These modifications don't seem like difficult to do in 4 months, right ?
Making the modifications is not enough. You need to upgrade every bitcoin node in the world as well.
Not really. If you keep your old node running, you copy the the old fork, if sufficient miners go with the old fork to still make some blocks. If you download the new node, you copy the new fork.
And lose bitcoin. How well do you think that will be welcomed by the greater community, and how much would you trust a currency whish did that?
You never lose bitcoins because you run a non-mining node.
This is wrong in so many ways, you obviously have no clue.
First of all I
am running a mining node, but that's beside the point.
Secondly, there are several ways of losing coins due to a fork. Just see the mess that occured when Ethereum split in ETC and ETH. A chain fork can even be designed to steal coins or reverse transactions, like it was in the Ethereum case.
If you receive a transaction on your node, and it is confirmed, you will regard it as a good one. The coin being spent may not exist on the other chain, or there may be another transaction on the other chain spending it differently. So you will lose coins, and can easily be scammed.
The only things that matter is what is recorded on the block chain(s). Whether your local copy gets fucked up or not doesn't matter. The only thing you can have as an accident, is that your old software makes a funny transaction that is nevertheless accepted in some way by the miners and put in a chain, but is in a way screwed up that you cannot use its outputs any more.
What? No.
If my chain is corrupted the, my node will just re-download the blocks with failing hashes, and I will be back on the best valid chain I am on.
But by running an old node, you never "lose bitcoins". And if bitcoin forks in two chains, you have your former coins on both of them.
And as soon as you spend them, you may be victim to an attack where someone copy your transaction to the other chain, and receive your coins on both chains. Unless double-spending protection is in place before the chain splits. This was not the case with ethereum, and many lost their coins on one of the chains due to this vulnerability. None of the bit-altcoins address this problem properly in their attempted chain splits, and this is why exchanges won't adopt them, even as altcoins.
If it was simple to change the hard economic consensus parameters, like block size, inflation rate, time between blocks, POW algorithm etc, it would have happened several times already. It doesn't, because people want bitcoin to be a secure store of value.
It doesn't, simply because of the mechanism of immutability, which, however, can break down if centralization occurs and there's a collusion of more than 50% of the consensus (= hash) power over a change.
> 50% of hashpower can only restrict activity by refusing to mine certain transactions. They can not change the consensus. If they produce invalid blocks, the hashpower is worthless. Nodes will just throw their blocks away.
But at least I'm happy that you consider block size just as well a hard economic parameter as inflation rate. I think that the block size limit as an economic parameter, introducing scarcity of transaction room, was a stupid thing to do in bitcoin's design, but so is its inflation rate. So, bitcoin being designed as a system with a scarce and finite number of coins, I don't see the problem with bitcoin as a system with a finite and scarce number of transactions per unit of time. I have to say I think the economic model of both is stupid if the idea was to make a currency, but then, that's how bitcoin was designed, and I think that is the way it should live its life. The economic design looks more like the one for "exclusive famous paintings" which are rare to come by, and difficult to transact, in other words, a kind of highly speculative and not very liquid asset with high price that is rarely moved, and only to move big amounts of value (not a currency at all, but a "settlement layer for rich guys doing things where fiat cannot go").
Bitcoin
is a settlement layer by design. No hard fork can change that.
You can use other layers on top of bitcoin for fast and cheap transactions. One example which dates back to the Satoshi era is payment channels. Unfortuately they never worked due to malleability. Segwit fixes this bug, and makes it possible to use payment channels safely. In the mean time smart people have found out how to connect payment channels in a network, called the lightning network, how to extend the chain with sidechains, etc. All of them depend on this bug to be fixed.
The block size becomes a very important economic parameter in the future when the reward from txfees is much larger than the block reward. With large blocks this will happen faster, and we still don't have a solution to the problems which will arise then.
But in all of this, you don't even need to run a node. You can just connect your light wallet to one of the miner pool nodes.
Yeah, or just use PayPal if you want to trust a thrid party. Actually I think PayPal is more trustworthy than the miners. That's why I chose to run my own nodes.
The point is, you can ask for the books of PayPal, or you can ask for the books of the miners. That's what you do when you use a full node. But you cannot change them, and there's only one book out there. If you think that PayPal has been cheating in the books, you could go to a judge. If you see that the miners have been cheating, I don't think you can go to a judge. You can just curse them, and that's it. If the one book that is out there is not to your likings, what are you going to do about it, apart from shouting, cursing, trying to tell everyone not to use bitcoin because it is a scam ....
Yep, and this is why I would never use Ethereum or any coin where the miners can change the rules. I would be out before you could blink. Exchange it for PayPal or something.
This won't be a problem, since old nodes don't generate segwit addresses. You can pay him with your segwit coins, and it is secure.
Ah, I didn't know you could go back from a segwit address back to a legacy address. How can the old node check that transaction, given that he doesn't have the witness data ?
For segwit transactions security would revert to just a little better than SPV. It is the same as with e.g. P2SH transactions, OP_HODL, etc. Of course privacy will still be better when you run a full node.
Suppose that I had coins on a legacy address A1. I transfer them to my new segwit address S1. Now, Joe, running an old node, has address A2. Can I transact coins from S1 to A2 ?
But, suppose now that I had coins in S1, and I pay Jack, running a new node, in S2.
I could try to spend S1 to A2, because Joe, with his old node cannot see my transaction from S1 to S2.
Wrong. Old nodes still see the transactions, and their UTXO set will be updated for all transactions. Only the witness is segregated. This is necessary, because transactions spending coins not in the UTXO set are invalid, and blocks containing them would be invalid.
But of course, the *miners* will not accept my transaction from S1 to A2, because that would be a double spend. In other words, Joe, with his old node, cannot see that I'm doing a double spend, and would cheerfully accept a chain with a spending from S1 to A1 (if this is even possible ?), but he TRUSTS THE MINERS that they won't allow that.
This is just completely misunderstood. No node, old or new, will accept S1 to A2 when S1 has been spent. If the old node didn't see the S1 to S2 transaction, and S2 was spent, it would be a hard fork.
What's the point for him to run his old full node, and not a light wallet connected to a miner node ?
Better security and privacy. The old node will only be useless for mining.
You may argue that segwit is a cleaner way of doing things, but there is no need to hard fork for it. In fact it will be very stupid to hard fork for a simple change like that. P2SH was a much more intrusive change, and it was done by a simple flag day activation.
The point is that if you do a radical change in the protocol, you fork anyhow. There' s no good reason to keep backward compatibility with software that doesn't understand the new protocol but simply "allows it". The coin after is not the same coin as the coin before. The protocol is different. The only thing that is the same, is the ownership of coins.
Eh, yes. As long as you don't break any rules, the coin will be the same. Why the f*** would anyone want to split into two coins for simple upgrades like P2SH, new opcodes like OP_HODL or segwit? It doesn'ẗ make sense to me at all. Only a badly designed coin would do that.
And a clean hard fork would also allow people to "not be tied to backward compatibility". Many crypto currencies have such a policy. There's a lot of clumsiness in the requirement of a soft fork that disappears with a hard fork. For a radical modification like this one, a hard fork is much cleaner.
Use one of the scamcoins, if you want an insecure coin which hardforks all the time. Don't think you will be able to convince all bitcoin users that would be a good idea, and then you have two coins, disruption and big losses for everyone.
This is what I call religion. If you talk about "insecure" and "scam coin", that's not rational.
Call it what you want. You could call it fiat, where uncontrollable inflation, invalidation of money and outright theft flourish. I use Bitcoin instead, because I can be certain that nothing like this will happen.
Hell, I'm even sure that you can change the inflation rate in bitcoin with a soft fork too. If you would allow every first transaction from legacy to segwit address to be spent not once, but twice, you'd double in one go, all bitcoin wallets that switch to segwit. With a segwit soft fork because it is a new protocol that is "invisible" to the old one, so a soft fork.
No, that is not possible. That would be a hard fork. Again, you have misunderstood how bitcoin works.
The whole "leading argument" in this whole business is the irrational belief that non-mining full nodes have any decentralization value, and that old nodes with old node software are important. Both of these notions are entirely wrong, but they are the fundamental argument on which all of this dispute is based.
Don't try to tell me this is wrong. I run an exchange. A small one, about 1 million USD in monthly volume now (times two, if you count buy and sell separately). Quite often when people sell coins to me, it first takes them ages to sync their old Bitcoin QT node. There are thousands of old nodes out there, and people who run them.
You could also just run a full node for your customers, and tell them to connect a light wallet to your node.
Or I could just use PayPal. Seriously, do you really consider this an option? Why do you use bitcoin at all?