blocks, a transaction that possibly needs alot of time to get verified, has already been closed. There is a solution that only has to be included in core.

[ATguy]

I think you never really gave it a though what will happen when we would stay at having bitcoin reach a full block threshold and transaction amount still is rising. I guess you imagine something like slowly rising fees, right? In fact it will be exponentially rising fees because everyone has to compete against an always rising amount of transactions. Everyone does want to get his confirmation. You will have paypal fees in no time.

Your right about the exponentially rising fees only if there is no alternative to Bitcoin. In reality people will stop using Bitcoin before fees go to paypal levels. Theymos told it nicely, if ever fees go very high like over 1 USD, increasing blocksize limit can start to be discussed. The point is such high fees cannot happen because it is self regulating - Increased Bitcoin usage means increased fees which means some people stop using Bitcoin which decrease fees - some equilubrum has to be reached, fee size and number of Bitcoin users wanting to pay such fees. Thats why promoting artificially limited blocksize is direct attack to cripple Bitcoin.

[SebastianJu]

I think you never really gave it a though what will happen when we would stay at having bitcoin reach a full block threshold and transaction amount still is rising. I guess you imagine something like slowly rising fees, right? In fact it will be exponentially rising fees because everyone has to compete against an always rising amount of transactions. Everyone does want to get his confirmation. You will have paypal fees in no time.

Your right about the exponentially rising fees only if there is no alternative to Bitcoin. In reality people will stop using Bitcoin before fees go to paypal levels. Theymos told it nicely, if ever fees go very high like over 1 USD, increasing blocksize limit can start to be discussed. The point is such high fees cannot happen because it is self regulating - Increased Bitcoin usage means increased fees which means some people stop using Bitcoin which decrease fees - some equilubrum has to be reached, fee size and number of Bitcoin users wanting to pay such fees. Thats why promoting artificially limited blocksize is direct attack to cripple Bitcoin.

Yes, it either stops adoption or kills bitcoin by making it unuseable.

I somewhat doubt that bitcoiners will jump on some altcoin, I would not count bitcoin forks to altcoins there, altcoins have not the best reputation with most bitcoiners so it probably won't happen.

And surely the lightning network won't take over. By now everyone knows the critics on LN and when bitcoin really becomes unuseable and everyone knows a fork would fix it then LN looks like the evil to even the rest in doubt.

Besides that... LN is not Bitcoin, it is another network which means new things to install and whatever. It won't happen. Things like that happened already alot and even when they were innovative, they don't really played a big role in the end. It's worse for LN when it really rides on the wave of dying bitcoin when it looks like it could have been avoided but wasn't for reasons.

[Hamuki]

1) Logically the devs should have very little power over the direction of BItcoin, and the users (as a whole) should have a lot of power over the direction of Bitcoin

I concur. However, when deciding between proposals developers should have more 'power' (because let's face it, the average human is pretty stupid/ignorant). I hope that you understand what I mean by this.

Totally agreed. Core Devs are the ones brought us here and now, after Satoshi.

2) The maximum block size needs to be increased immediately

No. Segwit will be enough for now.

As long as now is now...and not in 6 months.

[sturle]

There is little reason why someone would want to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and for the most part, this is not how Bitcoin has ever been used.

Bitcoin is a settlement layer by design.  If you use it for something else, you are doing it wrong.

[Quickseller]

There is little reason why someone would want to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and for the most part, this is not how Bitcoin has ever been used.

Bitcoin is a settlement layer by design.  If you use it for something else, you are doing it wrong.

I disagree. every bitcoin transaction will show up on the blockchain for anyone to see. If I were to send BTC to address "A" and then subsequently send BTC "from" address "A" to address "B" then even if both transactions are confirmed in the same block, then both of these transactions will be visible in the blockchain and the transactions will appear in a specific order. If I were to have a balance of 10 BTC in my coinbase account and then send 2 of those BTC to someone who also has a coinbase account via email transfer, then I never really had 10 BTC, I only had IOU's for 10 BTC, and transferred those IOUs, not actual bitcoin.

I would define a settlement layer as one that all transactions are not transparent. With a settlement layer, for example if coinbase customers were to send 150 BTC to bitpay customers, and bitpay customers were to send 53 BTC to coinbase customers then there would be a single transaction in the amount of 97 BTC from coinbase to bitpay, and not all individual transactions will be clear, nor will they show up on the blockchain.

The idiots that you describe are the ones that give Bitcoin it's value because they are the ones who are using it. If you go against the wishes of these idiots for too long then there will be no reason why Bitcoin will have any value.

Considering these idiots are complaining that the sky is falling because they need to pay ~$.04 in fees per transaction, I'm guessing they aren't the ones using it. Further, I'd guess they don't hold very many bitcoins at all. But who's to say? Well, there's always Bitcoinocracy....

The average transaction fee increased to something closer to $0.06 to $0.10 per transaction during what was alleged to be spam attacks on the blockchain/nodes. While this is still a nominal amount, both in absolute terms and when compared to the costs associated with using the likes of PayPal and credit cards, it is a significant increase when compared to what transactions have cost in the past. As Seb has pointed out, when blocks do become full and stay full for even the medium term (and possibly the short term), then transaction fees will increase at an exponential rate, and will continue to increase until transaction fees have increased so much so that users are discouraged from sending additional transactions (or until the maximum block size is increased).

BIP 101 would have increased the maximum block size "today" and then subsequently increased maximum block sizes in the future at a sustainable rate.

That BIP is horrible. Bitcoin can't support a doubling every two years.

Don't give any evidence, or make any kind of factual argument when refuting my points.

Roughly 20 years ago, it would cost a residential user roughly $45 per month for a 28.8 kbs internet connection (for both a dedicated phone line and the fee the ISP charges). Today, I can spend roughly the same amount of money for a 8 mbs internet connection. There are 10 two-year periods between this timeframe. This works out to available internet speeds to residential customers increasing by roughly 75% every two years for the same price, however it should be noted that the US (where I am located) is generally "behind the curve" in terms of broadband access so the increase would likely be greater for the rest of the world.

According to the lighting white paper, for Bitcoin to be able to handle as many transactions per second that Visa has ever had to handle per second, the maximum block size would need to increase to roughly 8 GB. It should be noted however that Visa has not had to handle that many transactions in roughly 2.5 years and usually handles much less transactions per second. If we were to increase the maximum block size to 2 MB today, and subsequently increase it by 75% every two years, then the maximum block size would increase to over 8 GB in 15 two-year periods, or in 30 years.

With my current internet connection of 8 mbs, I would be able to transmit an 8MB block to 10 peers in 10 seconds, and would be able to transmit a 2MB block to 40 peers in 10 seconds.

There is not any evidence that suggests increasing the maximum block size today is a bad idea. Even if such an increase is "not needed" then there will be no harm in increasing the maximum block size because current modern computers and current modern broadband connections would be able to handle 2MB blocks.

There's that attack vector that a 2 MB block size limit opens up, but I guess that would be considered as "not evidence". Additionally, it gets worse the further up you go.

Don't give any kind of evidence, links or anything like that. I am not aware of any kind of attack vector that you are claiming.

BTW, if you are against increasing the maximum block size today, then you should also be against SegWit because SegWit will increase the amount of data transmitted each time a block is found.

Not really, no.

What part of my statement do you disagree with? Do you not think that SegWit will increase the potential amount of data that will need to be transmitted with each block? Do you think that the maximum block size should decrease once SegWit is implemented?

There is no such thing as a fake node

Yes there is

How exactly do you define a fake node? How exactly are you able to claim that the nodes that are reporting as being classic are in fact "fake" by your definition?

[sturle]

There is little reason why someone would want to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and for the most part, this is not how Bitcoin has ever been used.

Bitcoin is a settlement layer by design.  If you use it for something else, you are doing it wrong.

I would define a settlement layer as one that all transactions are not transparent.

That would be your personal definition, and not a general property of settlement layers.  Not all transactions are transparent in Bitcoin either, btw.  It has been shown how you could transact on the side, e.g. A->B->C->...->Z on a sidechain, and commit A->Z to the blockchain.  Coinjoins are commonly done to obfuscate the real partners in a transactions.

The idiots that you describe are the ones that give Bitcoin it's value because they are the ones who are using it. If you go against the wishes of these idiots for too long then there will be no reason why Bitcoin will have any value.

Considering these idiots are complaining that the sky is falling because they need to pay ~$.04 in fees per transaction, I'm guessing they aren't the ones using it. Further, I'd guess they don't hold very many bitcoins at all. But who's to say? Well, there's always Bitcoinocracy....

The average transaction fee increased to something closer to $0.06 to $0.10 per transaction during what was alleged to be spam attacks on the blockchain/nodes. While this is still a nominal amount, both in absolute terms and when compared to the costs associated with using the likes of PayPal and credit cards, it is a significant increase when compared to what transactions have cost in the past. As Seb has pointed out, when blocks do become full and stay full for even the medium term (and possibly the short term), then transaction fees will increase at an exponential rate, and will continue to increase until transaction fees have increased so much so that users are discouraged from sending additional transactions (or until the maximum block size is increased).

And why on Earth do you think a larger blocksize would solve the spam problem?  It will only make the consequenses worse.  Bitcoin clearly needs a way to transact unobstructed outside the blockchain, and only commit to the chain when needed.  If miners want to promote normal transactions over spam, they should use spam filters.  Some pools do, e.g. Eligius.  If spam is the problem, you should attack the spam, not allow more of it.  When my mail server got attacked by spammers, I didn't run to the shop to buy more disk.

There's that attack vector that a 2 MB block size limit opens up, but I guess that would be considered as "not evidence". Additionally, it gets worse the further up you go.

Don't give any kind of evidence, links or anything like that. I am not aware of any kind of attack vector that you are claiming.

There is an attack on non-segwit transactions where you can make a 2 MB transaction which take more than 10 minutes to validate.  "Classic" has "solved" this by introducing a new hard limit to Bitcoin ("Classic" likes to brag about a limit they lift, not so much about extra limits they add), where a transaction can't be larger than 100 KB.  The largest transaction mined to date was 1 MB, and it takes 20 seconds to validate on a modern fast CPU.

There is no such thing as a fake node

Yes there is

How exactly do you define a fake node? How exactly are you able to claim that the nodes that are reporting as being classic are in fact "fake" by your definition?

Pseudonode is an example of a fake node.  It can emulate all popular versions, and some unpopular like "Classic" and "BitcoinXP", using almost no resources.  It just acts as a relay to fetch the requested data from another node which (hopefully) stores it.  Unless it is another psaudonode, which fetch it from another node, etc.  Perhaps there are only a handful real "Classic" nodes on the network.  We will never know.  The operator who run hundreds of "Classic" nodes on Amazon to attack the Bitcoin P2P network probably want to do it as cheaply as possible, and Pseudonode is the obvious solution.