6 ms·

As someone who has been closely following the Bitcoin community since 2011, I am baffled by the toxicity of the blocksize debate and the resistance even against

by Hermel 11y ago

As someone who has been closely following the Bitcoin community since 2011, I am baffled by the toxicity of the blocksize debate and the resistance even against a moderate blocksize increase.

sneak 11y ago
Bitcoin is not a system for those who favor changing the rules while the ball is in play. Furthermore, the terms "war" and "toxic" seem tremendously overblown. It was just a fork of some software that hardly anybody, in the scheme of things, really uses. Maybe we should get the neovim guys some of this press frenzy, eh?
- Hermel 11y ago
  That's funny about the debate. Both sides accuse the other of changing the rules. Large-blockers want to increase a parameter in the code. And small-blockers want to change Satoshi's implicit plan of increasing it as necessary.
  - makomk 11y ago
    Satoshi's assumptions in the early days about how easy it would be to make major changes to Bitcoin have very little relevance now that it's in widespread use. I think he was also planning to re-enable the disabled opcodes and various other things that are unlikely to ever happen because they'd cause a hard fork.
    - Hermel 11y ago
      The opposite is the case. Satoshi's assumptions are relevant as they are the basis for the expectations people have. Departing from these visions is what upsets a lot of users, and rightly so.
my5thaccount 11y ago
Wait a minute! Are you telling me that after all this, the supply of bitcoins is, ultimately, like all fiat currency, controlled by the will of human beings? I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't know the answer to that question, but if, as it sounds, someone or group could just change the blocksize, that, based on my simple understanding of math, seems to indicate an ability to alter the supply-demand curve for the commodity.
- pmorici 11y ago
  Block size has nothing to do with the supply of Bitcoin. It has to do with the transaction throughput of the network. No one has ever proposed a change the Bitcoin supply. The original Bitcoin release from Satoshi set the block size at 32MB (it's currently at 1MB) so increasing the block size to 2MB as is being proposed by classic would bring Bitcoin closer to it's original implementation. Perhaps your comment is genuine but when people say stuff like "if we increase the block size next they will want to increase the money supply!" I feel like they are trying to hood wink less technically adept Bitcoin users into supporting their small block view.
  - my5thaccount 11y ago
    After reading the article, I get that now, but is there a difference? If there are 1,000,000 bitcoins and you can only use 100,000 of them per day in transactions, then there are only 100,000 bitcoins in supply. I understand there may be more than one bitcoin per transaction, however, the fact remains. The supply of bitcoins, via the ability to use bitcoins to transfer value, is controlled by human beings. The consequence is identical. Is it not? Perhaps, the consequence is the opposite? If there is no ability to transact with the currency, the currency has no value? I'm seriously ignorant, you can tell, but I would like to understand. Perhaps my questions can help reveal the answer? If not only to me, then to the community? Is that too scary? The truth? Too scary?
    - hughw 11y ago
      No. The proof of work requirement constrains the money supply. It's a hard constraint. The block size constraint was never designed to constrain the money supply by constraining the number of transactions per day. It is adequately constrained by the proof of work.
nkuttler 11y ago
It makes absolutely no difference by how much the block size is increased, it would always be an incompatible fork of the network, and that's contentious. That making a "small" change is some kind of compromomise is a lie told by one side.
- Hermel 11y ago
  There was a planned hard fork in 2013 that went just fine.
  - pyre 11y ago
    Lies! Lies by the "other side!" /s
  - makomk 11y ago
    The 2013 hard fork had a couple of advantages over anything proposed since. Firstly, the only change it made was to modify the block acceptance rules to be what everyone had thought they were all along, so it was completely uncontentious. Secondly, the unintended block size limit it removed was an artifact of the DB library that Bitcoin used and could not be guaranteed to be the same on all clients - the choice was to hard fork in a controlled manner now, or risk a spontaneous and unplanned hard fork later. Even though technically speaking it would've been easy to bump the 1MB block limit at the same time, no-one considered it because it would've been a recipe for chaos.
pmorici 11y ago
If you look below the surface at what is going on it becomes pretty clear. Essentially one well funded Bitcoin company, Blockstream, has managed to hire a majority of the current top Bitcoin Core contributors. They also control discussion on a handful of the historically important forums for discussing Bitcoin and censor any comments critical of Core or supporting a blocksize increase. Blockstream has a business plan that revolves around providing private blockchain services. For whatever reason they feel like in order to be successful they need to limit Bitcoin's block size so that it is very expensive and inconvenient to use Bitcoin. They have 55 million in funding and probably feel like they have a lot at stake. Hence they are playing very dirty to try and kill Bitcoin's first mover advantage so they can essentially privatize Bitcoin under their corporate banner. It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.
- kanzure 11y ago
  That's... not what the consensus seems to be. How is it that those "historically important forums" have been talking about block size increases for so long if they are being "censored" on this topic....? Maybe they aren't being censored at all despite the accusations. This could be trivially verified by searching "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin block size XT classic". Perhaps if you did as much digging as you claim, you would find that the censorship accusations are mostly false. Also, theymos isn't a Blockstream employee, great job digging though.... (BTW, I am a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list.)
  - antonios 11y ago
    Are you really claiming that there hasn't been any censorship in the Bitcoin subreddit? If I remember correctly, even gmaxwell has himself said in Reddit that he has found Theymos' censorship excessive.
    - replies_to_all 11y ago
      They will remove ANY non-negative post dealing with non-Blockstream (Core) Bitcoin or any other internet currency. This group is despicable that they are trying to take over like this.

by Hermel 11y ago

As someone who has been closely following the Bitcoin community since 2011, I am baffled by the toxicity of the blocksize debate and the resistance even against a moderate blocksize increase.

sneak 11y ago

Bitcoin is not a system for those who favor changing the rules while the ball is in play. Furthermore, the terms "war" and "toxic" seem tremendously overblown. It was just a fork of some software that hardly anybody, in the scheme of things, really uses. Maybe we should get the neovim guys some of this press frenzy, eh?

Hermel 11y ago
That's funny about the debate. Both sides accuse the other of changing the rules. Large-blockers want to increase a parameter in the code. And small-blockers want to change Satoshi's implicit plan of increasing it as necessary.
- makomk 11y ago
  Satoshi's assumptions in the early days about how easy it would be to make major changes to Bitcoin have very little relevance now that it's in widespread use. I think he was also planning to re-enable the disabled opcodes and various other things that are unlikely to ever happen because they'd cause a hard fork.
  - Hermel 11y ago
    The opposite is the case. Satoshi's assumptions are relevant as they are the basis for the expectations people have. Departing from these visions is what upsets a lot of users, and rightly so.

my5thaccount 11y ago

Wait a minute! Are you telling me that after all this, the supply of bitcoins is, ultimately, like all fiat currency, controlled by the will of human beings? I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't know the answer to that question, but if, as it sounds, someone or group could just change the blocksize, that, based on my simple understanding of math, seems to indicate an ability to alter the supply-demand curve for the commodity.

pmorici 11y ago
Block size has nothing to do with the supply of Bitcoin. It has to do with the transaction throughput of the network. No one has ever proposed a change the Bitcoin supply. The original Bitcoin release from Satoshi set the block size at 32MB (it's currently at 1MB) so increasing the block size to 2MB as is being proposed by classic would bring Bitcoin closer to it's original implementation. Perhaps your comment is genuine but when people say stuff like "if we increase the block size next they will want to increase the money supply!" I feel like they are trying to hood wink less technically adept Bitcoin users into supporting their small block view.
- my5thaccount 11y ago
  After reading the article, I get that now, but is there a difference? If there are 1,000,000 bitcoins and you can only use 100,000 of them per day in transactions, then there are only 100,000 bitcoins in supply. I understand there may be more than one bitcoin per transaction, however, the fact remains. The supply of bitcoins, via the ability to use bitcoins to transfer value, is controlled by human beings. The consequence is identical. Is it not? Perhaps, the consequence is the opposite? If there is no ability to transact with the currency, the currency has no value? I'm seriously ignorant, you can tell, but I would like to understand. Perhaps my questions can help reveal the answer? If not only to me, then to the community? Is that too scary? The truth? Too scary?
  - hughw 11y ago
    No. The proof of work requirement constrains the money supply. It's a hard constraint. The block size constraint was never designed to constrain the money supply by constraining the number of transactions per day. It is adequately constrained by the proof of work.

nkuttler 11y ago

It makes absolutely no difference by how much the block size is increased, it would always be an incompatible fork of the network, and that's contentious. That making a "small" change is some kind of compromomise is a lie told by one side.

Hermel 11y ago
There was a planned hard fork in 2013 that went just fine.
- pyre 11y ago
  Lies! Lies by the "other side!" /s
- makomk 11y ago
  The 2013 hard fork had a couple of advantages over anything proposed since. Firstly, the only change it made was to modify the block acceptance rules to be what everyone had thought they were all along, so it was completely uncontentious. Secondly, the unintended block size limit it removed was an artifact of the DB library that Bitcoin used and could not be guaranteed to be the same on all clients - the choice was to hard fork in a controlled manner now, or risk a spontaneous and unplanned hard fork later. Even though technically speaking it would've been easy to bump the 1MB block limit at the same time, no-one considered it because it would've been a recipe for chaos.

pmorici 11y ago

If you look below the surface at what is going on it becomes pretty clear. Essentially one well funded Bitcoin company, Blockstream, has managed to hire a majority of the current top Bitcoin Core contributors. They also control discussion on a handful of the historically important forums for discussing Bitcoin and censor any comments critical of Core or supporting a blocksize increase. Blockstream has a business plan that revolves around providing private blockchain services. For whatever reason they feel like in order to be successful they need to limit Bitcoin's block size so that it is very expensive and inconvenient to use Bitcoin. They have 55 million in funding and probably feel like they have a lot at stake. Hence they are playing very dirty to try and kill Bitcoin's first mover advantage so they can essentially privatize Bitcoin under their corporate banner. It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.

kanzure 11y ago
That's... not what the consensus seems to be. How is it that those "historically important forums" have been talking about block size increases for so long if they are being "censored" on this topic....? Maybe they aren't being censored at all despite the accusations. This could be trivially verified by searching "site:reddit.com/r/bitcoin block size XT classic". Perhaps if you did as much digging as you claim, you would find that the censorship accusations are mostly false. Also, theymos isn't a Blockstream employee, great job digging though.... (BTW, I am a moderator of the bitcoin-dev mailing list.)
- antonios 11y ago
  Are you really claiming that there hasn't been any censorship in the Bitcoin subreddit? If I remember correctly, even gmaxwell has himself said in Reddit that he has found Theymos' censorship excessive.
  - replies_to_all 11y ago
    They will remove ANY non-negative post dealing with non-Blockstream (Core) Bitcoin or any other internet currency. This group is despicable that they are trying to take over like this.