The Barry Silbert segwit2x agreement with >80% miner support.

[sturle]

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.

That's not what I'd call "losing coins because you run a node".

Great.  I'll tell pepole who lose their coins that you have chosen a different name for it, so it must be OK.

That's evident that if the chains have identical signature schemes, and you didn't do anything to split them, of course a valid transaction on chain A will also be a valid transaction on chain B, the famous "replay attack".  The thing to do, is that ideally, the one forking off should modify something in the signature (hard fork !) so that this is automatically solved (a good signature on one scheme will not be a good signature on the other) ; or you should mix in yourself newly mined dust on one of the two prongs.  Otherwise, it is normal that any signature on one chain will be copied over to the other chain.

Yep, so you will make two coins.  And if you were to do that for every minor improvement, we would have more than 20 different bitcoin blockchains already, and most people, including me, would see it as a failed experiment.

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.

More than just restrict activity.  ANY soft fork is automatically imposed by a >50% hash rate collusion over the soft fork.  If tomorrow, >50% of miner nodes decide to impose segwit, then segwit will be.  Other miners have no option.  They will get orphaned all the time according to their own rules.  Because all nodes will accept segwit blocks like "legacy nodes", including the non-segwit miners.

Of course, because segwit is a soft fork.  Hard forks don't work that way.  The blocks produced on the other side won't get orphaned.  Both chains will continue as different coins.

A hard fork is a whole different affair: you make two coins, and users happen to possess both of them.  Up to them to use both of them, by running their respective wallets (and eventually, their respective nodes).

Yep, and if someone want to do that with bitcoin they are welcome.  Just don't call the new coin "bitcoin", because that will be confusing to everyone, and don't expect anyone to use their new coin.

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[dinofelis]

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.

That's not what I'd call "losing coins because you run a node".

Great.  I'll tell pepole who lose their coins that you have chosen a different name for it, so it must be OK.

Again, nobody CAN lose a coin just by running or not running a particular non-mining node.  That's trivially obvious.

Yep, so you will make two coins.  And if you were to do that for every minor improvement, we would have more than 20 different bitcoin blockchains already, and most people, including me, would see it as a failed experiment.

Why ?  After all, each time you make two coins, they are evaluated in the market.  If most users find the improvement much better than the original, they will put all the market cap on the new one, and none on the old.  In PoW, the miners follow the market cap (in fact, they follow the block reward in $$ but if the rewards are comparable, the miners follow the market cap).  So if users decide to buy up the new coins, and dump the old ones, the market cap of the old ones goes to 0, and the market cap of the new one takes over all of it.

If the users are divided over the utility of the modification, two coins emerge with comparable market cap, mostly half of what used to be the original coin, which is a good thing too: it means that essentially a useless modification was applied, at least as evaluated by the market.

I would think the multitude of different coins a good thing ; but actually, one doesn't need to fork off bitcoin to do so, one can also start a chain from scratch.  That is what about 700 or more other crypto currencies have done.   The more the market is varied, the more different coins there are, the better the experiment, and the more fluid the market ; the better the outcome.    Monopolistic markets are a bad thing.  Variation and choice is good in my book.  I think bitcoin has been having a monopoly for far too long a time, and finally, other crypto is being considered somewhat, even though in a crazy speculative game.

If there is a strong majority forking away in bitcoin, the slow difficulty adaptation in bitcoin will simply kill the small minority chain: its block rate will be ridiculously small.  So any 10/90 % split in bitcoin will result in a 0/100% split almost directly by the miners, and no miners are going to stick with the slow chain ; that was the difference with ETH/ETC.

Note that you are contradicted that every hard fork needs to lead to two prongs in reality: most regularly hardforking coins like ethereum, DASH, monero, .... are in any case so much centralized on their "Core" dev team, that only in very contentious cases, two prongs emerge, as was the case with the winding-back HF on ethereum.

Of course, because segwit is a soft fork.  Hard forks don't work that way.  The blocks produced on the other side won't get orphaned.  Both chains will continue as different coins.

Yes.  That's good in my book.

Yep, and if someone want to do that with bitcoin they are welcome.  Just don't call the new coin "bitcoin", because that will be confusing to everyone, and don't expect anyone to use their new coin.

The funny thing is that a UASF is exactly the same.  You make two coins if the soft fork chain is minority, even though it is a soft fork.  UASF is asking users to only consider a segwit-only chain, and hope that a minority of miners will make a segwit-only chain that those UASF nodes will accept (otherwise, they stop).  But the old majority chain continues of course.  We ALSO have a fork and two coins: don't call the new one "bitcoin" in that case, you might confuse people.

However, this kind of fork is extremely dangerous.  Because the majority chain may be orphaned after a month or so if they don't transform it into a bilateral hard fork.

[ComputerGenie]

Sad how much of this thread points out the real problem: Most people that have an opinion don't even know the underlying factors of their own opinion (much less the opinion they oppose).  

[mindrust]

What would happen if satoshi logs in to the board and says that he is supporting UASF?

Would that be enough for you to name that minority chain as "bitcoin"?

I feel like we are taking bitcoin to the point of near destruction and just before 3-4 different bitcoins appear, satoshi will make a comeback and settle things once and for all. (I hope he re-sets the rules and removes ASICs all together)

[ComputerGenie]

...I feel like ...satoshi will make a comeback and settle things once and for all...

More likely, he'll just quietly spend his billions and call it a day.

... (I hope he re-sets the rules and removes ASICs all together)

There's now billions of dollars invested in Bitcoin; even if the world turned upside down and the alg changed, new ASICs would be out in less than 2 months.   

[dinofelis]

...I feel like ...satoshi will make a comeback and settle things once and for all...

More likely, he'll just quietly spend his billions and call it a day.

... (I hope he re-sets the rules and removes ASICs all together)

There's now billions of dollars invested in Bitcoin; even if the world turned upside down and the alg changed, new ASICs would be out in less than 2 months.  

The real problem with asic mining and its centralization, is that PoW mining is also used for consensus building (= decision power over the protocol and the history).  One should have kept PoW for mining (that is, making new coins) ; but one should have used PoS or a variant of it for consensus.  Then, there wouldn't be that difficulty that those with a lot of mining power are also the masters of the consensus (protocol) ; the stake holders would remain master.

In fact, ASIC-optimized mining has the advantage that after a while, all technological advancement has been squeezed out apart from overall technological advancement (say, Moore's law).  As such, a certain amount of PoW starts to represent an incompressible economic cost.

This is my favorite way for automatic value capping of a crypto currency, by allowing emission of just as many coins as you want that have been burned with an incompressible amount of economic waste.  It would do what the FED is doing, but automatically, and make a real, near-ideal currency (in the sense of Nash ideal money).  Of course it would be inflationary with technological progress, so one should program in a difficulty rise of the order of Moore's law, instead of the difficulty adjustment to keep the coin emission rate on a curve, one should keep the coin *value* on a curve and regulate the emission.

In other words, instead of a difficulty adjustment every 2016 blocks, one should have a difficulty adjustment following Moore's law, and let people make as many coins as they want, until the coin value drops below the cost to make it, at which point it stabilizes in value.

[mindrust]

...I feel like ...satoshi will make a comeback and settle things once and for all...

More likely, he'll just quietly spend his billions and call it a day.

... (I hope he re-sets the rules and removes ASICs all together)

There's now billions of dollars invested in Bitcoin; even if the world turned upside down and the alg changed, new ASICs would be out in less than 2 months.   

Why are you keep repeating yourself? I am pretty sure you said the same thing more than 3 times in this thread now. I haven't answered intentionally but it seems you are having a hard time to understand...

1-If they hack it again, PoW algo can be changed again also.

2-I don't give a rats ass if people invested billions of dollars in ASICs. I simply don't care. They shouldn't have been there in the first place so nobody will miss them when they are gone. Your hardware becomes obsolete in a year or two anyway. I guarantee that you won't miss them neither. 

[ComputerGenie]

...In other words, instead of a difficulty adjustment every 2016 blocks, one should have a difficulty adjustment following Moore's law...

1965 is over and we've about reached the end of Moore's law. 

[ComputerGenie]

...[blablablibiddybla]...

Thank you for being the shining example of:

Sad how much of this thread points out the real problem: Most people that have an opinion don't even know the underlying factors of their own opinion (much less the opinion they oppose). 

[cellard]

The most important thing in a coin is the software being solid, and Core devs have proven time after time for years, that they are the best in the game.

Mining is an easy task, anybody can do it.

We should in any case, find some common ground and try to reach an agreement that will NOT cause 2 freaking coins. Let's not kill the current amazing uptrend with drama (and a lot of people has commented this so I think there would be a big correction if we don't do it without drama)

Let's find a way to get segwit it with no drama and we'll be sitting at $10,000 easy by next year.

Segwit soft fork now, 2mb hard fork later, Core devs in charge of the code. Can't lose.

The frankenstein segwit agreement needs to be replaced with a BIP that looks like what I said and we'll be ok. There are people working on this already. Then we could avoid going the UASF route.

[Quantus]

How large would blocks be under the current segwit plans plus the 2mb block increase plans?

How large would the blockchain grow each year for this implementation of Bitcoin?

I would like to remind everyone the single greatest barrier for someone wishing to participate in our decentralized network is the size of the block chain and the time it takes to download and the bandwidth to continuously sync.

If all you care about is the price of Bitcoin and not its decentralization then you will lose both and deserve neither.  

We should not let accountants, PR heads or sales reps decide whats is best for our network.

Hubris and greed will be our downfall.

[ComputerGenie]

The most important thing in a coin is the software being solid, and Core devs have proven time after time for years, that they are the best in the game...

So we can assume that you've thoroughly tested every other option to be qualified to make such an assertion? 

[The One]

"Gmaxwell on "Frankensegwit" agreement: we were explicitly disinvited then reinvited then disinvited.": https://0bin.net/paste/catFu7J9BqL7zsFq#xByDHjK6HYhzmcXXMVgeBX8tYUB6+-9pb14RBxEJVF0

We all need more details why invite then disinvite, then invite, then and so on. This sounds too bizarre and rather irrational human action. I fear there is more info not yet revealed.

[ComputerGenie]

It's nice to know that I'm not the only one that calls it "Twatter".

[cellard]

The most important thing in a coin is the software being solid, and Core devs have proven time after time for years, that they are the best in the game...

So we can assume that you've thoroughly tested every other option to be qualified to make such an assertion? 

There's no "other options".

All we have is people copy-pasting 99.99% of Core's hard work, then adding some changes on top and calling it a dev team. And the irony is, once they add that 00.01% of new code, things go south (see Buggy Unlimited faulty code that lead to constant exploits).

BU is not even on the picture anymore. UASF has defeated BU, and if miners don't wake the fuck up and activate segwit before august 1, you know what's coming.

But again, hopefully we can reach a proper 2MB HF agreement before UASF kicks in.

[ComputerGenie]

The most important thing in a coin is the software being solid, and Core devs have proven time after time for years, that they are the best in the game...

So we can assume that you've thoroughly tested every other option to be qualified to make such an assertion? 

There's no "other options"...

When you claim "they are the best in the game" and they are the "only" in the game, by extension, you're also saying "Core devs are the worst in the game. "
Because, logic. 

[sturle]

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.

That's not what I'd call "losing coins because you run a node".

Great.  I'll tell pepole who lose their coins that you have chosen a different name for it, so it must be OK.

Again, nobody CAN lose a coin just by running or not running a particular non-mining node.  That's trivially obvious.

Ah, you are making the argument they have to actually use the node to either receive or send transactions?  Yes, that goes without saying.

Yep, so you will make two coins.  And if you were to do that for every minor improvement, we would have more than 20 different bitcoin blockchains already, and most people, including me, would see it as a failed experiment.

Why ?  After all, each time you make two coins, they are evaluated in the market.  If most users find the improvement much better than the original, they will put all the market cap on the new one, and none on the old.

No.  Since people will lose money from this, and the security of the storage itself since all parameters are subject to change this way, the total market cap will be much lower.  Bitcoin will become one of those altcoins you never know what will happen to.

I am more interested in other properties of bitcoin than the market cap.  It doesn't matter much to me if it loses value.  If it loses the concept of the immutable blockchain rules, it has lost everything to me and become just another shitcoin.  I'll be out, and so will many other people holding large amounts, and small businesses (like mine) which depend on keeping cost and complexity down.

In PoW, the miners follow the market cap (in fact, they follow the block reward in $$ but if the rewards are comparable, the miners follow the market cap).  So if users decide to buy up the new coins, and dump the old ones, the market cap of the old ones goes to 0, and the market cap of the new one takes over all of it.

It is not that easy.  If miners were interested in market cap, then segwit would have been  activated a long time ago.

If the users are divided over the utility of the modification, two coins emerge with comparable market cap, mostly half of what used to be the original coin, which is a good thing too: it means that essentially a useless modification was applied, at least as evaluated by the market.

Yeah, this way you can make loads of shitcoins, and if you think the market wants it it would have happened many times already.

I can recommend bitcoin to people, because I know what it is.  If it stops being bitcoin, and becomes a bunch of shitcoins, I can't do that any more.

I would think the multitude of different coins a good thing ; but actually, one doesn't need to fork off bitcoin to do so, one can also start a chain from scratch.  That is what about 700 or more other crypto currencies have done.   The more the market is varied, the more different coins there are, the better the experiment, and the more fluid the market ; the better the outcome.    Monopolistic markets are a bad thing.  Variation and choice is good in my book.  I think bitcoin has been having a monopoly for far too long a time, and finally, other crypto is being considered somewhat, even though in a crazy speculative game.

What?  The first altcoins started in 2010.  Bitcoin hasn't had any kind of monopoly for as long as the economy around it has existed.

So you want a hard fork to destroy bitcoin and it's dominance, and the other arguments you made were just nonsense?

If there is a strong majority forking away in bitcoin, the slow difficulty adaptation in bitcoin will simply kill the small minority chain: its block rate will be ridiculously small.

  OK, you obviously don't understand even the most basic properties of bitcoin.  Mining difficulty adjusts automatically every 2016 blocks to make sure the blockrate stay the same, regardless of the hashrate.

Note that you are contradicted that every hard fork needs to lead to two prongs in reality: most regularly hardforking coins like ethereum, DASH, monero, .... are in any case so much centralized on their "Core" dev team, that only in very contentious cases, two prongs emerge, as was the case with the winding-back HF on ethereum.

Those are centrally controlled shitcoins.  I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.  Fortunately Bitcoin is nothing like that.

Of course, because segwit is a soft fork.  Hard forks don't work that way.  The blocks produced on the other side won't get orphaned.  Both chains will continue as different coins.

Yes.  That's good in my book.

Then just fork off your own coin.

Yep, and if someone want to do that with bitcoin they are welcome.  Just don't call the new coin "bitcoin", because that will be confusing to everyone, and don't expect anyone to use their new coin.

The funny thing is that a UASF is exactly the same.  You make two coins if the soft fork chain is minority, even though it is a soft fork.  UASF is asking users to only consider a segwit-only chain, and hope that a minority of miners will make a segwit-only chain that those UASF nodes will accept (otherwise, they stop).  But the old majority chain continues of course.  We ALSO have a fork and two coins: don't call the new one "bitcoin" in that case, you might confuse people.

No, it isn't the same.  Since segwit is backwards compatible, the other chain will reorg to the UASF chain if/when the UASF chain become the longest.  If UASF gains traction, those not running the UASF chain will at some point get reorged over to the UASF chain, losing all traces of the chain they used to be on.

However, this kind of fork is extremely dangerous.  Because the majority chain may be orphaned after a month or so if they don't transform it into a bilateral hard fork.

It can be orphaned any time.  Could be an hour, a day, a month or even years.  UASF is clearly the safest side to be on.  About 10% of all bitcoin nodes on the network signal some kind of support for a BIP148 style UASF.  It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

[The One]

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").  

This is a typical error that people make. First of all, a block have nothing to do with economics. It is an accountancy thing. Double book-keeping with 2 columns; Expenditure and Income. In Bitcoin it is; Input and Output. The original blocksize was 32mb and the 1mb was temporary anti-spam measure.

I know that it was presented that way, and maybe it was even *intended* that way.   But a desirable outcome is not necessarily the actual outcome of a design.  If I make a rocket to go to the moon, and I put propellers on it, even if my intentions are to get to the moon, my rocket will never leave the atmosphere.  Arguing that propellers should bring me to the moon because that's why I put them on my rocket in the first place, is an erroneous form of reasoning that takes desired outcome as provable consequence.

If one puts a hard limit on something, you make it artificially scarce.  One has put an artificial limit on the number of bitcoins that are made.  Nothing technical would stop you from making more of them.  Changing the >>= into <<= in the calculation of the coinbase reward is all that is needed to have doublings instead of halvings every 210 000 blocks.  But one put halvings, to make bitcoins artificially scarce and hence expensive.

Whether this was the intention or not, one did the same with the number of transactions by limiting the amount of produced transaction room to 1 MB/10 minutes.  This could actually be a very smart move, because the scarcity of transaction room makes it expensive: the fees.  Given that sooner or later, the whole of bitcoin's PoW security must be paid by fees, it wouldn't be crazy to make fees expensive.

Why 1 MB and not 10 MB ?  That's similar to "why 21 million coins and not 210 million coins ?".  Arbitrary choice of scarcity.  But it *is* a scarcity parameter, and its price is the fee, like the number of bitcoins is scarce and its price is the market price of a coin.

A company does not limited its sales according to the double book-keeping size. Sales are limited by the goods/services they have on offer - economic. The original limit of 32mb was a good one and allows adoptions to grow naturally over a decade or more before reaching the limit. Thus there is plenty of time to solve the capacity/scaling issue before the limit is reached.

I agree with you on the idea that *if bitcoin were not to be scarce in transactions*, but it wasn't designed that way.  I also think that the uncapped value of bitcoin is wrong.  I think bitcoin's value should be regulated automatically (I already said how).  But no, people want scarce coins that can go moon.  Well, they  also have scarce transaction room that can go moon too.

Both of these are bad for a currency.  A currency should have fluid transactions, and should have stable value.  Bitcoin is designed to have speculative value by scarcity of coins, and is equally designed to have expensive transactions by scarcity of room.  The coin emission lowers, the transaction "emission" is constant.  Hell, it would even be funny if block SIZE halved also every 210 000 blocks !  Then the total block chain would have finite length and the last transaction would take place in some 10s of years when the block size drops under 1 KB, in the same way as the emission rate drops under 1 Satoshi.

Can't help it that it is designed that way, even if it was not intended that way.

Rocket, propeller - engineering not accountancy, so a bad example, but i see what you were trying to do. The intended and designed outcome was 32mb. The desirable outcome of having 32mb was that it would take a decade or more to reach the 32mb limit, thus allowing developers plenty of time to come up with new solutions/features to expand capacity and scaling before the 32mb limit is reached. Satoshi intended the 1mb to be temporary but others had different ideas. Thus the actual outcome has changed because of others, not Satoshi. You shouldn't confused the intention, design, desire of Satoshi, with the present developers' desire thus creating a different "actual outcome."

How? Any links?
Regulating Bitcoin price like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_fixing ? Who then is going to fix the price daily. I do see where you are coming from. I fixed price daily is good for businesses, so then can accept and convert bitcoin without worrying the price crashing. This would lead to centralisation, unless it can be automated by codes. Bitcoin value is still at its infancy. It either goes up and reach a stable value at some point or it will crash due to the "creation of ponzi codes."

The scarcity of coin is good. It allows the value to settle and stabilise, then go up slowly, in the future, if it ever gets there. Yes, the value is speculative now, mostly due to traders. The "scarcity of room" should not have happened. It's now a cluster fuck.

[classicsucks]

So you want a hard fork to destroy bitcoin and it's dominance, and the other arguments you made were just nonsense?

STAHP. Educate yourself. Don't you know that bitcoin has already hard forked several times in its history?

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki

Bitcoin didn't split in half - there is still only one bitcoin. When it becomes absolutely necessary to modify the protocol, sane people work together and get it done. Like when the blocks are totally full, and people have been waiting for years to do a trivial blocksize increase...

Even if bitcoin DID split into two chains, one would have more hashpower, and would therefore be more valuable than the other, like Ethereum did. Ehrmagerd, it didn't die!


Bitcoin dominance is ending because the blocksize is still too small.

[ComputerGenie]

...Thus the actual outcome has changed because of others, not Satoshi. You shouldn't confused the intention, design, desire of Satoshi, with the present developers' desire thus creating a different "actual outcome."...

But they were hand-picked by him with a clear understanding of how to carry out his vision, just ask them and they will tell you.