Todays TOP post in Chinese forum: Terminate the hard/soft fork debate

[franky1]

What you are describing is what I and others call a bilaterial hardfork-- where both sides reject the other.

I tried to convince the authors of BIP101 to make their proposal bilateral by requiring the sign bit be set in the version in their blocks (existing nodes require it to be unset). Sadly, the proposals authors were aggressively against this.

ofcourse people are going to reject the stupid idea to split the network..
ofcourse people are going to reject the stupid idea to avoid using bitcoins main feature... the consensus/orphaning mechanism.
but as we all know you want anyone who is not blockstream loving, to F**k off..
however blockstream is not the bitcoin owner, nor the network owner... though you want it to be.
blockstream should remain just part of the network, working with others on the network collective, to agree on rules using consensus, done via compromising and agreements by majority (consensus)

The ethereum hardfork was bilateral, probably the only thing they did right-- though it appears to have mostly been an accidental side effect due to the fact that their hardfork was rewriting their mutable state directly.. It has a benefit of being cleaner, but it is laughable to call it a "safe hardfork", because it eliminates only one fairly boring source of risk.

The comparisons so soft-forks do not hold-- normally a softfork does not split the chain at all. And it is safe precisely because any fraying it causes if it causes any is not lasting, and will automatically heal without human intervention or significant disruption.

all the upgraded miners will reject those small blocks produced by the minority miners, and extend the chain with small blocks mined by them, thus orphaning those small blocks

As a result, non-upgraded nodes would incur huge loss and will immediately upgrade to the new version, quickly make the hash rate on the new version almost 100%

It's unfortunate to see this kind of ignorance continue. You're adopting a faulty analysis that comes from 'assuming the existence of a privileged position', why is it that you assume the non-upgraded are incurring a huge loss? By each system's own rules its own chain is valid and the others is invalid in that sense they have equal standing, but one has the moral authority of being first and consistent with the philosophy of robustness against external influence. Because of this it would be more valid to say the interlopers are incurring a huge loss if anyone is.

though bitcoin right now has consensus of many implementations and diverse nodes. you actually want a 'existence of a privileged position' (dictatorship) and people see that you want it. and so are describing scenarios to explain why splitting bitcoin is bad, and why we should use consensus. to avoid a 'existence of a privileged position' (dictatorship) that you desire

Consider, the _only_ thing that distinguishes the litecoin blockchain from the bitcoin blockchain is a trivial bilateral hardfork.  When litecoin came into being and you were running Bitcoin instead of it-- were you incurring a huge loss? No.

From the perspective of the non-upgraded nodes, the parties with the mutilated protocol simply do not exist. Due to being bilateral, the same is true in the other direction. But none of this creates automatic winners or losers.  And in all hardfork scenarios there is plenty of opportunity for everyone to be a loser.

alot of waffle just to replace the word minority with "interloper".. a subtle but failed attempt try making people assume that bitcoin already is a dictatorship by suggesting anyone not a sheep to blockstream, as an invader (interloper)
YOU joined 2011,
core brand and blockstream brand appeared in 2013
stop pretending blockstram/core have owned bitcoin since 2009

Gmaxwell. its far easier to ask you to go and play with your monero and go program your leaders desire of a banking network over at hyper ledger. that to allow bitcoin to be sucked into the closed dictatorial realm of blockstream

bitcoin should remain in the open realm where anyone can be part of it but no one owns the protocol in full.
the only reason i see blockstream upping their game of dominance is that they fear not getting their next investment tranche from the banking sector if they cannot become a dictatorship of the network.

[Carlton Banks]

And Franky claims people are trolling him?

[johnyj]

What you are describing is what I and others call a bilaterial hardfork-- where both sides reject the other.

I tried to convince the authors of BIP101 to make their proposal bilateral by requiring the sign bit be set in the version in their blocks (existing nodes require it to be unset). Sadly, the proposals authors were aggressively against this.

The ethereum hardfork was bilateral, probably the only thing they did right-- though it appears to have mostly been an accidental side effect due to the fact that their hardfork was rewriting their mutable state directly.. It has a benefit of being cleaner, but it is laughable to call it a "safe hardfork", because it eliminates only one fairly boring source of risk.

The comparisons so soft-forks do not hold-- normally a softfork does not split the chain at all. And it is safe precisely because any fraying it causes if it causes any is not lasting, and will automatically heal without human intervention or significant disruption.

Maybe you have not read the whole proposal carefully. Or you don't really know the details about how a soft fork works? Please tell me under which condition a soft fork will create a chain split, so that I can be sure that we are talking about the same thing

It is not a bilateral hard fork, it is a soft fork followed by a hard fork. The purpose of this solution is to avoid chain split, while a bilateral hard fork is to split the chain

It is difficult to argue against this solution because what it does in the first phase is exactly what a soft fork does:  "It is safe precisely because any fraying it causes if it causes any is not lasting, and will automatically heal without human intervention or significant disruption." This automatically healing process is when those old style blocks becomes orphaned and old miners automatically switch to work on the longest chain created by upgraded miners. If your criticize against this method is reasonable, then it will automatically apply to any soft fork

You're adopting a faulty analysis that comes from 'assuming the existence of a privileged position', why is it that you assume the non-upgraded are incurring a huge loss?

Non-upgraded miners are incurring a huge loss in a soft fork because all their mined blocks are orphaned by the longest chain, and they must follow the longest chain if they use default client behavior (In a soft fork, upgraded nodes with 0.5MB block size limit will reject 1MB non-upgraded blocks, but non-upgraded nodes will not reject 0.5MB blocks generated by upgraded nodes, so all the blocks that is > 0.5MB will be orphaned if the upgraded side have major hash power. The non-upgraded nodes can not split the blockchain because they always regard the upgraded blocks are valid and always reorg to that chain)

From the perspective of the non-upgraded nodes, the parties with the mutilated protocol simply do not exist. Due to being bilateral, the same is true in the other direction. But none of this creates automatic winners or losers.

Yes, non-upgraded nodes will not see a new chain that does not comply to their rules, however in this solution, they will notice that their own chain stopped growing, they won't have a block for months, it just becomes obsolete

Of course the second phase is still a hard fork, however, after the soft fork, all the miners are already on board the newer version, this is a big step forward if you compare it with a standard hard fork where many different versions are running by miners and nodes. So after all miners have been upgraded to new version, the only inconsistency left are those non-mining nodes. Since all the hash power have switched to the new version, there will never be any old version blocks mined, so for those old nodes, although they can ignore what happens on the new chain, what happens on their own chain becomes strange: It totally stopped growing. They have to upgrade if they want to spend their coins, but since all the transactions on the old chain is disabled, there will not be a loss for anyone running old nodes if they insist to do so

Of course you could always modify your code and create a chain split and adjust the difficulty and extend that chain forever, but if you just upgrade or not upgrade by default, the chain will automatically heal without human intervention

[johnyj]

Just got a new name for this kind of fork: A synthetic fork 

[franky1]

Just got a new name for this kind of fork: A synthetic fork 

or better:
softfork = good code:patch.. bad code:trojan
hard fork = good: consensual fork=upgrade with no split.. bad: controversial fork= intentional split

none of the proposals have demanded a controversial fork(--oppose-rule, ban opposing nodes). they have all been consensual forks(consensus mechanism)
its only blockstreamers that want controversial forks if they cant get their softfork

[Wind_FURY]

Let us pretend that everyone, that means the miners, people maintaining Bitcoin nodes and the community supported Bitcoin Unlimited. What will happen to the core developers. Will they lose their position and their influence over the development of the network? Who will take over, the developers who started Bitcoin Unlimited?

Are the Bitcoin Unlimited coders competent enough to take over Bitcoin's development?

I don't go that far away into conspiracy road, but I think core devs should be more flexible and open to different ideas. This solution is so simple but missed by all the core devs, which raises a large question about core devs' competence

It is not a conspiracy theory because it is possible that the core developers will be supplanted as the top developers of Bitcoin. Also in asking the question if the Bitcoin Unlimited developers are as competent as the core developers, you know what I mean. Are they as good in coding and finding solutions to Bitcoin's shortcomings? If you think they are, then who are the Bitcoin Unlimited developers and what have they accomplished?

Answers to these simple questions should be known to the community so we could form our own opinions and express them. I honestly do not know who the developers of Bitcoin Unlimited are except that it is led by Roger Ver which I think has his own agenda.

[franky1]

Let us pretend that everyone, that means the miners, people maintaining Bitcoin nodes and the community supported Bitcoin Unlimited. What will happen to the core developers. Will they lose their position and their influence over the development of the network? Who will take over, the developers who started Bitcoin Unlimited?

Are the Bitcoin Unlimited coders competent enough to take over Bitcoin's development?

I don't go that far away into conspiracy road, but I think core devs should be more flexible and open to different ideas. This solution is so simple but missed by all the core devs, which raises a large question about core devs' competence

It is not a conspiracy theory because it is possible that the core developers will be supplanted as the top developers of Bitcoin. Also in asking the question if the Bitcoin Unlimited developers are as competent as the core developers, you know what I mean. Are they as good in coding and finding solutions to Bitcoin's shortcomings? If you think they are, then who are the Bitcoin Unlimited developers and what have they accomplished?

Answers to these simple questions should be known to the community so we could form our own opinions and express them. I honestly who the developers of Bitcoin unlimited are except that it is led by Roger Ver which I think has his own agenda.

or to flip it on its head.
if devs get involved and help each other out no matter the brandname. and start working as a community rather then a fight for dictatorship
then consensus would move forward faster.

[Wind_FURY]

I agree, it would have been better if the developers from both sides could work together. But too bad each camp has its own agenda and self interests and now the community is caught in the middle. I believe the Chinese mining cartel is also for the smalls blocks unless I am mistaken.

[franky1]

I agree, it would have been better if the developers from both sides could work together. But too bad each camp has its own agenda and self interests and now the community is caught in the middle. I believe the Chinese mining cartel is also for the smalls blocks unless I am mistaken.

the mining pools want more capacity but they are not even going to enter the civil war until the nodes sort themselves out.
after all a mining pool is foolish to make changes if the nodes are not going to accept them.

some lemon fruitloop tried to do a rekt campaign on mining pools by suggesting (falsely) that pools were planning a controversial split to scare the community into a mining civil war. but the mining pools quickly shouted the campaign as utter fud and that they would not do anything that risked the network or the security or even risk their own rewards.

mining pools want the extra capacity and some do 'have faith' that core will eventually do it. but this is not unconditional faith.

the solution many have come up with is
nodes: code, review implement THEN flag desire (taking XXweeks/months) to get to 95%
mining pools: code, review, implement at this same time.
when nodes get to 95%. there is then a grace period
THEN
mining pools: continue code, review implement THEN flag desire (taking XXweeks/months) to get to 95%
when pools get to 95%. there is then a grace period

by this point over 95% of nodes and over 95% of pools are all onboard. and pools then test out the water making a block of 1.001kb and see its orphan risk.
if deemed safe they slowly increase, until comfortable.

anyone doomsday shouting that "it will be 1.999mb blocks in 2 days" is just someone that is trying to prolong a civil war.

its worth noting that some pools already have ceded reviewed and tested and implemented their new rules. but are not stupid enough to make block beyond the current limit for obvious rational reasons. they are just waiting it out until the nodes get consensus, before even flagging a pool consensus

[johnyj]

I agree, it would have been better if the developers from both sides could work together. But too bad each camp has its own agenda and self interests and now the community is caught in the middle. I believe the Chinese mining cartel is also for the smalls blocks unless I am mistaken.

That's why this synthetic fork proposal is a large step towards reaching consensus: It combined the benefit from both soft fork and hard fork, thus will become easier to be accepted by both sides

It seems the most hard core core supporter in Chinese forum has expressed some interest in this proposal

[Wind_FURY]

Well then there is no need to argue anymore on who's right and who's wrong and let the actions speak for itself and may consensus be achieved naturally for the good of the whole network. If we get bigger blocks then we get bigger blocks if not then let us see how LN helps Bitcoin scale.

I do like to see LN launched and used because there is also great potential in it. One of it is we could make users less dependent on centralized exchanges and trading from one coin to another could be done on the Lightning Network as sort of bridge between blockchains.

[johnyj]

Well then there is no need to argue anymore on who's right and who's wrong and let the actions speak for itself and may consensus be achieved naturally for the good of the whole network. If we get bigger blocks then we get bigger blocks if not then let us see how LN helps Bitcoin scale.

I do like to see LN launched and used because there is also great potential in it. One of it is we could make users less dependent on centralized exchanges and trading from one coin to another could be done on the Lightning Network as sort of bridge between blockchains.

21inc's LN has been launched for 6 months, no one cares. If there is slightest market demand for this kind of service, why is there no one interested in it?

[Wind_FURY]

Well then there is no need to argue anymore on who's right and who's wrong and let the actions speak for itself and may consensus be achieved naturally for the good of the whole network. If we get bigger blocks then we get bigger blocks if not then let us see how LN helps Bitcoin scale.

I do like to see LN launched and used because there is also great potential in it. One of it is we could make users less dependent on centralized exchanges and trading from one coin to another could be done on the Lightning Network as sort of bridge between blockchains.

21inc's LN has been launched for 6 months, no one cares. If there is slightest market demand for this kind of service, why is there no one interested in it?

Lack of marketing perhaps? I have not heard of their Lightning Network before you mentioned it. Is it working well and are there enough users in the system? The problem I see sometimes is some developers create something that should be cool but have their own shortcomings. Like Open Bazaar and bitsquare.io. They are usable but they are somewhat lacking some features or maybe they need a little more polishing.

[Lauda]

21inc's LN has been launched for 6 months, no one cares. If there is slightest market demand for this kind of service, why is there no one interested in it?

That's not the Lightning Network. It is just their implementation of payment channels. Stop spreading false information.

[franky1]

21inc's LN has been launched for 6 months, no one cares. If there is slightest market demand for this kind of service, why is there no one interested in it?

That's not the Lightning Network. It is just their implementation of payment channels. Stop spreading false information.

you realise and know that "payment channels" is the technology/concept and LN is the brand name of one of those utilising the technology/concept.

trying to protect a brand name, even when someone is just using the brand name simply as just a laymens descriptor of the concept is very revealing.

its like saying people like to facetime each other on skype and you argue not to use the term facetime unless talking about apple.. very revealing indeed

protecting business interests more then cryptocurrency features is where the civil war began

[johnyj]

21inc's LN has been launched for 6 months, no one cares. If there is slightest market demand for this kind of service, why is there no one interested in it?

That's not the Lightning Network. It is just their implementation of payment channels. Stop spreading false information.

Lightning Network is not a registered trade mark, it is only a concept of payment channels. 21inc's LN is the simplest form of payment channel thus also one type of LN

[thejaytiesto]

Let us pretend that everyone, that means the miners, people maintaining Bitcoin nodes and the community supported Bitcoin Unlimited. What will happen to the core developers. Will they lose their position and their influence over the development of the network? Who will take over, the developers who started Bitcoin Unlimited?

Are the Bitcoin Unlimited coders competent enough to take over Bitcoin's development?

I don't go that far away into conspiracy road, but I think core devs should be more flexible and open to different ideas. This solution is so simple but missed by all the core devs, which raises a large question about core devs' competence

It is not a conspiracy theory because it is possible that the core developers will be supplanted as the top developers of Bitcoin. Also in asking the question if the Bitcoin Unlimited developers are as competent as the core developers, you know what I mean. Are they as good in coding and finding solutions to Bitcoin's shortcomings? If you think they are, then who are the Bitcoin Unlimited developers and what have they accomplished?

Answers to these simple questions should be known to the community so we could form our own opinions and express them. I honestly do not know who the developers of Bitcoin Unlimited are except that it is led by Roger Ver which I think has his own agenda.

Everyone knows that all those alternative development teams aim to, is to take control of bitcoin, make their software the "official bitcoin", then live off the hope of bitcoin core devs keep doing the hard work (copy pasting their code and changing a couple of things then appealing to open source to justify this copy pasting)

Core team is the most competent team as demonstrated through the years, there's no doubt about this.

[franky1]

Everyone knows that all those alternative development teams aim to, is to take control of bitcoin, make their software the "official bitcoin", then live off the hope of bitcoin core devs keep doing the hard work (copy pasting their code and changing a couple of things then appealing to open source to justify this copy pasting)

Core team is the most competent team as demonstrated through the years, there's no doubt about this.

only blockstream are telling people to f**k off (you choose if ** = 'uc' or 'or')
other teams want to use consensus
other teams have compromised to find a solution the community in the majority are happy with. so that consensus moves things forward ON ONE MUTUAL CHAIN of diverse, distributed nodes to remove risks and keep decentralized security

even blockstream were happy with it in december.. but then back tracked later and started the civil war when they decided they want 100% control.

sticking to consensus means NO ONE has control and rules only change when that are MUTUAL agreements across different diverse nodes.

[johnyj]

Core team is the most competent team as demonstrated through the years, there's no doubt about this.

The reason core devs knows more about bitcoin protocol is mainly time, if you look at all those guys who started early like Jeff, Gavin, they all familiar with the different aspects of bitcoin. Purely from engineering perspective, core devs demonstrated their lacking of software engineering discipline by pushing out the segwit sf hacky codes. If you talk to anyone that have designed larger software systems, this design is not optimum, it seems the only reason it designed like this is to avoid a chain split

But now we have this two step synthetic forking method that can permanently avoid a chain split, invented by Chinese engineer. Why core has not thought about this simple method before? This is definitely not rocket science, this raised a big doubt about their competence

Of course the idea is forming during several months of debate and many different people jointly contributed to the solution, but you should never underestimate the R&D ability of Chinese, their large IT companies like Huawei have mostly defeated all the western competitors both technically and market wise

[franky1]

Core team is the most competent team as demonstrated through the years, there's no doubt about this.

The reason core devs knows more about bitcoin protocol is mainly time, if you look at all those guys who started early like Jeff, Gavin, they all familiar with the different aspects of bitcoin. Purely from engineering perspective, core devs demonstrated their lacking of software engineering discipline by pushing out the segwit sf hacky codes. If you talk to anyone that have designed larger software systems, this design is not optimum, it seems the only reason it designed like this is to avoid a chain split

But now we have this two step synthetic forking method that can permanently avoid a chain split, invented by Chinese engineer. Why core has not thought about this simple method before? This is definitely not rocket science, this raised a big doubt about their competence

Of course the idea is forming during several months of debate and many different people jointly contributed to the solution, but you should never underestimate the R&D ability of Chinese, their large IT companies like Huawei have mostly defeated all the western competitors both technically and market wise

the consensus mechanism is not new.
its been there since day one.

its just that people dont talk about it because they want to avoid it and instead take control of bitcoin by shying away from the main security measure that prevents corruption. that prevents manipulation.

the linked "chinese guy" is not inventing anything. but instead highlighting consensus.
which is something we all should be thinking about and utilizing. and should always do