Post your SegWit questions here - open discussion - big week for Bitcoin!

[Carlton Banks]

I was just reviewing the release notes for v0.13.2 released about a week ago, and noticed a 'feature' where it would not be mandatory to use the SegWit addition even if enabled (if I understood that correctly).

Is this a very shrewd move to allow both SegWit and BU parties to climb down a couple of pegs to make negotiations easier and possibly get SegWit active without opposition having their hand forced to participate? 

Yes. This is because Segwit is a soft fork.

It doesn't prevent the possibility of a hard fork of course, but at least it allows for people to watch and see how it works and add some more fixes (malleability for example) and push back the date for blocks becoming full to an extremely uncomfortable level, which may allow a new approach to reaching consensus.

No...... Segwit is a soft fork. Not a hard fork.

I was never happy that consensus was set to 95% in the first place, as it in effect gives a minority the ability to block the majority (something we're seeing more and more in Society in general).  I'd prefer elegant design first, and pure horse power (BU) to add to that at a later date.

Horse power is not required. There is currently no propulsion tech in Bitcoin, I'm not convinced it needs it. You will have a difficult job convincing anyone.

[classicsucks]

In what way has Segwit failed? It still has another 10 months to go before the activation period is up.

I don't think it's feasible that Segwit adoption will reach past 30%, given that it peaked at 25% a few months ago. Consensus won't be reached, and the soft fork won't happen.

Firstly, Segquit was a technical solution for political and human problems. Transaction malleability is a problem, but it's easily mitigated in the current environment and is largely irrelevant in the big picture.

Not really. Transaction malleability is still a large problem and not irrelevant. There have been multiple times within the past year where transaction malleability has caused issues. Off the top of my head, I can remember once instance which screwed with a lot of users and wallets.

Dealing with malleability in wallets is still a major pain in the ass for both developers and users.

I think it's fair to say that refactoring hundreds of thousands of lines of bitcoin support code and then fixing the inevitable bugs is far more work than continuing to work around the well-defined malleability problem.

However, Core devs were also becoming increasingly arrogant, because the masses had never rejected one of their releases, and the code forks like XT, Unlimited, and Classic were complete garbage.

In what way are they becoming arrogant? In what way do the devs act arrograntly?

Devs in general act arrogantly about technical issues for a number of reasons:
* because the best solution must be argued decisively to win
* because they know their sh*t
* because it's their primary way of asserting their manhood.

Before Segwit, Core devs had never released code that wasn't adopted. This caused them to believe that they represented the de facto consensus of the bitcoin community, despite loud screaming that they didn't. To core's credit, much of the screeching WAS technically misinformed, FUD, trolling, and possibly sabotage. However, they may have overstepped the line in labeling all critics invalid. Now it's clear to everyone that the masses won't simply follow Core to the end of the earth with an obscure and complicated soft fork.
 
The Core team is technically far superior to any (known) rivals, but they are only somewhat correct about what issues exist in the entire bitcoin landscape (and there may well be issues that may not be spoken of, but are influential in the decision-making process...). Core was INCORRECT about what remedies the issues require and what priorities they occupy. All of this has been demonstrated in the failed Segwit push. Merely 25% adoption is a resounding defeat and a clear rejection of this soft fork. That said, I'm very sorry for the wasted effort from the team, and very much appreciate Core's continuing commitment to development.  I hope devs were able to sell some coin this month!

I'm hoping that Core can accept Segwit's defeat, merge the latest bug fixes into the 12.1 code, hard fork the blocksize to 2MB or whatever, and MOVE FORWARD.

As I said earlier, segwit is far from dead. Segwit is moving forward. Hard forking, less so.

The changes since 0.12.1 are not just bug fixes. There have been numerous optimizations and additional features that overall make Core a better wallet and node software. People can use 0.13.0 and get all of those changes without using segwit. Core has already significantly diverged from the 0.12.x versions; we are almost two major releases ahead as 0.14.0 is coming out in a few months.

Sorry, I may have the versions wrong.

Hard forking is very simple technically, although somewhat problematic logistically. However, in this day and age of rapid communication and the sheer mass of geeks at the ready to handle the task, I believe we can accomplish it in just a few days of pain. Bitcoin has hard forked several times in the past, and it will again in the near future. Everyone just needs to swallow their prides, manage their emotions appropriately, and DO IT. I suspect the BTC price would soar after a successful 2MB blocksize increase hard fork.

Thanks for the dialogue,

[achow101]

I don't think it's feasible that Segwit adoption will reach past 30%, given that it peaked at 25% a few months ago. Consensus won't be reached, and the soft fork won't happen.

Segwit signalling did not peak at all. It went up and plateaued at ~26%, very different from peaking.

I think it's fair to say that refactoring hundreds of thousands of lines of bitcoin support code and then fixing the inevitable bugs is far more work than continuing to work around the well-defined malleability problem.

Getting around the malleability problem is far harder than you think, and implementing segwit is far easier than you think. Segwit is very well documented and the Core devs are very responsive to questions regarding segwit.

Devs in general act arrogantly about technical issues for a number of reasons:
* because the best solution must be argued decisively to win
* because they know their sh*t
* because it's their primary way of asserting their manhood.

Before Segwit, Core devs had never released code that wasn't adopted. This caused them to believe that they represented the de facto consensus of the bitcoin community, despite loud screaming that they didn't.

You are not one of the devs nor do you seem to have participated in anything related to discussion with the devs. You cannot make these statements about what the devs believe because you are not them. Do not state your own opinions as if it were fact.

To core's credit, much of the screeching WAS technically misinformed, FUD, trolling, and possibly sabotage. However, they may have overstepped the line in labeling all critics invalid.

I don't think that you have followed Bitcoin development nor spoken with the devs before. At no point has Core called any critics invalid. They invite constructive criticism and will explain why someone's criticism is incorrect or how they addresses the issues.

Those who just shout and make noise but don't do anything constructive are dismissed because they are not being constructive but rather just a nuisance preventing work from actually being done.

Now it's clear to everyone that the masses won't simply follow Core to the end of the earth with an obscure and complicated soft fork.

Segwit is not obscure. All of the details of segwit are very well documented and you can find out any of the details by just asking the devs. Segwit is also not very complicated. There is a lot of documentation because there is a lot to it, but that does not mean that it is complicated. In fact, if you know how Bitcoin works technically, you can very easily understand how segwit works.

All of this has been demonstrated in the failed Segwit push. Merely 25% adoption is a resounding defeat and a clear rejection of this soft fork.

Not really. Previous soft forks have taken much longer to activate than has already passed for segwit.

Bitcoin has hard forked several times in the past, and it will again in the near future.

This is simply incorrect. Bitcoin has never hard forked before intentionally. There has been one singular hard fork that occurred in 2013 due to a bug. That was completely accidental. Bitcoin has never hard forked before, but it has had multiple soft forks.

This is the kind of FUD and misinformation that people spread and it really needs to stop.

[classicsucks]

Thanks for the reply. Mostly your critique is semantic in nature. I can't quibble about minor details.

Devs in general act arrogantly about technical issues for a number of reasons:
* because the best solution must be argued decisively to win
* because they know their sh*t
* because it's their primary way of asserting their manhood.

Before Segwit, Core devs had never released code that wasn't adopted. This caused them to believe that they represented the de facto consensus of the bitcoin community, despite loud screaming that they didn't.

You are not one of the devs nor do you seem to have participated in anything related to discussion with the devs. You cannot make these statements about what the devs believe because you are not them. Do not state your own opinions as if it were fact.

When I say "devs in general" I mean "software developers", and I'm simply stating what I believe is common knowledge. I didn't say anything about what Bitcoin Core devs believe. However, you are a Core dev, and you are in fact engaging in semantic and technical arguments in this very thread... This is often where "devs" can lose sight of the bigger picture, which IMHO is: Segwit won't be adopted, a post-mortem reflection on what went wrong would perhaps be a good idea, the simplest path forward if we can drop the egos and the anger is a one-line code fix to increase blocksize, etc.

I don't think that you have followed Bitcoin development nor spoken with the devs before.

I think you're making assumptions.

At no point has Core called any critics invalid. They invite constructive criticism and will explain why someone's criticism is incorrect or how they addresses the issues.

nullc was trolling critics pretty hard on this forum and reddit. Mostly I agreed with his criticisms, but did not agree that Segwit was the way forward.

Bitcoin has never hard forked before intentionally. There has been one singular hard fork that occurred in 2013 due to a bug.
That was completely accidental. Bitcoin has never hard forked before, but it has had multiple soft forks.

This is the kind of FUD and misinformation that people spread and it really needs to stop.

I'm not sure what is FUD about the statement "bitcoin has hard forked several times before"? Also, an unintentional hard fork is much more dangerous than a planned one.

Bitcoin hard forks happened on On August 15, 2010, and March 12, 2013. https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/02/26/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-forks/

[gmaxwell]

Bitcoin hard forks happened on On August 15, 2010,

That is totally untrue.     What should people think of the rest of your comments?

[Searing]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

[classicsucks]

Bitcoin hard forks happened on On August 15, 2010,

That is totally untrue.     What should people think of the rest of your comments?

My source is cited (blockchain blog, LOL)

Code:

On August 15, 2010, an emergency consensus fork was executed to deal with an exploited integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins.

I suppose now we can argue about the semantics of a hard fork versus soft fork? I'm not interested in that discussion, for the reasons cited above... Furthermore, I'm fine with being wrong on this trivial topic if that is the case. I don't feel being wrong about this would undermine my other comments, although it might distract some from them...
 

[amaclin]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

what would you like to see interesting?
Except of speculation about exchange rates, there will be nothing "interesting" there.

[JayJuanGee]

Bitcoin hard forks happened on On August 15, 2010,

That is totally untrue.     What should people think of the rest of your comments?

My source is cited (blockchain blog, LOL)

Code:

On August 15, 2010, an emergency consensus fork was executed to deal with an exploited integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins.

I suppose now we can argue about the semantics of a hard fork versus soft fork? I'm not interested in that discussion, for the reasons cited above... Furthermore, I'm fine with being wrong on this trivial topic if that is the case. I don't feel being wrong about this would undermine my other comments, although it might distract some from them...
 

You were making all kinds of points to attempt to normalize the idea about the greatness of hardforks as compared with softforks and attempting to assert that bitcoin had done it a lot in it's history, therefore, no big deal blah blah blah and some more bullshit characterizations.

Then Gmaxwell apparently concedes with you about the fact that ONE hardfork had actually taken place, but left it up to you to attempt to describe that even if you had gotten one fact correct, how getting that one fact correct would make any one of your other points to being close to correct - which apparently, you are having difficulties with achieving with either logic or additional facts.

And, further in this subsequent post, you go on some kind of additional tangent to again attempt to bring greater credence to the fact that you may have gotten one fact correct (that one successful hard fork had already occurred with bitcoin).  In the end, so fucking what. ... we all can agree that a hardfork had taken place under a certain set of circumstances historically, but those same certain circumstances do not necessary exist today or justify that a hardfork today would either be a necessary or prudent course of action.

In other words, the burden is still on you to describe with facts and/or logic concerning how a hardfork today would be a prudent or necessary course of action in bitcoin  in spite the conceded fact that a hardfork had occurred one time in the past under a specific set of circumstances that do not seem to be the circumstances of today, right?

[Foxpup]

Bitcoin hard forks happened on On August 15, 2010,

That is totally untrue.     What should people think of the rest of your comments?

My source is cited (blockchain blog, LOL)

Code:

On August 15, 2010, an emergency consensus fork was executed to deal with an exploited integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins.

I suppose now we can argue about the semantics of a hard fork versus soft fork?

That was a soft fork; the post you cite even says so in no uncertain terms, and it also explains the difference between soft forks and hard forks. Are we supposed to think that you are illiterate?

[Searing]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

what would you like to see interesting?
Except of speculation about exchange rates, there will be nothing "interesting" there.

Call it 'embarrassing then" if it does so before BTC. Not like the 2 parties of Devs in BTC land imho are ever gonna agree....stalemate with Core having the advantage
of a bit more land in this stalemate..but still a stalemate imho

But yeah would probably pump LTC a bit and just for a bit.

Just saying humans being humans ...looks like this imho

[JayJuanGee]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

what would you like to see interesting?
Except of speculation about exchange rates, there will be nothing "interesting" there.

Call it 'embarrassing then" if it does so before BTC. Not like the 2 parties of Devs in BTC land imho are ever gonna agree....stalemate with Core having the advantage
of a bit more land in this stalemate..but still a stalemate imho

But yeah would probably pump LTC a bit and just for a bit.

Just saying humans being humans ...looks like this imho

It's only been 2 months in BTC, so far.  quite a bit more can happen in 10 months, no?

[classicsucks]

I'm fine with being wrong on this trivial topic if that is the case. I don't feel being wrong about this would undermine my other comments, although it might distract some from them...

You were making all kinds of points to attempt to normalize the idea about the greatness of hardforks as compared with softforks and attempting to assert that bitcoin had done it a lot in it's history, therefore, no big deal blah blah blah and some more bullshit characterizations.

In other words, the burden is still on you to describe with facts and/or logic concerning how a hardfork today would be a prudent or necessary course of action in bitcoin  in spite the conceded fact that a hardfork had occurred one time in the past under a specific set of circumstances that do not seem to be the circumstances of today, right?

I don't recall making any points about "the greatness of hardforks", nor is the "burden still on [me] to describe with facts and/or logic concerning how a hardfork today would be a prudent or necessary course of action".  Surely you're aware that some 500 million words of text have already been expended on that topic, with no solution in sight?  


Perhaps the burden is on YOU to propose another way forward (other than a hard fork executed in a manner similar to the March 2013 fork, but as a planned event rather than an emergency), now that Segwit has failed.



@Foxpup: troll harder.

[Kakmakr]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

what would you like to see interesting?
Except of speculation about exchange rates, there will be nothing "interesting" there.

Call it 'embarrassing then" if it does so before BTC. Not like the 2 parties of Devs in BTC land imho are ever gonna agree....stalemate with Core having the advantage
of a bit more land in this stalemate..but still a stalemate imho

But yeah would probably pump LTC a bit and just for a bit.

Just saying humans being humans ...looks like this imho

I am worried that LTC with SegWit & LN would offer more to investors and they would abandon Bitcoin in favor of LTC with more scaling options I will hedge my investment in <Alt'> Crypto currencies, if something more official happens in this regard.

I can understand that developers would target other Alt coins, with this "add-on", if it does not succeed in incorporating this into Bitcoin. All that time and effort and months of work, cannot be dumped into obscurity.

Consensus can be a cruel beast.

[-ck]

I am worried that LTC with SegWit & LN would offer more to investors and they would abandon Bitcoin in favor of LTC with more scaling options I will hedge my investment in <Alt'> Crypto currencies, if something more official happens in this regard.

Given that there is still massive amounts of unused capacity in the standard litecoin blockchain, there is zero reason to believe that adding more scaling options at this point to litecoin will make people jump from bitcoin.

[mezzomix]

..., now that Segwit has failed.

The timeout for segwit is end of 2017! When a consensus for a soft-fork is not possible, I see no chance for a hard-fork.

For me, the most important point of a hard-fork would be changing the mining algorithm to use the UTXO set and the transactions of the block in every round of the algorithm and to produce an additional UTXO commitment.

[JayJuanGee]

I'm fine with being wrong on this trivial topic if that is the case. I don't feel being wrong about this would undermine my other comments, although it might distract some from them...

You were making all kinds of points to attempt to normalize the idea about the greatness of hardforks as compared with softforks and attempting to assert that bitcoin had done it a lot in it's history, therefore, no big deal blah blah blah and some more bullshit characterizations.

In other words, the burden is still on you to describe with facts and/or logic concerning how a hardfork today would be a prudent or necessary course of action in bitcoin  in spite the conceded fact that a hardfork had occurred one time in the past under a specific set of circumstances that do not seem to be the circumstances of today, right?

I don't recall making any points about "the greatness of hardforks", nor is the "burden still on [me] to describe with facts and/or logic concerning how a hardfork today would be a prudent or necessary course of action".  Surely you're aware that some 500 million words of text have already been expended on that topic, with no solution in sight?  


Perhaps the burden is on YOU to propose another way forward (other than a hard fork executed in a manner similar to the March 2013 fork, but as a planned event rather than an emergency), now that Segwit has failed.



@Foxpup: troll harder.

I am not proposing anything, therefore I have no burden.

I am saying that seg wit is only a couple of months into its having gone live, so it is quite early to call it a failure.  Seg wit has a lot of innovative features, so it has decent chances to be activated either in its current form or maybe somewhere down the road within a year or longer in some variation of its current form.

Regarding a hardfork, whether emergency or not, we do not currently have any emergency, so there seems to be no need to hardfork at the moment, and if an emergency comes, then such a consideration can be accounted at such time.

In other words, if nothing happens and seg wit is not activated, and bitcoin just keeps working like it is with a 1 mb hard limit, that is not an emergency, as far as I can tell, and bitcoin will be fine with that particular set up, even though it seems that activating seg wit would be the better course forward (but of course requires a certain higher level of consensus than it currently seems to be signaling)

[2cV5S3zAuz]

 Here people mostly talk about supporting segwit and how to support it, will wallet's be updated for segwit.

[classicsucks]

Here people mostly talk about supporting segwit and how to support it, will wallet's be updated for segwit.

Yes there is a site showing the progress for Segwit software support here:
https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/

I doubt people are working that hard on Segwit support because it looks like the Segwit upgrade initiative has failed.

[d5000]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

what would you like to see interesting?
Except of speculation about exchange rates, there will be nothing "interesting" there.

In my opinion, Litecoin's Segwit adoption could be indeed "interesting" for Bitcoin. If successful, it could show to Bitcoin miners that the soft fork is not so risky or "complicated" than some of them may fear. Also, as I understand there are miner groups involved in LTC and BTC mining that could try Segwit first with LTC where they hold less stake and then in case of success enable it in BTC too.

For this reasons, I expect Segwit adoption among Bitcoin miners (and probably also among normal nodes) to go up in case the LTC softfork happens without problems. It may not be enough to reach 95% inmediately but it could help pave the way to there.