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This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non
by buttershakes 9y ago
This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chain scaling haven't really been tested or materialized, and the SegWit code itself is a series of changes to the fundamentals of Bitcoin without requiring a hard fork. In other words it is overly engineered to avoid having to have real consensus.
Further the almost rabid attacks against a 2mb increase are bordering on complete insanity. No serious software engineer would say that an additional 1 megabyte of traffic every 10 minutes is a problem in any way. Instead we are stuck with a proportional increase in bandwidth and processing to support segwit and a minor increase in block size, which is through some convoluted logic preventing centralization. This whole thing is a power grab, plain and simple.
Now the alternative implementations are racing to complete something the miners will agree with, the sole purpose being to wrest control away from the "Bitcoin core" development group which has made some a complete mess of governance. Anyone who invested in Blockstream has to seriously be scratching their heads and wondering why they are killing the golden goose over some ideological bs instead of making what is really a trivial change. I think at this point they have screamed so loudly for so long that back tracking would reveal them to be hypocritical in the extreme. To couch this whole debate as a rallying cry against centralized interests instead of a corporate power grab is completely absurdist.
- zhoujianfu 9y agoWell put and 100% correct in my opinion. I feel like everybody's starving and there are hundreds of free hamburgers sitting right in front of them and core is blocking everybody from grabbing them while yelling "Don't eat those or you'll all die of heart attacks some day!!!"
- mmagin 9y agoAs an outsider, I find it especially amusing that cryptocurrencies are supposed to make it so that users don't have to live with the politics surrounding traditional currency.
- buttershakes 9y agoIt's unfortunate but as a consensus driven system it is much different structurally than say Linux. I can fork the Linux code and run my own version and nobody cares and it still has utility (for me), but Bitcoin as a whole requires a lot of different parties to agree on the code they run for it to be effective. I'm undecided as to whether that is a fatal flaw or a feature.
- PaulHoule 9y agoI think blockchains are more practical for a few traders who meet around a Buttonwood Tree (permissioned) than they are for the public. The reason we got so far before blockchains were invented was that you've never get a paper in a CS conference if you built a distributed system that did not increase it's ability to handle more workload AT ALL when you add more nodes. If 5 parties that don't trust each other 100% share a blockchain they get a lot of benefit from that. Upping that 5 to 500 or 5000 does not increase the value proportionately. That is, blockchains don't scale.
- buttershakes 9y agoWell, they do scale. It's just a question or how much they scale. A practical perspective says we don't need to scale to VISA levels right now, we just need to slowly increase the block size to encourage adoption and new users while keeping fees low, while additional scale measures are explored and integrated. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is susceptible to centralization risks independent of the block size. The nodes that are doing validation for light clients are important, but don't need to store the entire blockchain to do that validation and so are largely limited by compute and bandwidth. If we slowly increase bandwidth requirements on a reasonable schedule we can continue to grow Bitcoin's base for years. Is it reasonable to expect we can handle 24 megabyte blocks in 6 years? There are other ways to handle scale that are less complicated than Segwit. This entire thing might fall under extremely premature optimization.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kerkeslager 9y agoMy understanding is that SegWit allows companies to insert themselves as middle men in the system who provide fast transactions.
- buttershakes 9y agoThis is probably exactly what will happen, because the chain will not be able to support transactions directly in quantity, and so we end up with a plethora of middle men who are responsible for opening and maintaining payment channels. That scales pretty well, but a hybrid solution is probably best. Moores law and all that.
- kerkeslager 9y agoMoore's law and all that?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoI think many recognize the value of federated 2nd layer solutions. Most are willing to accommodate some reasonable changes to the protocol to permit this. I think many would prefer a hard-fork 'cleaner' SegWit, but the softfork may have to do. The real issue, I think, is that the main chain must remain a practical option for those that value it. Discovering the 'fair' cost for this while maintaining a secure network is very much an open question, and ultimately the source of all the controversy. Personally I'd like to see unlimited block sizes, where txn fees and block orphan risk reach an equilibrium, but it's very difficult to say whether this would create unworkable centralization pressure.
- rasz 9y agoI was always under (false?) impression Blocksize Increase opposition was due to hardcoded ASIC miners deployed by the majority of big players.