8 ms·

Inside the Fight Over Bitcoin’s Future

93 points by donohoe 11y ago

Hermel 11y ago
The Bitcoin core has definitely left the stage of rapid innovation. Instead, we can expect slow, consensus-based progress at best for the future. This is normal for a successful protocol and happened to html, smpt, tcp, etc. as well. Committees have taken over.
- lnanek2 11y ago
  Sidechains are a kind of complex mess. After reading about them I'd definitely chalk them down to terrible, committee based software development vs. just bumping the size like the XT people want to do.
- cb18 11y ago
  The Bitcoin core has definitely left the stage of rapid innovation. Instead, we can expect slow, consensus-based progress at best for the future. This is normal for a successful protocol But that alone isn't indicative of the protocol's success, is it, can't that also be attributed to infighting? Committees may propose things, but they've not really taken over as it's still the community(those controlling the networks computational power) that decides what changes to adopt right? And the only people who can actually implement changes are those with access to the core right? Or former core people who've splintered off(XT.) So what do committees have to do with this?
erikb 11y ago
I totally agree with that part of the conclusion that says Bitcoin has failed in regards of it's "no need to trust anyone" goal. It's not a failure for us though. There are so many things we can learn from Bitcoin, like no matter what your technical solution is, you'll always have power bubbles (e.g., for bitcoin the power aligns around the developers and the huge farm owners), you'll always have disagreement in the community no matter how morally high your goals are.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  More generally, you can rarely solve social problems with technological means alone.
  - eterm 11y ago
    This really is the takeaway. Bitcoiners like to point to the remittance industry or the wider money transfer industry and say how a bitcoin future would be so much better, but they're slowly learning the hard way a lot of problems actually need solving, and the cost with bitcoin is just as high as non-bitcoin. "Solutions" start to appear which look remarkably similar to the existing industries they were trying to disrupt. For example "off chain" transactions which seem w.r.t bitcoin remarkably similar to fiat banking with respect to gold.
    - vectorpush 11y ago
      "Offchain" aka marketing speak for a standard relational database.
      - tveita 11y ago
        Not always, sometimes they use MongoDB.
  - erikb 11y ago
    Yeah and in theory we all know that, right? But especially with Bitcoin I totally forgot about it, although I'm probably far less enthusiastic than most Bitcoiners (don't read much about it, only own $2 worth of Satoshis, etc). For some time I really thought Bitcoin would solve money. And that's where I think the real learning comes in, when you transfer your theoretical knowledge and see how it applies to reality.
- pron 11y ago
  > There are so many things we can learn from Bitcoin, like no matter what your technical solution is, you'll always have power bubbles If many of Bitcoin's believers had only been less dismissive of the social sciences, they could have known that long ago. In fact, if they had only been less dismissive of politics, they would have known that people who dismiss politics are simply people who don't know what it is, and those are the people who eventually do bad politics. Politics is a property of any social interaction and is simply influence over others (by any social means -- even technological). As an academic field of study it is the study of the flow of power (simply put -- influence) in a society.
jackgavigan 11y ago
I feel the article does Pieter Wuille a disservice by mentioning the Blockstream/sidechains conflict of interest without mentioning the fact that he is actually in favour of raising the block size limit (albeit gradually, over time) and has authored a proposal to do so: https://gist.github.com/sipa/c65665fc360ca7a176a6 https://gist.github.com/sipa/c65665fc360ca7a176a6 What's ironic about this whole affair is that four of the five core developers support raising the blocksize limit (Gregory Maxwell is the sole dissenter, preferring to wait until a transaction backlog develops before taking action) but they diverge on exactly how and how quickly to raise it.
- jnbiche 11y ago
  I honestly feel that some of the "pro raising" devs aren't actually in favor of raising it anytime in the foreseeable future, and are just dragging their feet in the hopes of that the whole thing will go away. The whole point of this debate is that we've been litigating this affair for the past three years, each year a several core devs claiming to want to raise it "soon", and then it just gets put down another year. I'm still not sure about the BitcoinXT gaining consensus, but I'm very glad someone is putting real pressure on the situation, because that's the only way the block size will be raised anytime in the next few years.
  - jackgavigan 11y ago
    My take on it is that the key difference is that Gavin perceives a greater urgency in raising the limit before we reach the point where blocks start getting filled up, than Jeff/Wladimir/Pieter do. I think he got frustrated that no progress was being made, which sparked his decision to add the relevant code to XT, which is what has brought things to a head. I actually suspect that his preferred outcome is not to fork the blockchain into XT and Core, but to put some pressure on the other core devs to act.
    - kang 11y ago
      That would not be correct entirely. Earlier they had 90% as the consensus limit, which they have now brought down to 75% and have suggested driving consensus in regular milestones if that doesn't succeed. Surely they want the fork.
sneak 11y ago
Bitcoin XT also has other changes decided solely by their two devs without fanfare or discussion; for instance, it disfavors Tor nodes and hampers anonymity. This is not widely reported but is indicative of what we can expect from such a BDFL model. A BDFL is the end of Bitcoin. The reason to oppose XT has nothing to do with blocksize and everything to do with control.
- u02sgb 11y ago
  Interesting, source?
  - sneak 11y ago
    http://cointelegraph.com/news/115153/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-blacklist-tor-exits-may-reveal-users-ip-addresses http://cointelegraph.com/news/115153/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-bla... and https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/privacy-backdoor-bitcoin-xt/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/privacy-backdoor-bitcoin-xt/
kang 11y ago
Suppose a client and server were connected with a connection running with speed of light. Even then, there is some finite limit as to how many bits can be transferred. How do we handle scalability beyond it then? By abstraction. Rather than sending raw data we only send what is relevant & decode it at either ends. Now transactions are raw data that flows in the bitcoin network, but there will always remain a practical limit. Throughput of the network is number of transactions per unit of time it can handle, which translates to number of blocks per unit of time. To increase the value of this equation, 3 things can be done: 1.increase block size 2.Decrease block time 3.Abstraction The problem is that XT side considers increasing blocksize is the only way. The core side has presented sidechains as one of the methods of abstraction, but since they invented it they formed a company out of it and now it appears as conflict of interest. Anyways, XT side is painting the Core side as anti scaling, which is totally untrue, but since sidechains are not even being heard, they are inviting other proposals to be presented at the workshop in Montreal on 12th Sept.
- ssharp 11y ago
  What I don't get is how quickly the debate started and then dissolved with a potential hard fork as the outcome. What was the urgency to make a change? Yes, Bitcoin couldn't scale as it was, but there wasn't even close to enough demand for Bitcoin transaction for the topic to have escalated so quickly. Are Bitcoin people so delusional about how popular Bitcoin is or will be, that they thought the amount of transactions that could be put into a block was of such dire importance?
  - kang 11y ago
    People are what they are, but why blocksize specifically is beyond reason.
  - jackgavigan 11y ago
    You should read http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size-is-urgent http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size...
  - toomim 11y ago
spectrum1234 11y ago
This is very good news (that there is a fight). Open sourced currency that could be forked at any moment is a feature not a bug. The fact that government currencies can't be forked, and thus never guarantee they stay competitive, is the main reason a bitcoin like currency is nearly certainly the future. The downside is some medium/long term uncertainty in that exact currency. However this is a NECESSARY component.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  I've tended to agree. Bitcoin is really just an early iteration of the cryptocurrency concept, and many of its "failures" are, in the long run, successes. This is why the "altcoin" ecosystem is so vital; they're doing a lot of the fundamental experimentation that's necessary for cryptocurrency in general to approach perfection. Unfortunately, a lot of people fail to realize this, and champion Bitcoin specifically as the be-all-end-all of electronic money despite the sheer number of problems with it. This attitude, while understandable, is regrettable.
stuhood 11y ago
This article is already stale: a near majority of the network has voted for BIP100 in the last few days. http://bitcoinist.net/block-size-debate-takes-turn-f2pool-rejects-xt-adopts-bip100-instead/ http://bitcoinist.net/block-size-debate-takes-turn-f2pool-re...
- pbreit 11y ago
  "Near majority" or ~25% (i.e., sufficient to win but far from majority)?
  - stuhood 11y ago
    Ah, sorry. Even the article I linked is potentially stale. Things seem to be moving quickly. The "near majority" statement was based on unconfirmed reports that another large pool has hopped onboard: https://twitter.com/mkomaransky/status/636534235508178945 https://twitter.com/mkomaransky/status/636534235508178945
pstrateman 11y ago
The simple truth of the matter is that there is no urgent action required. Blocks are only just now half full on average. http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/diagrams/blocksize-pretty.svg http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/diagrams/blocksize-pretty.svg

93 points by donohoe 11y ago

The Bitcoin core has definitely left the stage of rapid innovation. Instead, we can expect slow, consensus-based progress at best for the future. This is normal for a successful protocol and happened to html, smpt, tcp, etc. as well. Committees have taken over.

lnanek2 11y ago
Sidechains are a kind of complex mess. After reading about them I'd definitely chalk them down to terrible, committee based software development vs. just bumping the size like the XT people want to do.
cb18 11y ago
The Bitcoin core has definitely left the stage of rapid innovation. Instead, we can expect slow, consensus-based progress at best for the future. This is normal for a successful protocol But that alone isn't indicative of the protocol's success, is it, can't that also be attributed to infighting? Committees may propose things, but they've not really taken over as it's still the community(those controlling the networks computational power) that decides what changes to adopt right? And the only people who can actually implement changes are those with access to the core right? Or former core people who've splintered off(XT.) So what do committees have to do with this?

erikb 11y ago

I totally agree with that part of the conclusion that says Bitcoin has failed in regards of it's "no need to trust anyone" goal. It's not a failure for us though. There are so many things we can learn from Bitcoin, like no matter what your technical solution is, you'll always have power bubbles (e.g., for bitcoin the power aligns around the developers and the huge farm owners), you'll always have disagreement in the community no matter how morally high your goals are.

CamperBob2 11y ago
More generally, you can rarely solve social problems with technological means alone.
- eterm 11y ago
  This really is the takeaway. Bitcoiners like to point to the remittance industry or the wider money transfer industry and say how a bitcoin future would be so much better, but they're slowly learning the hard way a lot of problems actually need solving, and the cost with bitcoin is just as high as non-bitcoin. "Solutions" start to appear which look remarkably similar to the existing industries they were trying to disrupt. For example "off chain" transactions which seem w.r.t bitcoin remarkably similar to fiat banking with respect to gold.
  - vectorpush 11y ago
    "Offchain" aka marketing speak for a standard relational database.
    - tveita 11y ago
      Not always, sometimes they use MongoDB.
- erikb 11y ago
  Yeah and in theory we all know that, right? But especially with Bitcoin I totally forgot about it, although I'm probably far less enthusiastic than most Bitcoiners (don't read much about it, only own $2 worth of Satoshis, etc). For some time I really thought Bitcoin would solve money. And that's where I think the real learning comes in, when you transfer your theoretical knowledge and see how it applies to reality.
pron 11y ago
> There are so many things we can learn from Bitcoin, like no matter what your technical solution is, you'll always have power bubbles If many of Bitcoin's believers had only been less dismissive of the social sciences, they could have known that long ago. In fact, if they had only been less dismissive of politics, they would have known that people who dismiss politics are simply people who don't know what it is, and those are the people who eventually do bad politics. Politics is a property of any social interaction and is simply influence over others (by any social means -- even technological). As an academic field of study it is the study of the flow of power (simply put -- influence) in a society.

jackgavigan 11y ago

I feel the article does Pieter Wuille a disservice by mentioning the Blockstream/sidechains conflict of interest without mentioning the fact that he is actually in favour of raising the block size limit (albeit gradually, over time) and has authored a proposal to do so: https://gist.github.com/sipa/c65665fc360ca7a176a6 https://gist.github.com/sipa/c65665fc360ca7a176a6 What's ironic about this whole affair is that four of the five core developers support raising the blocksize limit (Gregory Maxwell is the sole dissenter, preferring to wait until a transaction backlog develops before taking action) but they diverge on exactly how and how quickly to raise it.

jnbiche 11y ago
I honestly feel that some of the "pro raising" devs aren't actually in favor of raising it anytime in the foreseeable future, and are just dragging their feet in the hopes of that the whole thing will go away. The whole point of this debate is that we've been litigating this affair for the past three years, each year a several core devs claiming to want to raise it "soon", and then it just gets put down another year. I'm still not sure about the BitcoinXT gaining consensus, but I'm very glad someone is putting real pressure on the situation, because that's the only way the block size will be raised anytime in the next few years.
- jackgavigan 11y ago
  My take on it is that the key difference is that Gavin perceives a greater urgency in raising the limit before we reach the point where blocks start getting filled up, than Jeff/Wladimir/Pieter do. I think he got frustrated that no progress was being made, which sparked his decision to add the relevant code to XT, which is what has brought things to a head. I actually suspect that his preferred outcome is not to fork the blockchain into XT and Core, but to put some pressure on the other core devs to act.
  - kang 11y ago
    That would not be correct entirely. Earlier they had 90% as the consensus limit, which they have now brought down to 75% and have suggested driving consensus in regular milestones if that doesn't succeed. Surely they want the fork.

sneak 11y ago

Bitcoin XT also has other changes decided solely by their two devs without fanfare or discussion; for instance, it disfavors Tor nodes and hampers anonymity. This is not widely reported but is indicative of what we can expect from such a BDFL model. A BDFL is the end of Bitcoin. The reason to oppose XT has nothing to do with blocksize and everything to do with control.

u02sgb 11y ago
Interesting, source?
- sneak 11y ago
  http://cointelegraph.com/news/115153/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-blacklist-tor-exits-may-reveal-users-ip-addresses http://cointelegraph.com/news/115153/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-bla... and https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/privacy-backdoor-bitcoin-xt/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/privacy-backdoor-bitcoin-xt/

kang 11y ago

Suppose a client and server were connected with a connection running with speed of light. Even then, there is some finite limit as to how many bits can be transferred. How do we handle scalability beyond it then? By abstraction. Rather than sending raw data we only send what is relevant & decode it at either ends. Now transactions are raw data that flows in the bitcoin network, but there will always remain a practical limit. Throughput of the network is number of transactions per unit of time it can handle, which translates to number of blocks per unit of time. To increase the value of this equation, 3 things can be done: 1.increase block size 2.Decrease block time 3.Abstraction The problem is that XT side considers increasing blocksize is the only way. The core side has presented sidechains as one of the methods of abstraction, but since they invented it they formed a company out of it and now it appears as conflict of interest. Anyways, XT side is painting the Core side as anti scaling, which is totally untrue, but since sidechains are not even being heard, they are inviting other proposals to be presented at the workshop in Montreal on 12th Sept.

ssharp 11y ago
What I don't get is how quickly the debate started and then dissolved with a potential hard fork as the outcome. What was the urgency to make a change? Yes, Bitcoin couldn't scale as it was, but there wasn't even close to enough demand for Bitcoin transaction for the topic to have escalated so quickly. Are Bitcoin people so delusional about how popular Bitcoin is or will be, that they thought the amount of transactions that could be put into a block was of such dire importance?
- kang 11y ago
  People are what they are, but why blocksize specifically is beyond reason.
- jackgavigan 11y ago
  You should read http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size-is-urgent http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size...
- toomim 11y ago

spectrum1234 11y ago

This is very good news (that there is a fight). Open sourced currency that could be forked at any moment is a feature not a bug. The fact that government currencies can't be forked, and thus never guarantee they stay competitive, is the main reason a bitcoin like currency is nearly certainly the future. The downside is some medium/long term uncertainty in that exact currency. However this is a NECESSARY component.

yellowapple 11y ago
I've tended to agree. Bitcoin is really just an early iteration of the cryptocurrency concept, and many of its "failures" are, in the long run, successes. This is why the "altcoin" ecosystem is so vital; they're doing a lot of the fundamental experimentation that's necessary for cryptocurrency in general to approach perfection. Unfortunately, a lot of people fail to realize this, and champion Bitcoin specifically as the be-all-end-all of electronic money despite the sheer number of problems with it. This attitude, while understandable, is regrettable.

stuhood 11y ago

This article is already stale: a near majority of the network has voted for BIP100 in the last few days. http://bitcoinist.net/block-size-debate-takes-turn-f2pool-rejects-xt-adopts-bip100-instead/ http://bitcoinist.net/block-size-debate-takes-turn-f2pool-re...

pbreit 11y ago
"Near majority" or ~25% (i.e., sufficient to win but far from majority)?
- stuhood 11y ago
  Ah, sorry. Even the article I linked is potentially stale. Things seem to be moving quickly. The "near majority" statement was based on unconfirmed reports that another large pool has hopped onboard: https://twitter.com/mkomaransky/status/636534235508178945 https://twitter.com/mkomaransky/status/636534235508178945

pstrateman 11y ago

The simple truth of the matter is that there is no urgent action required. Blocks are only just now half full on average. http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/diagrams/blocksize-pretty.svg http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/diagrams/blocksize-pretty.svg