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To me, it seems like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is just a cash grab (no pun intended) by a minority of misguided Bitcoin enthusiasts. From what I can tell, the main rea

To me, it seems like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is just a cash grab (no pun intended) by a minority of misguided Bitcoin enthusiasts. From what I can tell, the main reason for the resistance to Segwit is that it reduces the power and influence of miners. That's why the people who are pushing BCH are also invested in mining. Miners earn money from transaction fees, and therefore have an incentive to artificially inflate the fees by delaying transactions (transactions are processed in order of highest to lowest fees). There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-two-august-1-mohit-mamoria https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-...

MichaelGG 9y ago
Why would a larger block size increase fees? ASICBoost might be a reason miners are against segwit. But enabling offchain payments kills the P2P aspect pretty hard. There's no good reason for not having had at least 2MB blocks years ago. And it'd have provided solid info on the real impact, not just fear mongering.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  I addressed this in another reply, but I'll repeat: it's a temporary solution. You're merely delaying the inevitable, since the block size limit can't be changed without a hard fork.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. But 2x or 8x'ing the capacity would be welcome, especially a while ago when the mempool was dozens of MB. It's silly to say it's not a permanent solution therefore not worth doing at all.
dwaltrip 9y ago
There isn't a legitimate reason to restrict block sizes to 1MB. That is the primary reason for the fork. Some claim that anything larger than 1MB will "hurt decentralization", but many others have shown this to be a very weak argument (sorry, I don't have any links handy). You don't need every Jane Smith running a full node on a rasberry pi to have robust decentralization.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  There is still a plan to activate 2MB blocks, at a later date (which is part of the Segwit2x proposal). I actually don't fully understand the reasons for why the pro-segwit side doesn't want to increase the block size (even beyond 2MB), except that it's a slippery slope: with Bitcoin, every time you change the block size it requires a hard fork. Increasing the block size isn't a long-term solution, because there's always going to be some new ceiling. Eventually increasing the block size will become impractical. As an aside, some coins have a variable block size to deal with this. AFAIK Monero is the only "major" coin which features variable blocks. It's also the only coin that's actually private.
  - andrewla 9y ago
    I think ZCash is the only coin that is private in a real sense; Monero is somewhat private, but as I recall, by watching the mempool, it is possible to see the chains being built and to reconstruct the payments. That's all transient data that is not included in the blockchain itself, but for agents interested in tracing future transactions or logging current transactions there's a significant amount of pseudonymous traceability.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      I think this is FUD about Monero. You don't see any more in the mempool than you do in actual blocks. Can you cite any sources?
      - andrewla 9y ago
        This was based on my own assessment of the whitepaper when it first became prominent. The way that transactions were formed was to build on an existing transaction in the mempool and mix the results together with the ring signatures. Looking at the coin now it appears that there's some optional (soon to be mandatory) protocol changes that will mask the output addresses, but I have not looked closer. The Wikipedia article has two papers that draw similar conclusions about the traceability: http://monerolink.com/monerolink.pdf http://monerolink.com/monerolink.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7e8g-wJId8md3FYUGF0TlB5NjQ/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7e8g-wJId8md3FYUGF0TlB5NjQ... RingCT claims to conceal the amount, and "stealth addresses" claims to obscure output addresses, but I have not verified these claims because I'm reluctant to spend more time verifying a coin that I am skeptical about.
andrewla 9y ago
It really takes some twisted logic to paint BCH has a miner-friendly measure. It is unfriendly to miners in every way that matters, which is why miners have never achieved consensus on any of the large-block proposals so far. Specifically, it: - reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a sufficiently scarce resources - makes orphaned blocks more likely, which means that the probability of losing a block that you already successfully mined is increased. Although I'm a large-blocker myself, Segwit has one thing going for it, namely, fixing transaction malleability. For anyone who has to deal with bitcoin in bulk (any business using bitcoin, basically), malleability is a killer bug -- it makes it very hard to detect if your transactions have made it on to the network, and impossible to chain transactions together reliably. That's who benefits from Segwit, and it's a big benefit. It also enables some off-chain solutions that are infeasible in a malleable-prone network. The opposition to Segwit, in my opinion, stems mainly from the fact that it is complicated, and was given priority over the "clear and present" problem of blocks being full that had a simpler solution of hard-forking to increase block size. So it's being held up as a totem by the large-blocking crowd of the poor decisions of Core, and for alleged conflicts of interest around the off-chain solutions. Other than the risk of a hard fork itself, the negative effects of a block size increase are so small as to be meaningless, for users and for miners.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  > reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a sufficiently scarce resources If bitcoin popularity grows, more transactions with lower per-tx fees will likely result in more total fees per block, compared to a world in which the block size is fixed and individual fees are higher. The induced demand will be a significant factor. This is fairly straightforward economics. This is a good thing by the way =) Regarding orphan rates: I don't understand all of the gritty details, but I have seen some convincing explanations describing how, if block space isn't scarce, a miner's decision to include an additional tx is largely based on the likelihood that adding the tx will result in a block they find being "orphaned". So it is a self-regulating feedback loop of sorts. And as another poster said, it should affect all miner's equally, assuming they have a sufficiently sophisticated setup (low-latency, well-connected, etc). For those don't know about orphan rates: An "orphaned" block is one that is wasted (and the reward thus lost). This happens when another miner finds a competing candidate block at a similar time and manages to propagate it more quickly through the network such that it is chosen by the majority as the next block.
googletazer 9y ago
Yup you got it. Bitcoin cash is a game of musical chairs - you can only raise the block size so much before its completely centralized (even more than it already is), by hardware requirements.
- throwaway9966 9y ago
  How centralized does 8mb blocks (the max for BCC) make bitcoin? Seems decentralized enough for me. Blocksize should be growing at the same rate that bandwidth availability is growing, but is isnt. Why not? That wouldnt affect decentralization at all.
  - brasky 9y ago
    Bigger blocks take more time to process if they are stuffed with transactions that take a long time for a node to process because of quadratic hashing problems. A miner could make blocks like this and then also delay the release of the block to gain an advantage finding the next block. Also add in the whole asicboost advantage and the GFC lag and it would be a nice attack for the Chinese miners. It seems like this is why they want big blocks and no segwit.
    - throwaway9966 9y ago
      Well first of all, segwit doesnt affect the quadratic hashing attack vector because legacy non-segwit transactions are still valid even with segwit activated, so the attacker would just use non-segwit transactions for his attack. Flextrans (a bitcoin classic proposal) on the other hand could actually solve quadratic hashing. Secondly, the Chinese miners overwhelmingly support segwit2x, including the 2mb HF that comes with it. If they are trying to keep asicboost (which has not been proven to actually being used), why would they support segwit2x instead of trying to force BU instead? Segwit2x includes....you guessed it....segwit...which disables covert asicboost.
      - brasky 9y ago
        We still have to wait and see if segwit2x actually happens. I guess we don't have much longer to wait.
sayurichick 9y ago
as someone who was involved with bitcoin since 2009. you are VERY wrong. this article will probably cover it better than I can. https://coingeek.com/core-think-bitcoin-cash/ https://coingeek.com/core-think-bitcoin-cash/ but there was only ever the "big blocks" camp to begin with. Starting with Satoshi and Gavin Andresen. The "small block" movement is the newer "vision" and didn't/wouldn't exist if not for the financial interest suddenly employing the core developers. The market has wanted bigger blocks for YEARS, and each attempt was slandered/DDoS'ed/attacked. Bitcoin Cash is the result of the market finally getting what it wants.

MichaelGG 9y ago

Why would a larger block size increase fees? ASICBoost might be a reason miners are against segwit. But enabling offchain payments kills the P2P aspect pretty hard. There's no good reason for not having had at least 2MB blocks years ago. And it'd have provided solid info on the real impact, not just fear mongering.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
I addressed this in another reply, but I'll repeat: it's a temporary solution. You're merely delaying the inevitable, since the block size limit can't be changed without a hard fork.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. But 2x or 8x'ing the capacity would be welcome, especially a while ago when the mempool was dozens of MB. It's silly to say it's not a permanent solution therefore not worth doing at all.

dwaltrip 9y ago

There isn't a legitimate reason to restrict block sizes to 1MB. That is the primary reason for the fork. Some claim that anything larger than 1MB will "hurt decentralization", but many others have shown this to be a very weak argument (sorry, I don't have any links handy). You don't need every Jane Smith running a full node on a rasberry pi to have robust decentralization.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
There is still a plan to activate 2MB blocks, at a later date (which is part of the Segwit2x proposal). I actually don't fully understand the reasons for why the pro-segwit side doesn't want to increase the block size (even beyond 2MB), except that it's a slippery slope: with Bitcoin, every time you change the block size it requires a hard fork. Increasing the block size isn't a long-term solution, because there's always going to be some new ceiling. Eventually increasing the block size will become impractical. As an aside, some coins have a variable block size to deal with this. AFAIK Monero is the only "major" coin which features variable blocks. It's also the only coin that's actually private.
- andrewla 9y ago
  I think ZCash is the only coin that is private in a real sense; Monero is somewhat private, but as I recall, by watching the mempool, it is possible to see the chains being built and to reconstruct the payments. That's all transient data that is not included in the blockchain itself, but for agents interested in tracing future transactions or logging current transactions there's a significant amount of pseudonymous traceability.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    I think this is FUD about Monero. You don't see any more in the mempool than you do in actual blocks. Can you cite any sources?
    - andrewla 9y ago
      This was based on my own assessment of the whitepaper when it first became prominent. The way that transactions were formed was to build on an existing transaction in the mempool and mix the results together with the ring signatures. Looking at the coin now it appears that there's some optional (soon to be mandatory) protocol changes that will mask the output addresses, but I have not looked closer. The Wikipedia article has two papers that draw similar conclusions about the traceability: http://monerolink.com/monerolink.pdf http://monerolink.com/monerolink.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7e8g-wJId8md3FYUGF0TlB5NjQ/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7e8g-wJId8md3FYUGF0TlB5NjQ... RingCT claims to conceal the amount, and "stealth addresses" claims to obscure output addresses, but I have not verified these claims because I'm reluctant to spend more time verifying a coin that I am skeptical about.

andrewla 9y ago

It really takes some twisted logic to paint BCH has a miner-friendly measure. It is unfriendly to miners in every way that matters, which is why miners have never achieved consensus on any of the large-block proposals so far. Specifically, it: - reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a sufficiently scarce resources - makes orphaned blocks more likely, which means that the probability of losing a block that you already successfully mined is increased. Although I'm a large-blocker myself, Segwit has one thing going for it, namely, fixing transaction malleability. For anyone who has to deal with bitcoin in bulk (any business using bitcoin, basically), malleability is a killer bug -- it makes it very hard to detect if your transactions have made it on to the network, and impossible to chain transactions together reliably. That's who benefits from Segwit, and it's a big benefit. It also enables some off-chain solutions that are infeasible in a malleable-prone network. The opposition to Segwit, in my opinion, stems mainly from the fact that it is complicated, and was given priority over the "clear and present" problem of blocks being full that had a simpler solution of hard-forking to increase block size. So it's being held up as a totem by the large-blocking crowd of the poor decisions of Core, and for alleged conflicts of interest around the off-chain solutions. Other than the risk of a hard fork itself, the negative effects of a block size increase are so small as to be meaningless, for users and for miners.

dwaltrip 9y ago
> reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a sufficiently scarce resources If bitcoin popularity grows, more transactions with lower per-tx fees will likely result in more total fees per block, compared to a world in which the block size is fixed and individual fees are higher. The induced demand will be a significant factor. This is fairly straightforward economics. This is a good thing by the way =) Regarding orphan rates: I don't understand all of the gritty details, but I have seen some convincing explanations describing how, if block space isn't scarce, a miner's decision to include an additional tx is largely based on the likelihood that adding the tx will result in a block they find being "orphaned". So it is a self-regulating feedback loop of sorts. And as another poster said, it should affect all miner's equally, assuming they have a sufficiently sophisticated setup (low-latency, well-connected, etc). For those don't know about orphan rates: An "orphaned" block is one that is wasted (and the reward thus lost). This happens when another miner finds a competing candidate block at a similar time and manages to propagate it more quickly through the network such that it is chosen by the majority as the next block.

googletazer 9y ago

Yup you got it. Bitcoin cash is a game of musical chairs - you can only raise the block size so much before its completely centralized (even more than it already is), by hardware requirements.

throwaway9966 9y ago
How centralized does 8mb blocks (the max for BCC) make bitcoin? Seems decentralized enough for me. Blocksize should be growing at the same rate that bandwidth availability is growing, but is isnt. Why not? That wouldnt affect decentralization at all.
- brasky 9y ago
  Bigger blocks take more time to process if they are stuffed with transactions that take a long time for a node to process because of quadratic hashing problems. A miner could make blocks like this and then also delay the release of the block to gain an advantage finding the next block. Also add in the whole asicboost advantage and the GFC lag and it would be a nice attack for the Chinese miners. It seems like this is why they want big blocks and no segwit.
  - throwaway9966 9y ago
    Well first of all, segwit doesnt affect the quadratic hashing attack vector because legacy non-segwit transactions are still valid even with segwit activated, so the attacker would just use non-segwit transactions for his attack. Flextrans (a bitcoin classic proposal) on the other hand could actually solve quadratic hashing. Secondly, the Chinese miners overwhelmingly support segwit2x, including the 2mb HF that comes with it. If they are trying to keep asicboost (which has not been proven to actually being used), why would they support segwit2x instead of trying to force BU instead? Segwit2x includes....you guessed it....segwit...which disables covert asicboost.
    - brasky 9y ago
      We still have to wait and see if segwit2x actually happens. I guess we don't have much longer to wait.

sayurichick 9y ago

as someone who was involved with bitcoin since 2009. you are VERY wrong. this article will probably cover it better than I can. https://coingeek.com/core-think-bitcoin-cash/ https://coingeek.com/core-think-bitcoin-cash/ but there was only ever the "big blocks" camp to begin with. Starting with Satoshi and Gavin Andresen. The "small block" movement is the newer "vision" and didn't/wouldn't exist if not for the financial interest suddenly employing the core developers. The market has wanted bigger blocks for YEARS, and each attempt was slandered/DDoS'ed/attacked. Bitcoin Cash is the result of the market finally getting what it wants.