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Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from signifi

• mhluongo 9y ago
  You skipped the option that's closest to consensus! SegWit2x has industry support and has a short enough window to lock-in before the Aug 1st UASF EDIT: Quick reference https://medium.com/@wintercooled/the-road-to-segwit-activation-uasf-segwit2x-and-segwit-signalling-explained-2ff00488b7cb https://medium.com/@wintercooled/the-road-to-segwit-activati...
  • jpatokal 9y ago
    Unlike the UASF timebomb, SegWit2x won't activate unless there's 80%+ support, so it's not going to trigger a fork. (Well, technically it will, but if activated the non-SegWit2x rump will quickly be reduced to irrelevance.)
    • wyager 9y ago
      There's currently 86.5% support.
      • dekz 9y ago
        That's 86.5% miners signalling to signal support. Segwit2x is still yet to have a working and tested implementation. Would you support something which has not been fundamentally tested?
        • awestroke 9y ago
          > Segwit2x is still yet to have a working ... https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin > ... and tested implementation. It will go online on the testnet tomorrow
          • spiralx 9y ago
            > It will go online on the testnet tomorrow It seems rather premature to call it working before it gets properly tested. And three weeks is a woefully short time to test something like this, fix any issues that are found, and then re-test.
          • ilikechilis 9y ago
            The testnet is already online since a few weeks now. But according to the segwit2x timeline this step should come tomorrow if they are still on track: July 14 - Agreement Participants Install and Test Milestone
  • Taek 9y ago
• acjohnson55 9y ago
  That's a much more informative post than the link, and yet, I still don't really understand all the jargon. But it also reinforces for me just how not ready for primetime BTC is, and it makes me think the appreciation over the past year is truly insane.
  • Hydraulix989 9y ago
    The demand for something like BTC is clearly there though.
    • jrimbault 9y ago
      How many individuals/7B is there?
  • erikpukinskis 9y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't need to be prime time at all. Almost no banking services, outside of checking accounts and index funds, are "ready for prime time" and yet banking services is a huge market.
    • acjohnson55 9y ago
      Fair point, but that still leaves a burden of proof to show what niche Bitcoin fills and how much that should be worth. It has to become a major pillar of either consumer spending or the financial system to justify its value. Don't get me wrong, I think the concept is brilliant. I just don't see how nearly 10x value was created in about a year.
  • vortico 9y ago
    I would guess that the market value of Bitcoin will sink a bit due to the muddiness of this announcement. Which suggests that a centralized party (Bitcoin.org) has a great effect on Bitcoin after all, despite its appeal of being a decentralized currency.
  • mdekkers 9y ago
    the appreciation over the past year *Speculation
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nodesocket 9y ago
  So this all sounds pretty scary and gloomy, so why is BTC/USD trading up $86.00 in the last 24 hours? Shouldn't it be getting hammered? Is this a buying opportunity then?
  • fuwafuwa 9y ago
    The 24 hour upswing may be another bull trap masking the bearish trend that has taken hold for the last month, which has hit the entire crypto market and sent some market caps down over 50%. The BTC scaling crisis has been a known factor for even longer than that and may have precipitated a runup in other coins that directly preceded this downtrend.
  • wyager 9y ago
    Because the OP is FUD, not a well-founded concern. The network has already overwhelmingly decided on a scaling solution. https://coin.dance/blocks https://coin.dance/blocks
  • olalonde 9y ago
    Those issues have been known for a while so it's no surprise they haven't affected the price in the last 24 hours. Explaining Bitcoin's price movements is a bit like astrology but this guy probably lifted some spirits today: https://media.giphy.com/media/8cTtn78RkOAk8/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/8cTtn78RkOAk8/giphy.gif
  • ryanSrich 9y ago
    There's a lot of shady movement going on in both BTC and ETH right now. We're seeing pretty violent swings. I'm guessing this is a symptom of the uncertainty. We'll likely see a downtrend overall in the next few weeks. Daily movements are day by day.
• beaner 9y ago
  > any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees Can you explain how this jives with miners supporting Segwit2X, which brings both segwit and bigger blocks?
  • jpatokal 9y ago
    The opposing and (IMHO) ultimately greater pressure is that it's also in miners' best interest to keep Bitcoin alive and successful. It took a long time to hammer out SegWit2x and it's still not certain that it's going to work.
    • rothbardrand 9y ago
      You would think so, but I think that they think they have enough hash power to take over the whole thing. They may be right. They are clearly making a power grab and opposing Segwit2X: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148/ https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14... Segwit2X would activate effectively Bip148, though it was originally a proposal to use a different mechanism it is acceptable enough that Core is happy to have segwit activated that way.
• zby 9y ago
  It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin protocol processes about 7 transactions per second. Doubling the speed by doubling blocks will not make it much closer to the 50K transactions per second of a system like VISA. But it is probably possible to scale the transaction system off-chain - with https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ - which works like a protocol for writing and accepting checks. As far as I know Lightning is impossible or very hard without SegWit. But with Lightning off-loading the bulk of transactions miners will lose a bit of their power - so maybe this is what makes them against it. Another aspect of the riddle is that SegWit will eliminate ASICBoost - which is an optimization developed by one of the biggest ASIC miners producer - so he is probably also against it. There is also the thing that ASICBoost is probably patented - so it has a lot of opposition in the community.
  • Hermel 9y ago
    I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not make you as fast as a rocket.
    • zby 9y ago
      Well - increasing the block size is not costless - it is not just pushing the gas pedal a little more like in your example.
      • colordrops 9y ago
        Pushing the gas peddle is not costless either. It costs gas.
        • beachbum8029 9y ago
• Taek 9y ago
  A neutral response would probably not use the phrasing 'muddle through' with regards to the solution endorsed by most of the technical experts in the Bitcoin space. ---- Right now there are 3 implementations of Bitcoin in the wild, and each of the 3 will react differently to different network events. The network is essentially splitting apart, with each fragment driven by a different faction. If you don't know what the different factions are, you probably don't need to. Its needlessly involved, highly political, and full of echo-chambers and shouting matches. What happens largely depends on how much support each faction has. Unfortunately, there's no real way to measure how much support each faction has until the fork actually occurs. Each faction thinks that its the largest by a significant margin, and thinks that the other factions have used underhanded techniques to bolster their visible support. When the rubber meets the pavement, we will know though. If the network splits into three pieces, likely the coin price for each piece will move around violently, and one portion of the network will probably end up with a much higher coin price than the other parts. Or maybe it'll be an even three-way split, which will make things in the Bitcoin world very confusing. ---- As a huge Bitcoin fan, I hate to say this, but if you aren't clued into the various events, and you can't name the three factions or explain the beliefs of each, you should just stay away for a while. If you get pulled into the split without knowing what's going on, you are very likely to lose money. There will certainly be opportunists trying to take advantage of the situation, and you, being ignorant of the situation, will be the one who gets taken advantage of. ---- If you do know what's going on, you can name the factions, etc, then what you should do is pretty simple. When the split happens, sell all of your coins on the forks that you disagree with, and use the resulting money to buy coins on your preferred fork. ---- For anyone who cares, my alignment is with the status quo. I feel great animosity towards the hardfork faction (confusingly called Segwit2x), precisely because they have forced a situation where people who don't know what's going on are able to get hurt. They have also repeatedly, repeatedly, ignored very sound advice from the technical experts of the industry. The UASF faction (confusingly, a 'pro Segwit' and 'anti Segwit2x' faction) has my spiritual support, but I don't think they have the numbers behind them to make a difference. I don't think running the UASF software is the right move. I personally believe that overwhelmingly, the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin are probably largely unaware of what is happening, and are running the status-quo software (confusingly, the 'Segwit' software, or the 'Bitcoin-core' software). I'm guessing when the forks all happen, it'll be pretty dominantly vanilla Bitcoin with the highest price, and then a few weeks later it'll all be a bad memory, and nothing will have happened at all. I guess we'll find out.
• runeks 9y ago
  > However, any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees, no change has received majority consensus. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of the miners, and the math is really simple: imagine a network on top of Bitcoin, e.g. lightning.network, which can process 10 million transactions off-chain and settle it on the Bitcoin blockchain using only a single transaction. Imagine if every one of those 10 million off-chain transactions paid just 0.01 cent in fees... this would earn the payment processor $1000, which can only be realized by publishing a Bitcoin transaction, in competition with everyone else making a lot on off-chain fees. The result is that off-chain profits (in the form of fees) would allow off-chain payment processors to pay huge blockchain fees, because they can deduce it from the profit they've made on off-chain fees. Nothing, in my opinion, will increase Bitcoin fees more than layer 2 protocols creating more users and transactions (because fees are paid per off-chain transaction). The point some miners are missing is that one billion off-chain transactions each paying a 0.01 cent fee is more profitable than 2,000 on-chain transactions paying $1 each. And if everyone is able to earn $100,000 in fees by publishing a single Bitcoin transaction, this must push up Bitcoin fees, since people will be competing on getting into the chain with the bidding power from their earned profits.
  • whiskers08xmt 9y ago
    I think what the miners are afraid of, is that the power of the bitcoin network, leaves their hands and fall into the hands of second layer operators. At the same time, a higher blockchain size would make it less profitable for small miners, to mine bitcoin. Bitfury recently released an analysis, that predicts that 95% of current miners, would find mining to be unprofitable at blocksize of 8MB. This would further centralize profits and power over the protocol, with the big datacenter miners.
    • runeks 9y ago
      > Bitfury recently released an analysis, that predicts that 95% of current miners, would find mining to be unprofitable at blocksize of 8MB. I don't understand this. Due to what would 95% of current miners find mining unprofitable at 8MB blocks?
• ftlio 9y ago
  That "Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems" is the topic of debate. SegWit was not created toward the end of increasing the blocksize, it was created to fix transaction malleability along with various other improvements. That it arranges the partitioning of witness data from transaction data to sort-of not count against the block size was a bonus, especially since a lot of dubious attempts at forking to a larger block size we're being given decent backing in terms of funds. The point of fixing transaction malleability is that it allows for more robust smart contracts that depend on transaction validity. Once you enable these smart contracts, you start scratching at the surface of scaling methods that shift risk to the willing participants. As every Bitcoin transaction must be validated by every Bitcoin node, the entire network must inherit the risk of attempting to satisfy demand for transactions. Not just in terms of hardware requirements, but also in terms of the viability of paying for security of the network against a diminishing block creation subsidy. The maintainers of Core, and plenty of other people in the Bitcoin community, see the scarcity of block space as a positive and as an inevitability. It's a positive in that it provides the incentive for security as the subsidy gets reduced, and inevitable as any 'spare' space in blocks can incentive superfluous transactions. There's plenty of development on the front of moving bitcoins between other chains with different consensus rules that would allow for better scaling, and for better development and testing of solutions that could eventually make their way to the main blockchain. I'm personally of the opinion that once you allow for the transfer of bitcoins to and from second order chains, that Bitcoin can essentially enter a version freeze.
  • davidgerard 9y ago
    > That "Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems" is the topic of debate. I find it hard to see how anyone could reasonably dispute it. Transactions were fast and cheap-to-free until mid-2015, when the blocks filled. Since then transactions have been slow and expensive.
    • exit 9y ago
      this is no longer true. blocks are not filling and mempool is clearing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hzw6c/010_satoshibyte_fees_are_starting_to_clear_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hzw6c/010_satoshi... it looks like some faction was spamming the network with transactions to create a false sense of urgency about the need to scale.
• asymmetric 9y ago
  Has anyone got a link to a neutral article summarizing the POVs and the players involved? I'm still confused as to many of the details, e.g. what /r/btc advocates if not SegWit.
• rothbardrand 9y ago
  I think you missed the key issue. Mining is largely centralized under the control of Bitmain, both via pools and indirectly via miners they have sold (which in the past have had backdoors). They profit from using an exploit called ASICBOOST. Segwit will disable ASICBOOST as a side effect of improving the protocol. Therefore, BitMain has been launching FUD campaigns and numerous attempts to propose alternative software to stop segwit (XT, BU, BTC1, BTCABC etc.) Segwit2X is a compromise-- but Bitmain does not like it because it activates segwit. So BitMain has announced they plan to do a forcible Hard Fork of Bitcoin, splitting off into another chain, that they will privately mine-- and they intend to neutralize segwit on it. They have publicly complained that segwit offers lower fees for transactions that use less resources. The entire conflict (including the "scaling problems" which have recently been proven to be due to spam driving up transaction costs) is Bitmain attempting to increase and protect their near monopoly. Please be aware that their fork, which will have nearly unlimited block size will increase their monopoly. Due to the great firewall of china, large blocks have trouble getting transmitted, so whenever a chinese miner finds a block, when the blocks are very big, they have a significant competitive advantage in finding the next block. Thus simply activating a spam campaign (which they have been doing the past 3 months or so already) will allow them to centralize mining in china because the chinese miners will start getting 2-3 blocks ahead. Further on their hard fork they can easily lower the difficulty and get many blocks ahead while private mining (but make it look like the difficulty is higher) -- admittedly a speculation but given their past exploits and announced plans to engage in further shady behavior I would not be surprised. Here's the blog post where they announce their (very sketchy) hard fork: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148/ https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14...
  • lawn 9y ago
    This is the main narrative being pushed by Blockstream and Core who are afraid of loosing control over the main Bitcoin reference client, beware. > I think you missed the key issue. Mining is largely centralized under the control of Bitmain, both via pools and indirectly via miners they have sold False, bitcoin mining has never been as decentralized as it is now: https://coin.dance/blocks https://coin.dance/blocks > Segwit2X is a compromise-- but Bitmain does not like it because it activates segwit. False, they are signaling Segwit2X and have been open to support segwit (except the arbitrary discount). > So BitMain has announced they plan to do a forcible Hard Fork of Bitcoin, splitting off into another chain, that they will privately mine-- and they intend to neutralize segwit on it. As per your own link, this is a plan against the UASF fork. > They have publicly complained that segwit offers lower fees for transactions that use less resources. And instead they back bigger blocks and flexible transactions which would give them even lower fees? If your statement was true then they wouldn't do that. > The entire conflict (including the "scaling problems" which have recently been proven to be due to spam driving up transaction costs) is Bitmain attempting to increase and protect their near monopoly. No, it is because Blockstream and Core wants to retain control. Do they support Segwit2X even when 90+ of all miner power signals it? No. Segwit as a soft fork is a crappy implementation and reduces the security of Bitcoin. See: https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179 https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-... Flexible Transactions is a superior proposal: https://zander.github.io/posts/Flexible_Transactions/ https://zander.github.io/posts/Flexible_Transactions/
• brownbat 9y ago
  As a BTC amateur, trying to approach it from an ordinary user's perspective, all I know is I used to be able to set whatever fee I wanted and wait a few hours and things would get through, and now I have to play some sort of game of chicken with the network, guessing whether my transaction will ever be processed unless I pay as large a fee as possible. I've used the fee prediction engines to try to avoid low fees and still ended up waiting eight days for a transaction to process. I gave up on it during that week, only for it to go through after I paid another way. I don't really get the debate, I mean maybe implement the solutions from both sides at once? I don't care, my local solution is to just avoid it as a payment network for now. That's its own kind of vote I guess... I'm sure there will be a camp arguing that I just wasn't smart enough, with the corollary that UX as a discipline coddles whiners like me. Maybe so. The game theory of fees and congestion is still interesting, with miners always interested in an incrementally more painful network for users, until the tragedy of the commons hits and it collapses. Bitcoin has a first mover advantage, which led to some network effects increasing its popularity. Miners are extracting some rents from that popularity right now. But there may be a weird game theory here, where users are driven to prefer newer bitcoin clones with smaller (less secure) networks, simply because the fees demanded are far lower and (more importantly) more predictable. Price volatility of newer networks is a major a downside, but there's an equilibrium. Everything has a price, even volatility/stability. If you're doing one transaction and not storing value, then your risk on a new network is bounded by how long it takes you to get money in or out of the network and process the transaction. BTC will bleed off support, under some values of: BTC fee, BTC tx processing time, processing time variation, velocity in and out of smaller network, and volatility of smaller network. (This might be asymptotic and leave BTC the leader though, no guarantees.) While creating a lot of confusion about long term coin viability, these forces could provide a useful equilibrium on power consumption, a downward force on how much power we want validating transactions. I've been worried about the power cannibalism scenario, where BTC becomes a payments standard but we're racing to commit all new power generation simply to verifying the network. But power use puts a floor on tx fees, and users with available alternatives put a ceiling on them, so... maybe we won't build a dyson sphere dedicated only to powering one payment network after all.
  • shp0ngle 9y ago
• csomar 9y ago
  I'd argue the other way. They didn't get involved in this mess and are just warning their users about possible disruption. What you wrote is your point of view which people might agree or disagree with.
  • OJFord 9y ago
    The article doesn't state what the issue is though. You probably knew immediately if you've kept up with it, but as someone interested in Bitcoin but not having followed these developments it was like the BBC telling me to lock my doors and close the curtains, but not saying why.
• zero_iq 9y ago
  I am rather stunned that the entire global bitcoin network, with its colossal combined computing power, and staggering electricity consumption, is only capable of sustaining 7 tps. The level of inefficiency here is mind-boggling. Surely this must be one of the least efficient, least environmentally-friendly computing ventures ever?
  • knocte 9y ago
    This is only layer1 (like IP in the networking world). Wait until layer2 comes (Lightning Network, TumbleBit), then we will reach the scalability levels we need for the entire planet to use the same blockchain.
    • antocv 9y ago
      The keyword is wait. Waiting. Since 2011.
    • qmarchi 9y ago
      But, but, but...... IP is on Layer 3 ;.; OSI Model: http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp
    • falcolas 9y ago
      Err, each layer on top of IP slows down traffic, not speeds it up. The extra overhead and retransmits result in less useful data being transferred with each packet. Perhaps not the best example to use.
      • deelowe 9y ago
        Depends on what you mean by speed doesn't it? Segmentation via additional layers certainly speeds up the network as a whole. I thought the ability to scale via adding additional layers is why SDN took off.
  • wyldfire 9y ago
    > colossal combined computing power It's colossal because of the sliding difficulty. The block period is a big portion of why the transaction rate is what it is.
• xorcist 9y ago
  Bitcoin may not scale well, but it is the capacity problems that lead to high fees. These are two different things and it is important to not conflate the two. Scalability has improved somewhat during the past two years and most developers believe it is time to increase capacity as well. The question you refer to is how to increase capacity, within the scaling constraints. I understand the ambition to be neutral in a contentious issue but one must be careful as not to spread misinformation. "Discarding less useful data" is not how segwit works at all. Segwit does away with the fixed blocksize and uses instead a flexible block size of up to four times the previous fixed limit. The discarding you refer to is the backwards compatible aspect of segwit where it can communicate with older nodes that do not implement this feature by not sending them the data. It is not discarded and a supermajority of the network must use the full larger blocks in order for this to be secure. It is merely a transition method to allow for upgraded and non-upgraded nodes to briefly share the same network. So what you refer to are two methods for larger blocks. One must be upgraded with a flag day where everyone upgrades or you lose money, and one allows for a transition with a certain amount of backwards compatibility. It is also misleading to describe this as two "sides". The sides are mostly within social media. The technical debate has been had and there was overwhelming consensus among the developers that the backwards compatible way should be deployed first. If the technology takes off and solutions such as Lightning prove viable, most developers agree that the non-witness part of the blocks probably needs to be upgraded as well.
  • hueving 9y ago
    Capacity is scaling from the user perspective. If it costs $5 to send $5 worth of bitcoin because of transaction congestion and it's only processing a tiny fraction of what a single US credit card network does, the entire system is not scaling, regardless of how many nodes are running it.
    • xorcist 9y ago
      Users don't care about scaling at all. They care about capacity only indirectly. Scaling is something developers care about, but in the nascent field of cryptocurrencies there probably no single solution. It should be noted that with your credit card example, however, that credit card networks charge a percentage of the funds transferred while in the case of Bitcoin it is instead a fixed fee. Should you instead have said that it costs $5 to send $5000 it would have been equally true but sounded quite different. That Bitcoin as it is described in the whitepaper doesn't scale to even a single US credit card network should be obvious to any reasonably informed reader. That every participant in the network store everyone else's transactions forever has its limitations. Does that mean the technology is useless? No, it means the use case is different from credit cards. It seems possible to build payment systems on top of Bitcoin that fills those use cases, and sidechains and payment channels are research along those lines. But just as crypocurrencies were a theoretical possibility twenty years ago, one should not expect working products too soon. It's not like there is a shortage of payment solutions in the meantime. For end users, credit cards offer a negative cost, so even then we should not expect the use cases to be identical.
• alex_duf 9y ago
  So whilst the chain is split, am I correct to assume you can spend your money twice?
  • BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    Yes, if you can find a place to spend your coins that accepts the old chain, and another place that accepts the new chain.
    • alex_duf 9y ago
      thanks
• criddell 9y ago
  Were the scaling problems not predicted or known in the original design?
  • SkyMarshal 9y ago
    They were known since the beginning, but for any complex problem it takes time to explore the solution space and hone in on the best (or least bad) solutions.
• xinayder 9y ago
  I think this is the most neutral and the best description so far of what's going on with Bitcoin.