Fuck: SegWit, LN, Blockstream, Core, Adam Back, and GMazwell

[Killerpotleaf]

how much will it cost to run a LN hub?

[jbreher]

When the start of the hierarchy is started from self appointment the BU articles of federation serve only to usurp core and to give the president dictatorship over bitcoin.  For what I can tell there is no rule that the same person can't rule forever...?

Well, yes. If the president is voted in for successive terms, then he would preside as long as that kept occurring. And? Is the CEO of Blockstream term limited?

The president of the BU Federation -- even if BU became the client of choice for the entirety of the network -- would not have 'dictatorship over bitcoin'. Firstly because the president of BU F's powers are limited over BU F, and second because BU F has no real power over the Bitcoin network.

Further, as Bitcoin is decentralized, there is no way to usurp core, as core has no formal power over Bitcoin either.

As near as I can tell, most of us BU'ers would like to see multiple implementations on the network.

[jonald_fyookball]

how much will it cost to run a LN hub?

depends what you mean by 'LN hub' and 'running one'.

Bitcoin is permissionless but programming takes time/money, and if you create a permissioned service as a business, developing that business also takes time/money.

[jonald_fyookball]

I know there is fear among the big blockers about it becoming like Paypal 2.0, but what if the system is a level playing field and an open one? I am sure Blockstream does not have a monopoly in setting up a payment hub service.

They do not have a monopoly, and I don't have any reason to suspect there isn't a level playing field.  The main issue for me is the entire market getting a huge boost to solve a problem that is being intentionally created by artificially restricting the main blockchain.  This is what is meant when people talk about "turning bitcoin from p2p cash into a settlement network."

[traincarswreck]

intentionally created by artificially restricting the main blockchain.  This is what is meant when people talk about "turning bitcoin from p2p cash into a settlement network."

artificially is a nonsensical subjective word.  The whole project like the 21 million cap is artificial.  Bitcoin will still be peer to peer cash even as a high value settlement network. 

[traincarswreck]

Well, yes. If the president is voted in for successive terms, then he would preside as long as that kept occurring. And? Is the CEO of Blockstream term limited?

The president of the BU Federation -- even if BU became the client of choice for the entirety of the network -- would not have 'dictatorship over bitcoin'. Firstly because the president of BU F's powers are limited over BU F, and second because BU F has no real power over the Bitcoin network.

Further, as Bitcoin is decentralized, there is no way to usurp core, as core has no formal power over Bitcoin either.

As near as I can tell, most of us BU'ers would like to see multiple implementations on the network.

We all know satoshi said multiple implementations would be bad.  And yes if BU took over the president would have control through appointed deputies, whom he can have removed if he wishes.  It's all part of the federation, I suspect you haven't read.  It's not a democracy by any meaningful sense.  And there is no division of powers or separation of duties to create check and balances.

BU is to run a mining and it is stated if they own greater than 51% they will no do anything to not control greater than 51%. 

[Killerpotleaf]

Well, yes. If the president is voted in for successive terms, then he would preside as long as that kept occurring. And? Is the CEO of Blockstream term limited?

The president of the BU Federation -- even if BU became the client of choice for the entirety of the network -- would not have 'dictatorship over bitcoin'. Firstly because the president of BU F's powers are limited over BU F, and second because BU F has no real power over the Bitcoin network.

Further, as Bitcoin is decentralized, there is no way to usurp core, as core has no formal power over Bitcoin either.

As near as I can tell, most of us BU'ers would like to see multiple implementations on the network.

We all know satoshi said multiple implementations would be bad.  And yes if BU took over the president would have control through appointed deputies, whom he can have removed if he wishes.  It's all part of the federation, I suspect you haven't read.  It's not a democracy by any meaningful sense.  And there is no division of powers or separation of duties to create check and balances.

BU is to run a mining and it is stated if they own greater than 51% they will no do anything to not control greater than 51%. 

there are all kinds of different implementations on the network.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/

check it out, you can even see which will crash and burn once segwit is activated

[jbreher]

We all know satoshi said multiple implementations would be bad. 

Admittedly, he did. However, the world is replete with multiple interoperating implementations of various protocols. Indeed, even Bitcoin is already working with multiple interoperating implementations. Are you stating that Satoshi's worst fears about multiple implementations need be slavishly adhered to?

And yes if BU took over the president would have control through appointed deputies, whom he can have removed if he wishes. 

Nonsense. There are no deputies. There are four differentiated officers -- each with limited and defined powers -- and members.

BU is to run a mining and it is stated if they own greater than 51% they will no do anything to not control greater than 51%. 

The AoF do speak of a mining pool. Something I argued against at the time. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, but rather because operating a pool seemed to me to be a distraction to the core effort.

But I don't think the pool never had anyone actually put the effort in to set it up. It is an unrealized plan. So even if it does not explicitly ban owning 51% of the network, it actually owns 0%.

If you have evidence to the contrary, I'm certainly willing to consider it. But you seem to be merely concern trolling. Almost as if your quasi-religious belief that Bitcoin is perfectly resistant to change is being threatened or something.

[traincarswreck]

I have and will put up evidence, and piece by piece, you have to answer, are you a member, and have you read the articles of federation?

It's a framework for dictatorship and there is no separation of duties.

[Alex.BTC]

Passing along a link posted by jonald_fyookball:

http://archive.is/XpI8a

Once only complex and unnecessary code, I have become immortalized as a brand name by my creators

Getting the inside scoop on the Segregated Witness. The truth shall set you free.

Segwit Resources

Segregated Witness: A Fork Too Far
https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179
This paper first examines Segregated Witness (SW), then demonstrates how it can only fail to realize its designed purpose, how it encumbers Bitcoin with irreversible technical debt, and how it threatens the fungibility of the currency.

Bitcoin is Being Hot-Wired for Settlement
https://medium.com/@jgarzik/bitcoin-is-being-hot-wired-for-settlement-a5beb1df223a
SW avoids an ecosystem-wide hard fork through ecosystem-wide upgrades to bitcoin transactions, blocks, addresses, scripts, full nodes, miners, wallets, explorers, libraries, and APIs. All to provide partial relief to core block pressure assuming users upgrade — 1.6M if 100% upgrade, based on current usage.

SW roll-out requires extensive software modifications just to maintain current functionality in the face of rising transaction volume. SW complicates bitcoin economics by splitting a “block” into a basket of two economic resources — core block and extended block — each with unique price incentives and (heavily intersecting) sets of actors.

Bitcoin Upgrade Governance, Hard Forks and Segregated Witness
https://medium.com/@jgarzik/bitcoin-upgrade-governance-hard-forks-and-segregated-witness-942885e0ce58
In terms of updates to production software, Segregated Witness pushes complexity up-layer, with a ripple-out impact of changes, from one team (bitcoin core) to many teams out in the ecosystem.

Core Segwit — Thinking of upgrading? You need to read this!
http://www.wallstreettechnologist.com/2016/12/03/core-segwit-you-need-to-read-this/
Segwit cannot be rolled back because to unupgraded clients, a segwit txn looks to pay ANYONE (technically, anyone can spend the outputs). After activation, if segwit is rolled back via voluntary downgrade of a majority of miners software, then all funds locked in segwit outputs can be taken by unscrupulous miners. As more funds gets locked up in segwit outputs, the incentive for miners to collude to claim them grows. Compare this to a block limit increase hardfork, which can be rolled back by a block limit decreasing softfork.

Segwit doesn’t actually increase the blocksize, it just counts blocksize differently giving a discount for the segregated witness data.

Segwit doesn’t actually fix malleability bug or quadratic hashing, for outputs which are not segwit outputs. Yes, this means that as long as there are non-segwit outputs in the blockchain (for instance, long untouched coins like Satoshi Nakamoto’s) these problems will still be exploitable on the network.

Presently the danger of a 51% miner collusion is just the danger that txn can be censored, or that a miner can double spend their own txn. There is nothing that a 51% cartel can do to steal your bitcoins. But if everyone was using segwit, then that [stealing] actually becomes a reality.

Segwit grows technical debt. The idea of shoehorning the merkel root of the signatures into the coinbase message is a cludge made just so that segwit could be deployed as a soft-fork. How many kludges do we want to put into the Bitcoin base layer? Are we going to make soft-forks (and thus kludges) the normal practice?

SegWit is not great
http://www.deadalnix.me/2016/10/17/segwit-is-not-great/
On the other hand, SegWit is essentially a hard fork disguised as a soft fork. It strips the regular block out of most meaningful information and moves it to the extension block. While software that isn’t updated to support SegWit will still accept the blockchain, it has lost all ability to actually understand and validate it.

An old wallet won’t understand if its owner is being sent money. It won’t be able able to spend it. A node is unable to validate the transactions in the blockchain as they all look valid no matter what. Overall, while SegWit can be technically qualified as a soft fork, it puts anyone who does not upgrade at risk.

How Software Gets Bloated: From Telephony to Bitcoin
http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/04/05/how-software-gets-bloated/
Some Bitcoin devs are considering a trick where they repurpose “anyone can spend” transactions into supporting something called segregated witnesses.

To older versions of Bitcoin software deployed in the wild, it looks like someone is throwing cash, literally, into the air in a way where anyone can grab it and make it theirs.
Except newer versions of software make sure that only the intended people catch it, if they have the right kind of signature, separated appropriately from the transaction so it can be transmitted, validated and stored, or discarded, independently.

Amazingly, the old legacy software that is difficult to change sees that money got thrown into the air and got picked up by someone, while new software knew all along that it could only have been picked up by its intended recipient.

How do SegWit and FlexTrans compare?
https://bitcoinclassic.com/devel/FlexTrans-vs-SegWit.html
People that receive a payment from a SegWit user will not have any progress reports of that payment unless they have a SegWit wallet. Users pay more to users that don’t have a SegWit wallet. The networked basis of money makes it a certainty that practically all people need to upgrade. And that begs the question if there really is a benefit to the SegWit solution.

Why We Must Oppose Core’s Segwit Soft Fork, Bitcoin Miner Jiang Zhuo’er Tells You Why!
https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-segwit-soft-fork-bitcoin-miner-jiang-zhuo-er-tells-you-why-28f820d51f98
Bitcoin Core plans to implement Segwit as a soft fork, and then to forever limit the block size to a piddling 1MB, turning the blockchain into a settlement network that is hard to distinguish from SWIFT.

Scaling Bitcoin: Reflections from the DCG Portfolio
https://medium.com/@DCGco/scaling-bitcoin-reflections-from-the-dcg-portfolio-35b9a065b2a4
One company notes, “Last year we got on the Bitcoin Classic bandwagon out of desperation. Our stance was: Segwit sounds complex and Classic seems easy and buys us time.

Segwit has “only been tested by core devs on testnet… the main worry would be that this testing may not match what enterprises actually need on a production level”.

Bitcoin company CTO here. Why I oppose Segwit.
https://archive.is/5rb0e
Largely out of technical objections, and political ones also. I see Segwit as a crudely-designed kludge, and an unnecessary complication to the protocol. Open Transactions was working on a sidechain implementation years ago that didn’t require Segwit, it only required deterministic ordering of UTXOs when creating new tx, which still doesn’t have a BIP and it’s a damn shame because that was a great idea.

Segwit: The Poison Pill for Bitcoin
https://archive.is/3u8Ny
Direct scaling has a 1.0 marginal scaling impact. Segwit has a 0.42 marginal scaling impact. I think the miners realize this. In addition to scaling more efficiently, direct scaling also is projected to yield more fees per block, a better user experience at lower TX fees, and a higher price creating larger block reward.

Why soft fork is a very bad idea and should be avoided at all costs
https://archive.is/NZHqM
I was surprised by the latest announcement of Pieter that a SegWit implementation which changes pretty much everything in bitcoin can be implemented via a soft fork, where it does not require all the nodes to upgrade to be compatible.

After a bit research, this is possible because you can always give old data new meaning in a new implementation, while the old nodes simply do not know how to parse that data.

As a result, a new block will be accepted by the old nodes because they appear to be valid. But in the new implementation, they are just a small subset of the new data structure, all the transaction data is in another related block.

Translation Of Chinese Miner Consensus Meeting
https://blog.bitmex.com/translation-of-chinese-miner-consensus-meeting/
First, assuming Seg Wit is used by all one-signature tx, the effectiveness of it is only equivalent to a 1.6MB block size. Because of the complexity and development needed for Seg Wit, some may refuse to employ the update. Assuming 50% of tx use Seg Wit in 12 months, this is equivalent to a 1.3MB block size, which is pretty useless.

Second, Seg Wit requires a lot of manipulation of core components of Bitcoin, which carries a lot of risk. Bitmain CEO: “Currently Core devs are working overtime to catch up with the development schedule. We all know what will happen if we can’t get enough sleep and code on…”

[traincarswreck]

Passing along a link posted by jonald_fyookball:

http://archive.is/XpI8a

Once only complex and unnecessary code, I have become immortalized as a brand name by my creators

Getting the inside scoop on the Segregated Witness. The truth shall set you free.

Segwit Resources

Segregated Witness: A Fork Too Far
https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179
This paper first examines Segregated Witness (SW), then demonstrates how it can only fail to realize its designed purpose, how it encumbers Bitcoin with irreversible technical debt, and how it threatens the fungibility of the currency.

Bitcoin is Being Hot-Wired for Settlement
https://medium.com/@jgarzik/bitcoin-is-being-hot-wired-for-settlement-a5beb1df223a
SW avoids an ecosystem-wide hard fork through ecosystem-wide upgrades to bitcoin transactions, blocks, addresses, scripts, full nodes, miners, wallets, explorers, libraries, and APIs. All to provide partial relief to core block pressure assuming users upgrade — 1.6M if 100% upgrade, based on current usage.

SW roll-out requires extensive software modifications just to maintain current functionality in the face of rising transaction volume. SW complicates bitcoin economics by splitting a “block” into a basket of two economic resources — core block and extended block — each with unique price incentives and (heavily intersecting) sets of actors.

Bitcoin Upgrade Governance, Hard Forks and Segregated Witness
https://medium.com/@jgarzik/bitcoin-upgrade-governance-hard-forks-and-segregated-witness-942885e0ce58
In terms of updates to production software, Segregated Witness pushes complexity up-layer, with a ripple-out impact of changes, from one team (bitcoin core) to many teams out in the ecosystem.

Core Segwit — Thinking of upgrading? You need to read this!
http://www.wallstreettechnologist.com/2016/12/03/core-segwit-you-need-to-read-this/
Segwit cannot be rolled back because to unupgraded clients, a segwit txn looks to pay ANYONE (technically, anyone can spend the outputs). After activation, if segwit is rolled back via voluntary downgrade of a majority of miners software, then all funds locked in segwit outputs can be taken by unscrupulous miners. As more funds gets locked up in segwit outputs, the incentive for miners to collude to claim them grows. Compare this to a block limit increase hardfork, which can be rolled back by a block limit decreasing softfork.

Segwit doesn’t actually increase the blocksize, it just counts blocksize differently giving a discount for the segregated witness data.

Segwit doesn’t actually fix malleability bug or quadratic hashing, for outputs which are not segwit outputs. Yes, this means that as long as there are non-segwit outputs in the blockchain (for instance, long untouched coins like Satoshi Nakamoto’s) these problems will still be exploitable on the network.

Presently the danger of a 51% miner collusion is just the danger that txn can be censored, or that a miner can double spend their own txn. There is nothing that a 51% cartel can do to steal your bitcoins. But if everyone was using segwit, then that [stealing] actually becomes a reality.

Segwit grows technical debt. The idea of shoehorning the merkel root of the signatures into the coinbase message is a cludge made just so that segwit could be deployed as a soft-fork. How many kludges do we want to put into the Bitcoin base layer? Are we going to make soft-forks (and thus kludges) the normal practice?

SegWit is not great
http://www.deadalnix.me/2016/10/17/segwit-is-not-great/
On the other hand, SegWit is essentially a hard fork disguised as a soft fork. It strips the regular block out of most meaningful information and moves it to the extension block. While software that isn’t updated to support SegWit will still accept the blockchain, it has lost all ability to actually understand and validate it.

An old wallet won’t understand if its owner is being sent money. It won’t be able able to spend it. A node is unable to validate the transactions in the blockchain as they all look valid no matter what. Overall, while SegWit can be technically qualified as a soft fork, it puts anyone who does not upgrade at risk.

How Software Gets Bloated: From Telephony to Bitcoin
http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/04/05/how-software-gets-bloated/
Some Bitcoin devs are considering a trick where they repurpose “anyone can spend” transactions into supporting something called segregated witnesses.

To older versions of Bitcoin software deployed in the wild, it looks like someone is throwing cash, literally, into the air in a way where anyone can grab it and make it theirs.
Except newer versions of software make sure that only the intended people catch it, if they have the right kind of signature, separated appropriately from the transaction so it can be transmitted, validated and stored, or discarded, independently.

Amazingly, the old legacy software that is difficult to change sees that money got thrown into the air and got picked up by someone, while new software knew all along that it could only have been picked up by its intended recipient.

How do SegWit and FlexTrans compare?
https://bitcoinclassic.com/devel/FlexTrans-vs-SegWit.html
People that receive a payment from a SegWit user will not have any progress reports of that payment unless they have a SegWit wallet. Users pay more to users that don’t have a SegWit wallet. The networked basis of money makes it a certainty that practically all people need to upgrade. And that begs the question if there really is a benefit to the SegWit solution.

Why We Must Oppose Core’s Segwit Soft Fork, Bitcoin Miner Jiang Zhuo’er Tells You Why!
https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-segwit-soft-fork-bitcoin-miner-jiang-zhuo-er-tells-you-why-28f820d51f98
Bitcoin Core plans to implement Segwit as a soft fork, and then to forever limit the block size to a piddling 1MB, turning the blockchain into a settlement network that is hard to distinguish from SWIFT.

Scaling Bitcoin: Reflections from the DCG Portfolio
https://medium.com/@DCGco/scaling-bitcoin-reflections-from-the-dcg-portfolio-35b9a065b2a4
One company notes, “Last year we got on the Bitcoin Classic bandwagon out of desperation. Our stance was: Segwit sounds complex and Classic seems easy and buys us time.

Segwit has “only been tested by core devs on testnet… the main worry would be that this testing may not match what enterprises actually need on a production level”.

Bitcoin company CTO here. Why I oppose Segwit.
https://archive.is/5rb0e
Largely out of technical objections, and political ones also. I see Segwit as a crudely-designed kludge, and an unnecessary complication to the protocol. Open Transactions was working on a sidechain implementation years ago that didn’t require Segwit, it only required deterministic ordering of UTXOs when creating new tx, which still doesn’t have a BIP and it’s a damn shame because that was a great idea.

Segwit: The Poison Pill for Bitcoin
https://archive.is/3u8Ny
Direct scaling has a 1.0 marginal scaling impact. Segwit has a 0.42 marginal scaling impact. I think the miners realize this. In addition to scaling more efficiently, direct scaling also is projected to yield more fees per block, a better user experience at lower TX fees, and a higher price creating larger block reward.

Why soft fork is a very bad idea and should be avoided at all costs
https://archive.is/NZHqM
I was surprised by the latest announcement of Pieter that a SegWit implementation which changes pretty much everything in bitcoin can be implemented via a soft fork, where it does not require all the nodes to upgrade to be compatible.

After a bit research, this is possible because you can always give old data new meaning in a new implementation, while the old nodes simply do not know how to parse that data.

As a result, a new block will be accepted by the old nodes because they appear to be valid. But in the new implementation, they are just a small subset of the new data structure, all the transaction data is in another related block.

Translation Of Chinese Miner Consensus Meeting
https://blog.bitmex.com/translation-of-chinese-miner-consensus-meeting/
First, assuming Seg Wit is used by all one-signature tx, the effectiveness of it is only equivalent to a 1.6MB block size. Because of the complexity and development needed for Seg Wit, some may refuse to employ the update. Assuming 50% of tx use Seg Wit in 12 months, this is equivalent to a 1.3MB block size, which is pretty useless.

Second, Seg Wit requires a lot of manipulation of core components of Bitcoin, which carries a lot of risk. Bitmain CEO: “Currently Core devs are working overtime to catch up with the development schedule. We all know what will happen if we can’t get enough sleep and code on…”

Communist propaganda.

[jbreher]

you have to answer,

Gawd, you're an insufferable twat. I don't have to answer squat.

But I'll indulge you this time.

are you a member,

Yup.

But it's even worse - I'm Bitcoin President. The forum sez so:



But it must be OK, because the forum says I'm Ethereum CEO, too:

and have you read the articles of federation?

Yeah. The difference here is that _I_ understood them.

[traincarswreck]

Yeah. The difference here is that _I_ understood them.

I understand them well enough...

When you get to pick the starting members, and vet them, the articles HOLD UP a dictatorship, they do NOT secure the separation of power and do NOT ensure checks and balances.

The secure-ness of the entire proposal is all hinged on NOT starting with a clique.

[franky1]

Yeah. The difference here is that _I_ understood them.

I understand them well enough...

When you get to pick the starting members, and vet them, the articles HOLD UP a dictatorship, they do NOT secure the separation of power and do NOT ensure checks and balances.

whens blockstreams election.. is been 3 years+ and no election
whens cores election.. is been 4 years+ and no election

The secure-ness of the entire proposal is all hinged on NOT starting with a clique.

BU put in an interim president for their implementation not the entire network.. and using satire/tongue in cheek to announce it and set an election for 2 months later. which went ahead.

core pretend to be independent yet lock themselves up in their own corner of cabin fever monologue, dictating they are the reference CORE engine..

hypocrisy much

[traincarswreck]

whens blockstreams election.. is been 3 years+ and no election
whens cores election.. is been 4 years+ and no election
BU just (tongue in cheek) put in an interim president for their implimentation (not the entire network) and set an election for 2 months later. which went ahead.

You have no claim to satoshi's hierarchy by the implementation of your own dictatorship. You admit a dictatorship, that chose it's own members to hold up its own rules.

It will never work, It can never work.  You are the laughing stocks of the future of humanity.

[Killerpotleaf]

oh this pointless.

lets just fix TX malleability and incress blocks to 2 MB

[traincarswreck]

oh this pointless.

lets just fix TX malleability and incress blocks to 2 MB

yup and your post isn't pointless.  it did something, gregory might have listened. How old are you?

[Killerpotleaf]

oh this pointless.

lets just fix TX malleability and incress blocks to 2 MB

yup and your post isn't pointless.  it did something, gregory might have listened. How old are you?

the president of core doesn't hang around these parts does he?

[Wind_FURY]

I know there is fear among the big blockers about it becoming like Paypal 2.0, but what if the system is a level playing field and an open one? I am sure Blockstream does not have a monopoly in setting up a payment hub service.

They do not have a monopoly, and I don't have any reason to suspect there isn't a level playing field.  The main issue for me is the entire market getting a huge boost to solve a problem that is being intentionally created by artificially restricting the main blockchain.  This is what is meant when people talk about "turning bitcoin from p2p cash into a settlement network."

I do not think that restricting the main blockchain is intentional. The 1MB maxblocksize limit is there as an anti spam measure. The Lightning Network is set up to carry some of the load and could do much more. Later, I believe there will be a need for a block size increase to accomodate the closing of LN's payment channels as they get settled on the main chain.

[jonald_fyookball]

I know there is fear among the big blockers about it becoming like Paypal 2.0, but what if the system is a level playing field and an open one? I am sure Blockstream does not have a monopoly in setting up a payment hub service.

They do not have a monopoly, and I don't have any reason to suspect there isn't a level playing field.  The main issue for me is the entire market getting a huge boost to solve a problem that is being intentionally created by artificially restricting the main blockchain.  This is what is meant when people talk about "turning bitcoin from p2p cash into a settlement network."

I do not think that restricting the main blockchain is intentional. The 1MB maxblocksize limit is there as an anti spam measure. The Lightning Network is set up to carry some of the load and could do much more. Later, I believe there will be a need for a block size increase to accomodate the closing of LN's payment channels as they get settled on the main chain.

The 1mb blocksize was put there 7 years ago by Satoshi as a temporary measure.  LEAVING it there (long after it served its purpose)  is openly admitted as intentional by core as their economic policy is a 'healthy fee market'.  They do not deny this.