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You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are. There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the

You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are. There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visible engineering expertise, and has has backed a series of code projects over the past two years all of which have been spectacular failures: BU, XT, Classic, ABC and BTC1-- all have had significant vulnerabilities. Their goal: Very large blocks that cannot cross the Great Firewall of China easily, increasing Chinese centralization. On the other side you have The Engineers: Hundreds of engineers who have contributed to Core, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto and going forward to the present day. They are called "corporate" because Blockstream hired some of them, but the blocksteram engineers are prominent only because of their contributions and smarts, not because they exercise any control. These engineers for the past 8 years have delivered quality software and 2 years ago delivered Segwit-- a misnomer that covers a large number of improvements for bitcoin that require a soft fork to activate. Segwit enables scaling and so many more applications to be built on Bitcoin, including smart contracts and side chains. However, Segwit also reveals an exploit. An exploit that Jihan Wu has been using to give him a competitive advantage and which is in part why he has been able to gain centralized control over bitcoin hashing. This exploit is called ASICBOOST and segwit would put a stop to it. This is why Jihan has opposed it. Worse the corporates have spent millions on a 50-cent army of shills to spread FUD and misinformation and conspiracy theories to discredit core. At the end of the day-- its the engineers who know what they are doing vs the corporate shills who sneer and think it can't be that hard to deliver bitcoin software -- but have so far completely failed to deliver anything that wasn't unmitigated crap. How it's going to play out: Jihan Wu has declared he will hard fork his own coin (and remove Segwit) because the real bitcoin industry and core agreed on Segwit2X .... he has hash power, so he may be able to make his coin dominant... for awhile. But core has solutions to this, and at the end of the day we will likely see chain split with the hash power on one side and the engineering resources on the other. That hash power advantage can be fixed within a few weeks.... the lack of engineering talent can't be fixed for love nor money-- as any engineer worth a damn understands what is at stake and will never join Jihan's Jihad.

buttershakes 9y ago
You are ascribing to the Bitcoin core narrative of a bunch of freedom fighters who are building a decentralized future of freedom, but that narrative does not hold water. First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. That tells you that the allegiances and motivations within "core" have changed in just the last few years. Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous. Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly. The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining. It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement. It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work. If we are worries about centralization in China, then we should just compete outside of China. If you are saying we can't compete than why are we trying to change the system so that we can? Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related.
- jhall1468 9y ago
  > but that narrative does not hold water. Right, because your narrative is "righter" than his. > First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. With little to no input outside of Jeff and the miners that are funding him. This is the nth (where n > 4) iteration of Bitcoin that Bitmain has funded with the intent of maintaining some degree of control over the reference client. As of yet, he hasn't been successful. > Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous. I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied. > Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly. That's actually false. Block sizes aren't really an issue for the miners, they are an issue for the nodes. Each miner only needs single full node. What increasing the block size does is make running a full node (which has to store the entire block chain) extremely expensive. The larger the block sizes, the more expensive a full node becomes. > The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining. SegWit does nothing of the sort. Lightning Network and Sidechains, which can be built on top of SegWit, certainly reduces off-chain fees. SegWit itself only reduces the fees on witness data, but that's moot for the time being. SegWit will have little impact on fees right now. > It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement. See, this implies you have limited technical knowledge on the subject. That's LN, potentially SC. But that has nothing to do with SegWit. > It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work. PoW is just the security policy, it's not the ecosystem. The economy is the ecosystem. Miners mine, the economy chooses what they mine. Long-term, miners need to adapt. Instead of looking at off-chain solutions as a bad thing, they need to consider that they are best suited as a Lightning Node. But that requires a longer vision than the miners have. No one is EVER going to buy coffee on-chain. No amount of increasing block sizes are going to make instant transactions. It's either off-chain transactions or some other altcoin. > If we are worries about centralization in China I don't care about where the centralization occurs, I care about the nature of it. Centralizing mining is bad because it gives them power they shouldn't hold. Centralizing nodes gives governments power over Bitcoin. That is dangerous. > Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related. LN is an opensource implementation of something not dissimilar to smart contracts. Calling that control is laughable.

buttershakes 9y ago

You are ascribing to the Bitcoin core narrative of a bunch of freedom fighters who are building a decentralized future of freedom, but that narrative does not hold water. First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. That tells you that the allegiances and motivations within "core" have changed in just the last few years. Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous. Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly. The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining. It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement. It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work. If we are worries about centralization in China, then we should just compete outside of China. If you are saying we can't compete than why are we trying to change the system so that we can? Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related.

jhall1468 9y ago
> but that narrative does not hold water. Right, because your narrative is "righter" than his. > First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. With little to no input outside of Jeff and the miners that are funding him. This is the nth (where n > 4) iteration of Bitcoin that Bitmain has funded with the intent of maintaining some degree of control over the reference client. As of yet, he hasn't been successful. > Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous. I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied. > Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly. That's actually false. Block sizes aren't really an issue for the miners, they are an issue for the nodes. Each miner only needs single full node. What increasing the block size does is make running a full node (which has to store the entire block chain) extremely expensive. The larger the block sizes, the more expensive a full node becomes. > The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining. SegWit does nothing of the sort. Lightning Network and Sidechains, which can be built on top of SegWit, certainly reduces off-chain fees. SegWit itself only reduces the fees on witness data, but that's moot for the time being. SegWit will have little impact on fees right now. > It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement. See, this implies you have limited technical knowledge on the subject. That's LN, potentially SC. But that has nothing to do with SegWit. > It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work. PoW is just the security policy, it's not the ecosystem. The economy is the ecosystem. Miners mine, the economy chooses what they mine. Long-term, miners need to adapt. Instead of looking at off-chain solutions as a bad thing, they need to consider that they are best suited as a Lightning Node. But that requires a longer vision than the miners have. No one is EVER going to buy coffee on-chain. No amount of increasing block sizes are going to make instant transactions. It's either off-chain transactions or some other altcoin. > If we are worries about centralization in China I don't care about where the centralization occurs, I care about the nature of it. Centralizing mining is bad because it gives them power they shouldn't hold. Centralizing nodes gives governments power over Bitcoin. That is dangerous. > Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related. LN is an opensource implementation of something not dissimilar to smart contracts. Calling that control is laughable.