Concerns regarding SegWit + Lightning Network?

[marcelbit]

Dear bitcoin community,

I'm an ordinary user of Bitcoin and shortly I came across some information regarding Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash and I kindly ask for your support to help me to better understand these issues.

It was this open letter which got my attention: https://theflippening.github.io/open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-from-another-miner/

Some of the complaints of the author contra Bitcoin Core:

a) Bitcoin Core via the BlockStream team is too much influenced by investors like AXA. As a traditional insurance company AXA's interest may not be the best for the Bitcoin future.
Link: https://blockstream.com/about/#investors

b) The upcomming Lightning Network is patented software. The patent is held by BlockStream.
Remark: I have read BlockStreams explanation why they patent their software (https://blockstream.com/about/patent_pledge/). Which leads me to a sub-question:

b2) Wouldn't it then make sense for most Bitcoin devs and open-source devs in general to patent their software? Which I assume would not be compatible with the spirit of open source, would it?

c) The Lightning Network could impair the decentralisation of Bitcoin. Citation: "To reach anyone in a big network with a series of branching channel connections, you either need a large number of channels [-> users have to divide up their funds and can’t do anything except tiny purchases], or a large number of hops [-> everyone’s money will be tied up routing everybody else’s money]."
One conceivable solution: "the system depends on large centralized hubs"

d) The feature "Replace By Fee" broke the much more useful (for daily life transactions) feature "Zero-Conf". Zero-Conf would very quickly allow to see that a transaction is triggered. Instead with RBF a receiver of a payment needs to wait until a transaction is really processed by miners in order to be sure that the transaction will be made. Since with RBF a dishonest payer could overwrite a transaction and send it to a different address.

Further assertion of another author:
e) SegWit could decrease the security of transactions. (https://bitcrust.org/blog-incentive-shift-segwit)
As far as I understand with SegWit miners could be motivated not to verify transactions securely.

On the other hand:
f) In one video Andreas Antonopoulis explains that just increasing the block size (like Bitcoin Cash) is a too simple, short-term solution. If some day Bitcoin may have tens of thousands of transactions per second the blocks would be in the high gigabyte range - every ten minutes! Which could barely be processed by common nodes and lead to a centralisation trend as with mining today.


Ok, that's my amateurish summery. If anyone could reply to one or more of those issues and provide more insight I would be very thankful. Thank you very much!


Marcel

[1713573908]

1713573908

[marcelbit]

Any ideas?

[mda]

Any ideas?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2381234.0

[Carlton Banks]

Any ideas?

Sell your BTC.

If you believe everything you've said (despite it either not being true, or a selective representation of the truth), you should sell. There's alot of choice in the cryptocurrency market.


If you don't want to sell despite the development team being ostensibly against your interests, then you should support a hard-fork of Bitcoin from a different development team.

[marcelbit]

@mda: Thank you for the link. But for my understanding it doesn't really cover the aspects mentioned above.

@R_crusoe: Thank you for the tip. But is it related to any of the above issues? I don't think so.

@ Carlton Banks: Thank you, too, for your answer. "If you believe everything you've said" -> I didn't claim that any of these issues are true. It was just a brief summary of some aspects of the mentioned letter so that you (or other readers) don't necessarily need to read the original source by yourself.
I'm just doing some research to find out what is true. I would appreciate answers in the form like "No, issue d) is wrong because of ..." for example.  

[Carlton Banks]

In cases like this, I prefer not to refute things that are false or half-true.

The list of things that are false is endless, the only limit is the imagination of any person dreaming them up. It's a waste of effort to handle every false claim, especially if the claims have been refuted already before, as is the case for the list of claims in your post.

[marcelbit]

"claims have been refuted already before, as is the case for the list of claims in your post." -> Great, this is what I am looking for. Could you perhaps provide me a link or two? Thank you.

[Carlton Banks]

Since you're willing to entertain nearly every poor representation of Bitcoin's development, you really should do your own research. It's not a good use of my time to respond to every newbie on the forum coming up with old objections to Bitcoin development. You're just the latest in a large number of people highlighting concerns. I don't expect it to stop.

So if you're really interested, prove it. Do your own research, and present your conclusions publicly if you like. But this is old stuff marclebit, sorry

[marcelbit]

Ok, thank you. I wonder what this whole forum then is about in your opinion. I did search for answers but didn't find them yet. Yes, there is plenty of talk about LN and SegWit. But I didn't find specific information about the patent stuff, ZeroConf vs. RBF and so on.

[achow101]

Some of the complaints of the author contra Bitcoin Core:

This will be the millionth time I have to respond to the same completely false and fabricated ideas. All of these "complaints" are false.

a) Bitcoin Core via the BlockStream team is too much influenced by investors like AXA. As a traditional insurance company AXA's interest may not be the best for the Bitcoin future.
Link: https://blockstream.com/about/#investors

Blockstream does not "control" a majority of contributors to Bitcoin Core nor do they have any control over what goes into Bitcoin Core. The maintainers are all independent of Blockstream (MIT DCI or Chaincode labs). The only person who has commit access to Bitcoin Core that works for Blockstream is Pieter Wuille, and he has had commit access since long before he co-founded Blockstream.

b) The upcomming Lightning Network is patented software. The patent is held by BlockStream.
Remark: I have read BlockStreams explanation why they patent their software (https://blockstream.com/about/patent_pledge/). Which leads me to a sub-question:

The Lightning Network is not patented at all by Blockstream or anyone else. It is a free and open standard that is being developed by multiple development teams. In fact, a lot of development is led by non-Blockstream companies like Lightning Labs and ACINQ.

b2) Wouldn't it then make sense for most Bitcoin devs and open-source devs in general to patent their software? Which I assume would not be compatible with the spirit of open source, would it?

Patents are not really in the spirit of open source, and anyone who tells you that Blockstream or any Bitcoin Core developer has patented anything related to Bitcoin is lying to you.

c) The Lightning Network could impair the decentralisation of Bitcoin. Citation: "To reach anyone in a big network with a series of branching channel connections, you either need a large number of channels [-> users have to divide up their funds and can’t do anything except tiny purchases], or a large number of hops [-> everyone’s money will be tied up routing everybody else’s money]."
One conceivable solution: "the system depends on large centralized hubs"

In general, each user will have several open Lightning channels and that should all be handled by the client you are running. Even with several open channels, while each channel may not be able to make a single large purchase, it is possible for you to make a large payment by sending money through multiple channels.

While there may be several large hubs, it certainly does not introduce that much centralization. Hubs can't change the amount of money that you have and can't dictate anything that you do. If a hub is misbehaving, you can simply stop using them and use someone else or just not use LN.

d) The feature "Replace By Fee" broke the much more useful (for daily life transactions) feature "Zero-Conf". Zero-Conf would very quickly allow to see that a transaction is triggered. Instead with RBF a receiver of a payment needs to wait until a transaction is really processed by miners in order to be sure that the transaction will be made. Since with RBF a dishonest payer could overwrite a transaction and send it to a different address.

"Zero conf" was never a feature and unconfirmed transactions were never meant to be accepted. It was already fairly easy to double spend an unconfirmed transaction without it signalling RBF. Furthermore, RBF is node policy, not a consensus rule, so even if Bitcoin Core didn't implement it, miners could still enforce RBF by running modified software. With Opt-in RBF (which is what we have now), it is very clear whether a transaction is more likely to be replaced as it explicitly signals that it can be replaced. If you are a merchant, then you can look at such transactions and hold off on accepting the payment. Since Opt-in RBF is opt in, you can just make transactions that don't opt in, and keep in mind that such transactions are still easily double spendable.

Further assertion of another author:
e) SegWit could decrease the security of transactions. (https://bitcrust.org/blog-incentive-shift-segwit)

No. That is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how Segwit works.

As far as I understand with SegWit miners could be motivated not to verify transactions securely.

That does not matter. Nodes will reject invalid blocks. Nodes are enforcing the consensus rules (which includes Segwit). If a miner produces a consensus-invalid block because they failed to verify the transactions, then nodes will reject it and that block will not be added to the Bitcoin blockchain.

On the other hand:
f) In one video Andreas Antonopoulis explains that just increasing the block size (like Bitcoin Cash) is a too simple, short-term solution. If some day Bitcoin may have tens of thousands of transactions per second the blocks would be in the high gigabyte range - every ten minutes! Which could barely be processed by common nodes and lead to a centralisation trend as with mining today.

That is correct. Just increasing the block size limit is not a feasible long term solution. It is, effectively "kick the can down the road" and "let someone else later deal with it". Increasing the block size limit comes with a lot more consequences than you think it does and there is a whole lot more nuance to increasing Bitcoin's capacity than you think there is.

[ir.hn]

Segwit destruction will snowball.  One miner will figure out it is more profitable to skip verifying signatures.  Then two and three figure it out.  Then those who don't skip verifying signatures will notice their relative reward rate dropping.  Then someone will publish new bitcoin code that makes it more profitable to mine (by not verifying signatures).  The less people verify, then the less risk that skipping sig verification would result in the block getting rejected by the network.   Then more and more will join the bandwagon until those who verify signatures are a minority and at that point bitcoin gets majorly attacked and starts collapsing.

[Samarkand]

...
That is correct. Just increasing the block size limit is not a feasible long term solution. It is, effectively "kick the can down the road" and "let someone else later deal with it". Increasing the block size limit comes with a lot more consequences than you think it does and there is a whole lot more nuance to increasing Bitcoin's capacity than you think there is.

Could you list some of these consequences? I can think of the obvious reasons like
higher bandwidth and storage requirements, but maybe you have additional reasons why
increasing the blocksize is a bad idea.

Generally, I think that some of the big companies like Coinbase and Bitpay should have
introduced Segwit addresses by now. That would really decrease the current congestion on the
blockchain. Instead they are busy integrating BCH in their respective businesses...

[achow101]

Could you list some of these consequences? I can think of the obvious reasons like
higher bandwidth and storage requirements, but maybe you have additional reasons why
increasing the blocksize is a bad idea.

There are computational costs of larger blocks as they can be more computationally expensive to validate. Other considerations include the orphan rate, increased potential for fee sniping, larger attack surface for potential DoS attacks, etc.

Segwit destruction will snowball.  One miner will figure out it is more profitable to skip verifying signatures.  Then two and three figure it out.  Then those who don't skip verifying signatures will notice their relative reward rate dropping.  Then someone will publish new bitcoin code that makes it more profitable to mine (by not verifying signatures).  The less people verify, then the less risk that skipping sig verification would result in the block getting rejected by the network.   Then more and more will join the bandwagon until those who verify signatures are a minority and at that point bitcoin gets majorly attacked and starts collapsing.

Please stop spreading misinformation. This "attack" is not just limited to segwit; miners could have chosen to not verify signatures anyways before segwit activated. Regardless of whether segwit is activated, if a miner produces an invalid block because it contains a transaction that does not have a valid signature (again, regardless of segwit or not), other non-mining full nodes on the network will reject that block and the miner will be wasting his time and electricity.

[ir.hn]

Could you list some of these consequences? I can think of the obvious reasons like
higher bandwidth and storage requirements, but maybe you have additional reasons why
increasing the blocksize is a bad idea.

There are computational costs of larger blocks as they can be more computationally expensive to validate. Other considerations include the orphan rate, increased potential for fee sniping, larger attack surface for potential DoS attacks, etc.

Segwit destruction will snowball.  One miner will figure out it is more profitable to skip verifying signatures.  Then two and three figure it out.  Then those who don't skip verifying signatures will notice their relative reward rate dropping.  Then someone will publish new bitcoin code that makes it more profitable to mine (by not verifying signatures).  The less people verify, then the less risk that skipping sig verification would result in the block getting rejected by the network.   Then more and more will join the bandwagon until those who verify signatures are a minority and at that point bitcoin gets majorly attacked and starts collapsing.

Please stop spreading misinformation. This "attack" is not just limited to segwit; miners could have chosen to not verify signatures anyways before segwit activated. Regardless of whether segwit is activated, if a miner produces an invalid block because it contains a transaction that does not have a valid signature (again, regardless of segwit or not), other non-mining full nodes on the network will reject that block and the miner will be wasting his time and electricity.

Lets say all the non-mining full nodes reject the block.  Why would the miners care?  the miners are the one creating the blockchain.  You can cry foul all day long but unless you can vote with your hashpower on which chain is correct, you are yelling to the wind.

[achow101]

Lets say all the non-mining full nodes reject the block.  Why would the miners care?  the miners are the one creating the blockchain.  You can cry foul all day long but unless you can vote with your hashpower on which chain is correct, you are yelling to the wind.

Miners care because the businesses that accept Bitcoin run full nodes. Businesses will choose to run the nodes that the users are using otherwise they would not have any other customers and would thus be making no money from accepting a different chain. If no one accepts the miner's chain, then they are mining something has no value. Bitcoin is not ruled by miners.

[ir.hn]

Lets say all the non-mining full nodes reject the block.  Why would the miners care?  the miners are the one creating the blockchain.  You can cry foul all day long but unless you can vote with your hashpower on which chain is correct, you are yelling to the wind.

Miners care because the businesses that accept Bitcoin run full nodes. Businesses will choose to run the nodes that the users are using otherwise they would not have any other customers and would thus be making no money from accepting a different chain. If no one accepts the miner's chain, then they are mining something has no value. Bitcoin is not ruled by miners.

So you are claiming bitcoin is ruled by corporations?  If that were true then wow we should let everyone know!  The reality is if the corporations don't accept the longest blockchain then, well, I guess they would have to stop using bitcoin as that would be their only recourse.  The only power non-mining nodes have is boycott, but they don't have control over bitcoin, only the miners have that, and that is by design.

[hatshepsut93]

Lets say all the non-mining full nodes reject the block.  Why would the miners care?  the miners are the one creating the blockchain.  You can cry foul all day long but unless you can vote with your hashpower on which chain is correct, you are yelling to the wind.

Miners care because the businesses that accept Bitcoin run full nodes. Businesses will choose to run the nodes that the users are using otherwise they would not have any other customers and would thus be making no money from accepting a different chain. If no one accepts the miner's chain, then they are mining something has no value. Bitcoin is not ruled by miners.

So you are claiming bitcoin is ruled by corporations?  If that were true then wow we should let everyone know!  The reality is if the corporations don't accept the longest blockchain then, well, I guess they would have to stop using bitcoin as that would be their only recourse.  The only power non-mining nodes have is boycott, but they don't have control over bitcoin, only the miners have that, and that is by design.

Non-mining nodes have the power to change the rules to whatever they want - like for example changing PoW algorithm to render all legacy mining equipment useless. By default, if non-mining nodes would stop receiving blocks for a long time, the difficulty would drop low enough to mine blocks on GPU's and CPU's even without any forks - they are non-mining only because of difficulty. But this situation would usually mean that the miners have gone rogue, and since they can launch an attack on minority chain at any time, a hard fork to a new algo would be required.

Currently there are thousands of full nodes, some of them belong to big companies, but they are all peers - the protocol does not care how many BTC you have and how many transaction you do, you are connected with the network for as long as you agree with its rules.

[nullius]

Please stop spreading misinformation. This "attack" is not just limited to segwit; miners could have chosen to not verify signatures anyways before segwit activated. Regardless of whether segwit is activated, if a miner produces an invalid block because it contains a transaction that does not have a valid signature (again, regardless of segwit or not), other non-mining full nodes on the network will reject that block and the miner will be wasting his time and electricity.

Lets say all the non-mining full nodes reject the block.  Why would the miners care?  the miners are the one creating the blockchain.  You can cry foul all day long but unless you can vote with your hashpower on which chain is correct, you are yelling to the wind.

ir.hn:  You have no idea how Bitcoin works.  You have no idea how Segwit works.  Or at least, you are feigning gross ignorance.  In this thread and others, intelligent and well-informed people have attempted to educate you.  You shoot back with bare assertions and blatant misinformation.  Enough.

General point:  There is a common misconception about the role of miners.  Miners have one, only one, and exactly one job:  To provide the ordering of transactions in a Byzantine fault-tolerant manner (which in turn prevents double-spends).  That’s what miners do.  That is all miners do.  Granted, it is an important and resource-intensive job; that’s why miners get paid for it.  But that is the one and only security function of miners.

Of course, miners must validate each block they produce; if they didn’t, they would be unable to reliably produce valid blocks.  But miners are not the parties responsible for enforcing validation on the network.  Full nodes do that.  Each individual full node does that, so as to provide better security for its owner; and all full nodes collectively do that, thus providing validation security for the whole network.  Observe how here as everywhere, Bitcoin precisely aligns the individual’s selfish interest with the common good.

Full nodes do not blindly “follow the longest chain”.  They follow the chain independently validated by them which has the highest total POW.  A miner who produced invalid blocks would be wasting his hashrate, and likely risking widespread blacklisting of his IP address.  It doesn’t matter if the invalid blocks steal money from Segwit transactions, steal money from old-style transactions, create 21 billion new coins, or are filled with gibberish from /dev/random.  An invalid block is an invalid block, and shall be promptly discarded by all full nodes—period.

ir.hn is creating nonsensical non-arguments by exploiting the aforesaid misconception about the role of miners.  After all the attempts others have made to explain on this and other points, I cannot but conclude that ir.hn is maliciously spreading misinformation.  I write this post for the benefit of others.  I am uninterested in arguing with somebody who is a deliberate liar and/or so manifestly ineducable as to appear braindead.

[ir.hn]

Please stop spreading misinformation. This "attack" is not just limited to segwit; miners could have chosen to not verify signatures anyways before segwit activated. Regardless of whether segwit is activated, if a miner produces an invalid block because it contains a transaction that does not have a valid signature (again, regardless of segwit or not), other non-mining full nodes on the network will reject that block and the miner will be wasting his time and electricity.

Lets say all the non-mining full nodes reject the block.  Why would the miners care?  the miners are the one creating the blockchain.  You can cry foul all day long but unless you can vote with your hashpower on which chain is correct, you are yelling to the wind.

ir.hn:  You have no idea how Bitcoin works.  You have no idea how Segwit works.  Or at least, you are feigning gross ignorance.  In this thread and others, intelligent and well-informed people have attempted to educate you.  You shoot back with bare assertions and blatant misinformation.  Enough.

General point:  There is a common misconception about the role of miners.  Miners have one, only one, and exactly one job:  To provide the ordering of transactions in a Byzantine fault-tolerant manner (which in turn prevents double-spends).  That’s what miners do.  That is all miners do.  Granted, it is an important and resource-intensive job; that’s why miners get paid for it.  But that is the one and only security function of miners.

Of course, miners must validate each block they produce; if they didn’t, they would be unable to reliably produce valid blocks.  But miners are not the parties responsible for enforcing validation on the network.  Full nodes do that.  Each individual full node does that, so as to provide better security for its owner; and all full nodes collectively do that, thus providing validation security for the whole network.  Observe how here as everywhere, Bitcoin precisely aligns the individual’s selfish interest with the common good.

Full nodes do not blindly “follow the longest chain”.  They follow the chain independently validated by them which has the highest total POW.  A miner who produced invalid blocks would be wasting his hashrate, and likely risking widespread blacklisting of his IP address.  It doesn’t matter if the invalid blocks steal money from Segwit transactions, steal money from old-style transactions, create 21 billion new coins, or are filled with gibberish from /dev/random.  An invalid block is an invalid block, and shall be promptly discarded by all full nodes—period.

ir.hn is creating nonsensical non-arguments by exploiting the aforesaid misconception about the role of miners.  After all the attempts others have made to explain on this and other points, I cannot but conclude that ir.hn is maliciously spreading misinformation.  I write this post for the benefit of others.  I am uninterested in arguing with somebody who is a deliberate liar and/or so manifestly ineducable as to appear braindead.

Full nodes can have their ledger of blocks that they verified.  But who is using a non-mining node's ledger to mine on?  Miners mine on the last block that is in the blockchain.  The only way to get a block into the blockchain is to win the block by mining.  If you are not mining you simply cannot vote on what blocks make it into the actual blockchain.  The only person who's vote counts is the person who actually mined the block.  So even if you have 99% of the hashpower but are so unlucky that you never win a block, you never actually have any say as to what makes it into the blockchain.  the only way transactions are confirmed, is if they make it into the actual blockchain.  thus the only people who "verify" transactions and actually have authority to enforce their verification, are miners.

[nullius]

Full nodes can have their ledger of blocks that they verified.  But who is using a non-mining node's ledger to mine on?  Miners mine on the last block that is in the blockchain.  The only way to get a block into the blockchain is to win the block by mining.  If you are not mining you simply cannot vote on what blocks make it into the actual blockchain.  The only person who's vote counts is the person who actually mined the block.  So even if you have 99% of the hashpower but are so unlucky that you never win a block, you never actually have any say as to what makes it into the blockchain.  the only way transactions are confirmed, is if they make it into the actual blockchain.  thus the only people who "verify" transactions and actually have authority to enforce their verification, are miners.

What is so difficult to understand here?  Invalid blocks are not “in the blockchain”.  The only way to add a block to the blockchain, is to mine a valid block.  Those who produce invalid blocks “never actually have any say as to what makes it into the blockchain.”

...I cannot but conclude that ir.hn is maliciously spreading misinformation.  I write this post for the benefit of others.  I am uninterested in arguing with somebody who is a deliberate liar and/or so manifestly ineducable as to appear braindead.