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Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended

491 points by avinassh 9y ago

captaincrunch 9y ago
What a great way to manipulate the market.
- thefalcon 9y ago
  I don't understand this desire to immediately assume bad faith in these situations. It's a complicated situation, involving a lot of actors. Yeah, probably some of them are acting in bad faith. But probably most of them are just trying to develop a functional cryptocurrency. This stuff is very hard, and having it all so decentralized only makes it harder. Personally I was hoping for the 2x fork to succeed, or, barring that, for some kind of miracle switch over to Bitcoin Cash, which has the 8x capacity without the baggage of Segwit. But realistically this is probably the best outcome for Bitcoin for the reasons outlined in the message.
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    What’s your opposition to SegWit?
    - natch 9y ago
      I can't speak for the user thefalcon you replied to, but most opposition as I understand it comes from the fact that segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure, departing from the original vision of bitcoin as a decentralized system that can't be controlled by entities like governments and banks.
      - gruez 9y ago
        >segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure elaborate?
      - VMG 9y ago
        > but most opposition as I understand it comes from the fact that segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure That simply isn't true. It's just a new transaction format.
    - apeace 9y ago
      Can't speak for thefalcon, but implementing Segwit (or any change) as a soft fork creates the possibility of an eventual chain re-org, as well as the possibility for non-upgraded miners to accidentally work on an invalid block. Soft forks have all the difficulties of hard forks (requiring 51% of hashing power to work), with those two additional disadvantages. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866911
    - thefalcon 9y ago
      I have more of a general aversion to the actions of the (Core) people who support SegWit, including false promises, censorship, and other shenanigans like the 2x trojan horse which we've just seen play out: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/duplicates/6iecx7/if_segwit_activates_it_will_represent_a_failure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/duplicates/6iecx7/if_segwit_act...
  - stonogo 9y ago
    Bitcoin fundamentally attracts people who assume existing markets are run in bad faith. It's why there's so much propaganda attacking "fiat currency," and presenting Bitcoin as some kind of ethical imperative.
    - askmike 9y ago
      Most bitcoin people I've met are very much in favor of everything free market, it's the goverments / central banks they don't trust.
      - bpicolo 9y ago
        You're looking at a group of 6 people that have relevant influence on bitcoin. You've still got centralized trust.
        icebraining 9y ago
        The fact that 6 people tried and failed to get their way should imply the opposite, no?
      - dexterdog 9y ago
        For very good historical reasons.
      - 659087 9y ago
        Bitcoin markets are a simulation of what would happen if you replaced the small group of people controlling governments and central banks with a small group of internet trolls, who held 95%+ of all available currency between them.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    > miracle switch over to Bitcoin Cash, which has the 8x capacity without the baggage of Segwit. That fork (BCH) already happened. You were hoping that the vendors who stated "follow the chain w/greatest difficulty" would land on BCH? The merits just aren't there, and that's likely why miners aren't there either. > But probably most of them are just trying to develop a functional cryptocurrency. This stuff is very hard IMO people who haven't actually tried to do that actual development have no idea how hard it is and don't put sufficient weight on the concerns expressed by those who do. The segwit 2x proponents weren't developers.
cypherpunks01 9y ago
Wow! Site is down, can someone copy the text over here?
- thefalcon 9y ago
  The Segwit2x effort began in May with a simple purpose: to increase the blocksize and improve Bitcoin scalability. At the time, the Bitcoin community was in crisis after nearly 3 years of heavy debate, and consensus for Segwit seemed like a distant mirage with only 30% support among miners. Segwit2x found its first success in August, as it broke the deadlock and quickly led to Segwit’s successful activation. Since that time, the team shifted its efforts to phase two of the project - a 2MB blocksize increase. Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin. Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together. Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x. As fees rise on the blockchain, we believe it will eventually become obvious that on-chain capacity increases are necessary. When that happens, we hope the community will come together and find a solution, possibly with a blocksize increase. Until then, we are suspending our plans for the upcoming 2MB upgrade. We want to thank everyone that contributed constructively to Segwit2x, whether you were in favor or against. Your efforts are what makes Bitcoin great. Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide. Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees -- Mike Belshe CEO, BitGo, Inc
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- captaincrunch 9y ago
  [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps Mike Belshe mike at bitgo.com Wed Nov 8 16:58:41 UTC 2017 Previous message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Require a new Statement from NYA companies Next message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] The Segwit2x effort began in May with a simple purpose: to increase the blocksize and improve Bitcoin scalability. At the time, the Bitcoin community was in crisis after nearly 3 years of heavy debate, and consensus for Segwit seemed like a distant mirage with only 30% support among miners. Segwit2x found its first success in August, as it broke the deadlock and quickly led to Segwit’s successful activation. Since that time, the team shifted its efforts to phase two of the project - a 2MB blocksize increase. Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin. Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together. Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x. As fees rise on the blockchain, we believe it will eventually become obvious that on-chain capacity increases are necessary. When that happens, we hope the community will come together and find a solution, possibly with a blocksize increase. Until then, we are suspending our plans for the upcoming 2MB upgrade. We want to thank everyone that contributed constructively to Segwit2x, whether you were in favor or against. Your efforts are what makes Bitcoin great. Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide. Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees -- Mike Belshe CEO, BitGo, Inc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/attachments/20171108/f0a72b0f/attachment.html> http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/... Previous message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Require a new Statement from NYA companies Next message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] More information about the Bitcoin-segwit2x mailing list
imron 9y ago
To the moon!
thewookiee 9y ago
HODL!
nikcub 9y ago
Considering the history of spoofed messages aimed at manipulating the market, they should have cryptographically signed the message That said - if this is true, they've done the difficult but right thing.
- air7 9y ago
  Which way would spoofing this message send the market?
  - kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
    Same way it's going right now? (up)
    - nikcub 9y ago
      I assumed the same. Mainly because anecdotally the last dozen people I know who were new buyers knew little about the fork and were mainly buying in via the price-news cycle Conversely for those who were following this removes the uncertainty around the fork - the downtime of a couple of days, potential 40-50 minute block times, lost coins, replay attacks, etc.
  - nathanasmith 9y ago
    You'd think it would send it down assuming people were buying in anticipating the free coins after the fork. Since there aren't any free coins to get now and assuming that was propping up the recent price rise, why not sell? At least in theory. edit: First three responses to the question all within one minute of each other with all completely different opinions. That's why it's so difficult to predict these things!
  - brut 9y ago
    Some people were waiting for the "free money" to come so they could buy "alt coins". Some will be happy to see BTC unchallenged. Price will be a balance of both.
    - 9y ago
VMG 9y ago
Wise decision. Surprised to see Jihan Wu sign it too. I hope this brings some peace to to the community.
AboutTheWhisles 9y ago
https://coin.dance/blocks https://coin.dance/blocks Looks like it is still on to me.
bpicolo 9y ago
So bitcoin went up because they were going to fork, and now it's going up again because they will not? k Edit: Otoh, looks like it's seeing a bit of a drop now, but I doubt it will hit the pre-anticipation levels.
- icey 9y ago
  It's possible that either decision attracted a different class of buyer. Altcoins have been dumping recently as people sold their holdings to buy Bitcoin in case there was a fork in order to get more of the forked coin (like what happened with Bitcoin Cash). Canceling Segwit2x may have caused traditional investors (e.g. those with less risk appetite) to feel that there are fewer questions about which chain survives a fork; they could have been waiting to put money into the market until there was a clear sense of which Bitcoin fork would be the successful one. Altcoins are surging at the moment, so I believe that lends some credence to the first group being people trying to move into BTC to get more free coin.
  - ifdefdebug 9y ago
    > waiting to put money into the market until there was a clear sense of which Bitcoin fork would be the successful one. I don't know, only if they did not understand that it's a win-win-win situation... they would have equal amount of coins on both chains so none of the three possible outcomes would be actually losing.
    - AgentME 9y ago
      It's possible that confusion and conflict coming from there being two chains (imagine if a user sends bitcoin to a retailer who then claims they never received a payment because they were actually expecting coins on the b2x fork) could depress the price. Now we know that won't happen.
      - ifdefdebug 9y ago
        I stand corrected, didn't consider the case of both chains crashing due to the fork.
whataretensors 9y ago
Here comes the alt flood.
temp987654 9y ago
So... this should probably mean a deep dive for btc price then, right?
- ashark 9y ago
  I checked coinbase expected exactly that, thinking "oh man, I'm glad I didn't sell my eth a month ago to buy into bc trying to capture free altcoins like others did and like I considered doing, it'll be down like 10% at least" but it... shot up about 10% instead. I don't get it.
  - ratacat 9y ago
    Coinbase had one million new accounts opened in a seven day period this month. The rise is substantially organic in new people coming in.
  - RexetBlell 9y ago
    Having too many forks makes it confusing for newcomers (and even hedge funds). So naturally avoiding a fork and keeping the community together is good for Bitcoin, which made the price go up.
    - jwilliams 9y ago
      The speculation prior was the the fork was driving people to buy BTC - hence the expectation of a correction.
      - celticninja 9y ago
        on wex it went up as high as $7900 and as low as $7000 so it is still very volatile, I would expect more of a sell off as people who bought in hoping to capitalise on a fork now exit their position but this may also mean more risk averse investors will buy in now that there is no contentious fork due. so, as usual with bitcoin, no one knows what the hell is going to happen
  - temp987654 9y ago
joering2 9y ago
Looking whats happening on Ethenerum, those who knew in advance already made fortune. Funny we don't have SEC actually able to look into these. Amazing times.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  up a whole $10 ..not exactly 'making a fortune'
  - searine 9y ago
    A $10 shift is a fortune in arbitrage. If you have insider info about the direction of a market, then you have a much reduced risk. You can move in big, take your bite of the change, and then cash out.
    - topmonk 9y ago
      In something as volatile as crypto, ethereum's 3.3% shift is not worth the risk.
paulpauper 9y ago
total meltdown. sell on news event ...wow. I think a lot of people were buying in anticipation of getting an alt coin, which is not going to happen. Given that alt coins are falling now, this looks like just another capitulation event, with the fork cancellation being the trigger.
sova 9y ago
The note states there was not enough consensus (only 30%) How much consensus would be quorum for this sort of shift? Making a hardfork is really a last resort. If we are trying to increase transaction capacity, is blocksize really the most efficient way to go about it (without screwing up the other aspects of BTC)?
- zik 9y ago
  The support for the earlier Segwit change was only 30%. The advertised support for this 2x change was over 80%.
wmf 9y ago
Sadly, this exact scenario was predicted by multiple people and could have been avoided by making segwit and 2MB activate atomically at the same time. This is a huge embarrassment for big blockers; they have been completely politically out-maneuvered.
- mbgaxyz 9y ago
  It's an embarrassment for the industry as a whole. The "New York Agreement" was a blog post, it was never a legally binding and enforceable contract. There's a strong argument that the "agreement" was designed to fail, as it's hardly a compromise when party A gets what they want immediately, but party B has to wait. In future, all "agreements" should be ignored.
  - stepik777 9y ago
    > The "New York Agreement" was a blog post, it was never a legally binding and enforceable contract. More important is that those who signed simply have no power to change Bitcoin. > There's a strong argument that the "agreement" was designed to fail, as it's hardly a compromise when party A gets what they want immediately, but party B has to wait. Yeah, especially when party A doesn't even sign any agreement.
    - wmf 9y ago
      I think if all the NYA signatories had gone all-in on 2x they could have killed the 1x chain. Between the majority of miners and a bunch of exchanges and payment processors, they probably do have the power. But the backlash and financial losses would have been significant.
- dane-pgp 9y ago
  To be fair, the game theory of the Segwit + 2MB blocksize "compromise" was well understood: "Give me the whip!" "Throw me the idol! ... No time to argue!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ920fat50M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ920fat50M This is why Bitcoin Cash was forked off from the legacy chain before Segwit was added.
olegkikin 9y ago
A few altcoins immediately went +20% up - NEO, IOTA, Omnise, Lisk, Waves, Ark. But not the ones I expected - like Ethereum.
- lavezzi 9y ago
  Doesn't Ethereum have its own problems right now?
  - olegkikin 9y ago
    Not ethereum, but one of the contracts written on top of it had a bug that some newbie triggered by mistake and locked something like $160M worth of moneys.
    - wc- 9y ago
      Ethereum's value, its reason for existing, is the deployment and operation of smart contracts. When one of the most popular semi-complex smart contracts fails not once but twice in a matter of months (losing hundreds of millions USD in the process), it is time to look not at the newbie or the contract programmer, but the platform itself.
      - olegkikin 9y ago
        Ethereum works fine as a currency too (~15 sec per block, quite nice). It also works fine with simple contracts, it's the humans who aren't good enough (yet) to write bug-free code. Bugs in software of various kinds cause billions of dollars worth of damage, deaths too. Yet I don't see people claiming it's the fault of C++.
        xwvvvvwx 9y ago
        Yet I don't see people claiming it's the fault of C++ A major driving force behind the development of Rust is that exact claim.
hudon 9y ago
"6 people called off the fork. Think about that." [0] A censorship resistant digital cash is being built, and it only took 6 small time CEOs to completely throw everyone off and almost derail the project. When someone like CME Group, who now has skin in the game, also starts pulling their weight, who knows if the bitcoin experiment will survive? [0] https://twitter.com/arronschaar/status/928316853092433920 https://twitter.com/arronschaar/status/928316853092433920
- matthewbauer 9y ago
  But the main reason they called it off was that it was extremely unlikely to succeed in being a bitcoin successor.
- lawn 9y ago
  Contrast it to how many people it takes to block any on chain scaling. As everyone practically runs Core the power in practice lies with their maintainers. Bitcoin as it is now is crippled. There is no reason to block on chain scaling except for the Core maintainers to retain their power and allow their second layer solutions to viable.
  - hudon 9y ago
    People choose to run Core and the network is worth 122 billion dollars. You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right".
    - lawn 9y ago
      > You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling Multiple dollar fees doesn't require any more arguments. The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking. > but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right". Have you considered that it's driven by speculation instead of technical merit? When the blockchain becomes unusable due to high fees and congestion the bottom will fall out. It cannot be driven by pure speculation forever.
chatmasta 9y ago
The idea of “consensus” in the bitcoin network is interesting to me. The code expresses “consensus” mathematically, and there exists a binary truth of whether a consensus has been “reached.” That’s simple and straightforward. It’s easy to reason about what happens once a consensus has been tautologically reached. However, answering the question of “do we have a consensus yet?” is far less precise. Answering “what compromises can we make to achieve consensus,” even less so. All deliberation and conversation must happen offline, in “meatspace” amongst humans and operating outside mathematical principles. For example with the segwit2x fork, there was the New York Agreement, discussion all over the internet, etc. But does anyone have a precise number for the “theoretical consensus” or is all discussion based entirely on estimates? I’ve always thought the “51% consensus” and the “hard fork” idea were hand-wavy solutions to a problem that can fundamentally only be solved by human cooperation. I also think Satoshi never expected this kind of discontent to be such a common occurrence. Bitcoin should include a consensus building layer of code that acts as an arbiter for building consensus. It could execute polls, enforce rules of deliberation, etc. This is basically decentralized voting, which is generally seen as a distinct topic from bitcoin. But it seems bitcoin, one of the biggest decentralized networks, could benefit from a consensus building protocol. The problem of decentralized governance is not going away. Solving it will be a massive technological step forward.
- hudon 9y ago
  I think the most promising work here is around fork futures. Paul Sztorc (of Bitcoin Hivemind, the original decentralized prediction market, and Drivechains) has a lot to say about how with fork futures, we can let the market tell us how valuable proposals are [0]. We saw this in practice with the numerous S2X futures that were available. They were all predicting that S2X had about 13% chance of winning. This signal can then be used as substantial evidence in meatspace to retract or push forward a proposal. [0] http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/fork-futures/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/fork-futures/
- wmf 9y ago
  You can do on-chain voting for protocol changes and this was done for segwit2x which was activated with an overwhelming majority of votes. Unfortunately only miners vote and in cases where other parties disagree with the miners you can get problems. More recently there have been chain split futures markets that gather predictions from traders; too bad that information came too late to avert the segwit2x fiasco. Tezos is trying to build more sophisticated on-chain governance mechanisms. https://www.tezos.com/governance https://www.tezos.com/governance oh whoops https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-founders-sued-securities-fraud-potential-class-action/ https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-founders-sued-securities-frau...
runeks 9y ago
Interesting move on the price chart after this announcement: https://i.imgur.com/EkxgJb2_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&fidelity=high https://i.imgur.com/EkxgJb2_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&fidelity=high The activity starts 11 minutes after the email.
xwvvvvwx 9y ago
I still don't really understand why people were so against a block size increase. I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too much, but it doesn't really seem as though increasing to 2mb really make such a big difference? Am I missing something?
- wmf 9y ago
  I think small blockers are concerned that short-term fixes like increasing the block size will cause long-term scaling solutions to never be developed, necessitating more and more short-term fixes.
  - linuxps2 9y ago
    Which to me is just stupid - like taking 5 min to increase the blocksize is going to take away significant development effort from more novel solutions. Meanwhile, tx fees are stupidly high and bitcoin can't be used as a currency for small-ish transactions.
- lawn 9y ago
  There are no real technical arguments against increasing to 2MB, only political. The main actors against a block size increase are Core developers who are also part of a company called Blockstream. Blockstream's business model is about selling side chains. But why use side chains if you can use on chain transactions instead? Well if you limit on chain scaling users would be forced on to your side chains... The movement against the Segwit2x upgrade was so fierce precisely because it threatened to offset Core as the de facto Bitcoin client, making them loose their power. They profit heavily from censorship on the bitcoin mailing list, the "bitcoin" subreddit and bitcoin.org. Their consistent propaganda and abuse has now caused the miners and businesses to back down on the Segwit2x upgrade, which would have been a certainty with 95% hashpower and business support. Keep these things in mind and you should get a better picture.
  - wol_ 9y ago
    peddle your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
Bitcoin will do very well...until it doesn't.
runeks 9y ago
I guess this is one of the merits of proof-of-work: force miners to mine on one chain only, and if the token on the fork is worth less compared to their relative increase in hash rate on the fork, they lose money. In my opinion, the financial motive of miners played a big role in this decision, and that’s exactly what proof-of-work is supposed to achieve: consensus through selfish miners. Has anyone done the math on the profitability of Bitcoin Cash miners versus regular Bitcoin miners?
- srwx 9y ago
  It's graphed in real time: https://fork.lol/ https://fork.lol/
  - runeks 9y ago
    Awesome! Not as clear-cut as I thought, though. The BCH income also seems a lot less stable than for BTC; shooting up to twice as profitable as BTC and then down to half as profitable. I assume there’s quite a lot of variance in the time-between-blocks in the BCH network.
- viraptor 9y ago
  All the time: https://whattomine.com/calculators https://whattomine.com/calculators
joering2 9y ago
Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees. Don't have anything against those guys but what was that part about decentralized crypto-currency that no one agency or government oversights?
659087 9y ago
It would be incredibly interesting to see who opened short positions shortly before this announcement. I'd be willing to bet at least a few of the names at the bottom of that message are among them.
thescriptkiddie 9y ago
This is just one guy, Mike Belshe, declaring his intention not to participate in the hard fork. Meanwhile, the miner support for the fork is still over 80% [0]. So it's pretty clear he doesn't speak for the majority. [0] https://coin.dance/blocks https://coin.dance/blocks
rcdwealth 9y ago
> Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has > ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and > fostering its growth worldwide. How sad that people are lured into "money" and selling and buying "money" while not understanding that provision of products and services are the most valuable in the world, and that any money is just a certificate of trust exchangeable for such products or services. Bitcoin is nothing but speculation and this kind of forks cannot make it better. Basic agreements especially relating to money shall never be changed or people loose trust in it.

491 points by avinassh 9y ago

captaincrunch 9y ago

What a great way to manipulate the market.

thefalcon 9y ago
I don't understand this desire to immediately assume bad faith in these situations. It's a complicated situation, involving a lot of actors. Yeah, probably some of them are acting in bad faith. But probably most of them are just trying to develop a functional cryptocurrency. This stuff is very hard, and having it all so decentralized only makes it harder. Personally I was hoping for the 2x fork to succeed, or, barring that, for some kind of miracle switch over to Bitcoin Cash, which has the 8x capacity without the baggage of Segwit. But realistically this is probably the best outcome for Bitcoin for the reasons outlined in the message.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  What’s your opposition to SegWit?
  - natch 9y ago
    I can't speak for the user thefalcon you replied to, but most opposition as I understand it comes from the fact that segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure, departing from the original vision of bitcoin as a decentralized system that can't be controlled by entities like governments and banks.
    - gruez 9y ago
      >segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure elaborate?
    - VMG 9y ago
      > but most opposition as I understand it comes from the fact that segregated witness makes things more likely to rely on centralized infrastructure That simply isn't true. It's just a new transaction format.
  - apeace 9y ago
    Can't speak for thefalcon, but implementing Segwit (or any change) as a soft fork creates the possibility of an eventual chain re-org, as well as the possibility for non-upgraded miners to accidentally work on an invalid block. Soft forks have all the difficulties of hard forks (requiring 51% of hashing power to work), with those two additional disadvantages. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866911
  - thefalcon 9y ago
    I have more of a general aversion to the actions of the (Core) people who support SegWit, including false promises, censorship, and other shenanigans like the 2x trojan horse which we've just seen play out: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/duplicates/6iecx7/if_segwit_activates_it_will_represent_a_failure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/duplicates/6iecx7/if_segwit_act...
- stonogo 9y ago
  Bitcoin fundamentally attracts people who assume existing markets are run in bad faith. It's why there's so much propaganda attacking "fiat currency," and presenting Bitcoin as some kind of ethical imperative.
  - askmike 9y ago
    Most bitcoin people I've met are very much in favor of everything free market, it's the goverments / central banks they don't trust.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      You're looking at a group of 6 people that have relevant influence on bitcoin. You've still got centralized trust.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        The fact that 6 people tried and failed to get their way should imply the opposite, no?
    - dexterdog 9y ago
      For very good historical reasons.
    - 659087 9y ago
      Bitcoin markets are a simulation of what would happen if you replaced the small group of people controlling governments and central banks with a small group of internet trolls, who held 95%+ of all available currency between them.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  > miracle switch over to Bitcoin Cash, which has the 8x capacity without the baggage of Segwit. That fork (BCH) already happened. You were hoping that the vendors who stated "follow the chain w/greatest difficulty" would land on BCH? The merits just aren't there, and that's likely why miners aren't there either. > But probably most of them are just trying to develop a functional cryptocurrency. This stuff is very hard IMO people who haven't actually tried to do that actual development have no idea how hard it is and don't put sufficient weight on the concerns expressed by those who do. The segwit 2x proponents weren't developers.

cypherpunks01 9y ago

Wow! Site is down, can someone copy the text over here?

thefalcon 9y ago
The Segwit2x effort began in May with a simple purpose: to increase the blocksize and improve Bitcoin scalability. At the time, the Bitcoin community was in crisis after nearly 3 years of heavy debate, and consensus for Segwit seemed like a distant mirage with only 30% support among miners. Segwit2x found its first success in August, as it broke the deadlock and quickly led to Segwit’s successful activation. Since that time, the team shifted its efforts to phase two of the project - a 2MB blocksize increase. Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin. Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together. Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x. As fees rise on the blockchain, we believe it will eventually become obvious that on-chain capacity increases are necessary. When that happens, we hope the community will come together and find a solution, possibly with a blocksize increase. Until then, we are suspending our plans for the upcoming 2MB upgrade. We want to thank everyone that contributed constructively to Segwit2x, whether you were in favor or against. Your efforts are what makes Bitcoin great. Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide. Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees -- Mike Belshe CEO, BitGo, Inc
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
captaincrunch 9y ago
[Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps Mike Belshe mike at bitgo.com Wed Nov 8 16:58:41 UTC 2017 Previous message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Require a new Statement from NYA companies Next message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] The Segwit2x effort began in May with a simple purpose: to increase the blocksize and improve Bitcoin scalability. At the time, the Bitcoin community was in crisis after nearly 3 years of heavy debate, and consensus for Segwit seemed like a distant mirage with only 30% support among miners. Segwit2x found its first success in August, as it broke the deadlock and quickly led to Segwit’s successful activation. Since that time, the team shifted its efforts to phase two of the project - a 2MB blocksize increase. Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin. Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together. Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x. As fees rise on the blockchain, we believe it will eventually become obvious that on-chain capacity increases are necessary. When that happens, we hope the community will come together and find a solution, possibly with a blocksize increase. Until then, we are suspending our plans for the upcoming 2MB upgrade. We want to thank everyone that contributed constructively to Segwit2x, whether you were in favor or against. Your efforts are what makes Bitcoin great. Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide. Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees -- Mike Belshe CEO, BitGo, Inc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/attachments/20171108/f0a72b0f/attachment.html> http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/... Previous message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Require a new Statement from NYA companies Next message: [Bitcoin-segwit2x] Segwit2x Final Steps Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] More information about the Bitcoin-segwit2x mailing list

imron 9y ago

To the moon!

thewookiee 9y ago

HODL!

nikcub 9y ago

Considering the history of spoofed messages aimed at manipulating the market, they should have cryptographically signed the message That said - if this is true, they've done the difficult but right thing.

air7 9y ago
Which way would spoofing this message send the market?
- kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
  Same way it's going right now? (up)
  - nikcub 9y ago
    I assumed the same. Mainly because anecdotally the last dozen people I know who were new buyers knew little about the fork and were mainly buying in via the price-news cycle Conversely for those who were following this removes the uncertainty around the fork - the downtime of a couple of days, potential 40-50 minute block times, lost coins, replay attacks, etc.
- nathanasmith 9y ago
  You'd think it would send it down assuming people were buying in anticipating the free coins after the fork. Since there aren't any free coins to get now and assuming that was propping up the recent price rise, why not sell? At least in theory. edit: First three responses to the question all within one minute of each other with all completely different opinions. That's why it's so difficult to predict these things!
- brut 9y ago
  Some people were waiting for the "free money" to come so they could buy "alt coins". Some will be happy to see BTC unchallenged. Price will be a balance of both.
  - 9y ago

VMG 9y ago

Wise decision. Surprised to see Jihan Wu sign it too. I hope this brings some peace to to the community.

AboutTheWhisles 9y ago

https://coin.dance/blocks https://coin.dance/blocks Looks like it is still on to me.

bpicolo 9y ago

So bitcoin went up because they were going to fork, and now it's going up again because they will not? k Edit: Otoh, looks like it's seeing a bit of a drop now, but I doubt it will hit the pre-anticipation levels.

icey 9y ago
It's possible that either decision attracted a different class of buyer. Altcoins have been dumping recently as people sold their holdings to buy Bitcoin in case there was a fork in order to get more of the forked coin (like what happened with Bitcoin Cash). Canceling Segwit2x may have caused traditional investors (e.g. those with less risk appetite) to feel that there are fewer questions about which chain survives a fork; they could have been waiting to put money into the market until there was a clear sense of which Bitcoin fork would be the successful one. Altcoins are surging at the moment, so I believe that lends some credence to the first group being people trying to move into BTC to get more free coin.
- ifdefdebug 9y ago
  > waiting to put money into the market until there was a clear sense of which Bitcoin fork would be the successful one. I don't know, only if they did not understand that it's a win-win-win situation... they would have equal amount of coins on both chains so none of the three possible outcomes would be actually losing.
  - AgentME 9y ago
    It's possible that confusion and conflict coming from there being two chains (imagine if a user sends bitcoin to a retailer who then claims they never received a payment because they were actually expecting coins on the b2x fork) could depress the price. Now we know that won't happen.
    - ifdefdebug 9y ago
      I stand corrected, didn't consider the case of both chains crashing due to the fork.

whataretensors 9y ago

Here comes the alt flood.

temp987654 9y ago

So... this should probably mean a deep dive for btc price then, right?

ashark 9y ago
I checked coinbase expected exactly that, thinking "oh man, I'm glad I didn't sell my eth a month ago to buy into bc trying to capture free altcoins like others did and like I considered doing, it'll be down like 10% at least" but it... shot up about 10% instead. I don't get it.
- ratacat 9y ago
  Coinbase had one million new accounts opened in a seven day period this month. The rise is substantially organic in new people coming in.
- RexetBlell 9y ago
  Having too many forks makes it confusing for newcomers (and even hedge funds). So naturally avoiding a fork and keeping the community together is good for Bitcoin, which made the price go up.
  - jwilliams 9y ago
    The speculation prior was the the fork was driving people to buy BTC - hence the expectation of a correction.
    - celticninja 9y ago
      on wex it went up as high as $7900 and as low as $7000 so it is still very volatile, I would expect more of a sell off as people who bought in hoping to capitalise on a fork now exit their position but this may also mean more risk averse investors will buy in now that there is no contentious fork due. so, as usual with bitcoin, no one knows what the hell is going to happen
- temp987654 9y ago

joering2 9y ago

Looking whats happening on Ethenerum, those who knew in advance already made fortune. Funny we don't have SEC actually able to look into these. Amazing times.

paulpauper 9y ago
up a whole $10 ..not exactly 'making a fortune'
- searine 9y ago
  A $10 shift is a fortune in arbitrage. If you have insider info about the direction of a market, then you have a much reduced risk. You can move in big, take your bite of the change, and then cash out.
  - topmonk 9y ago
    In something as volatile as crypto, ethereum's 3.3% shift is not worth the risk.

paulpauper 9y ago

total meltdown. sell on news event ...wow. I think a lot of people were buying in anticipation of getting an alt coin, which is not going to happen. Given that alt coins are falling now, this looks like just another capitulation event, with the fork cancellation being the trigger.

sova 9y ago

The note states there was not enough consensus (only 30%) How much consensus would be quorum for this sort of shift? Making a hardfork is really a last resort. If we are trying to increase transaction capacity, is blocksize really the most efficient way to go about it (without screwing up the other aspects of BTC)?

zik 9y ago
The support for the earlier Segwit change was only 30%. The advertised support for this 2x change was over 80%.

wmf 9y ago

Sadly, this exact scenario was predicted by multiple people and could have been avoided by making segwit and 2MB activate atomically at the same time. This is a huge embarrassment for big blockers; they have been completely politically out-maneuvered.

mbgaxyz 9y ago
It's an embarrassment for the industry as a whole. The "New York Agreement" was a blog post, it was never a legally binding and enforceable contract. There's a strong argument that the "agreement" was designed to fail, as it's hardly a compromise when party A gets what they want immediately, but party B has to wait. In future, all "agreements" should be ignored.
- stepik777 9y ago
  > The "New York Agreement" was a blog post, it was never a legally binding and enforceable contract. More important is that those who signed simply have no power to change Bitcoin. > There's a strong argument that the "agreement" was designed to fail, as it's hardly a compromise when party A gets what they want immediately, but party B has to wait. Yeah, especially when party A doesn't even sign any agreement.
  - wmf 9y ago
    I think if all the NYA signatories had gone all-in on 2x they could have killed the 1x chain. Between the majority of miners and a bunch of exchanges and payment processors, they probably do have the power. But the backlash and financial losses would have been significant.
dane-pgp 9y ago
To be fair, the game theory of the Segwit + 2MB blocksize "compromise" was well understood: "Give me the whip!" "Throw me the idol! ... No time to argue!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ920fat50M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ920fat50M This is why Bitcoin Cash was forked off from the legacy chain before Segwit was added.

olegkikin 9y ago

A few altcoins immediately went +20% up - NEO, IOTA, Omnise, Lisk, Waves, Ark. But not the ones I expected - like Ethereum.

lavezzi 9y ago
Doesn't Ethereum have its own problems right now?
- olegkikin 9y ago
  Not ethereum, but one of the contracts written on top of it had a bug that some newbie triggered by mistake and locked something like $160M worth of moneys.
  - wc- 9y ago
    Ethereum's value, its reason for existing, is the deployment and operation of smart contracts. When one of the most popular semi-complex smart contracts fails not once but twice in a matter of months (losing hundreds of millions USD in the process), it is time to look not at the newbie or the contract programmer, but the platform itself.
    - olegkikin 9y ago
      Ethereum works fine as a currency too (~15 sec per block, quite nice). It also works fine with simple contracts, it's the humans who aren't good enough (yet) to write bug-free code. Bugs in software of various kinds cause billions of dollars worth of damage, deaths too. Yet I don't see people claiming it's the fault of C++.
      - xwvvvvwx 9y ago
        Yet I don't see people claiming it's the fault of C++ A major driving force behind the development of Rust is that exact claim.

hudon 9y ago

"6 people called off the fork. Think about that." [0] A censorship resistant digital cash is being built, and it only took 6 small time CEOs to completely throw everyone off and almost derail the project. When someone like CME Group, who now has skin in the game, also starts pulling their weight, who knows if the bitcoin experiment will survive? [0] https://twitter.com/arronschaar/status/928316853092433920 https://twitter.com/arronschaar/status/928316853092433920

matthewbauer 9y ago
But the main reason they called it off was that it was extremely unlikely to succeed in being a bitcoin successor.
lawn 9y ago
Contrast it to how many people it takes to block any on chain scaling. As everyone practically runs Core the power in practice lies with their maintainers. Bitcoin as it is now is crippled. There is no reason to block on chain scaling except for the Core maintainers to retain their power and allow their second layer solutions to viable.
- hudon 9y ago
  People choose to run Core and the network is worth 122 billion dollars. You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right".
  - lawn 9y ago
    > You haven't provided any good arguments for on chain scaling Multiple dollar fees doesn't require any more arguments. The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking. > but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right". Have you considered that it's driven by speculation instead of technical merit? When the blockchain becomes unusable due to high fees and congestion the bottom will fall out. It cannot be driven by pure speculation forever.

chatmasta 9y ago

The idea of “consensus” in the bitcoin network is interesting to me. The code expresses “consensus” mathematically, and there exists a binary truth of whether a consensus has been “reached.” That’s simple and straightforward. It’s easy to reason about what happens once a consensus has been tautologically reached. However, answering the question of “do we have a consensus yet?” is far less precise. Answering “what compromises can we make to achieve consensus,” even less so. All deliberation and conversation must happen offline, in “meatspace” amongst humans and operating outside mathematical principles. For example with the segwit2x fork, there was the New York Agreement, discussion all over the internet, etc. But does anyone have a precise number for the “theoretical consensus” or is all discussion based entirely on estimates? I’ve always thought the “51% consensus” and the “hard fork” idea were hand-wavy solutions to a problem that can fundamentally only be solved by human cooperation. I also think Satoshi never expected this kind of discontent to be such a common occurrence. Bitcoin should include a consensus building layer of code that acts as an arbiter for building consensus. It could execute polls, enforce rules of deliberation, etc. This is basically decentralized voting, which is generally seen as a distinct topic from bitcoin. But it seems bitcoin, one of the biggest decentralized networks, could benefit from a consensus building protocol. The problem of decentralized governance is not going away. Solving it will be a massive technological step forward.

hudon 9y ago
I think the most promising work here is around fork futures. Paul Sztorc (of Bitcoin Hivemind, the original decentralized prediction market, and Drivechains) has a lot to say about how with fork futures, we can let the market tell us how valuable proposals are [0]. We saw this in practice with the numerous S2X futures that were available. They were all predicting that S2X had about 13% chance of winning. This signal can then be used as substantial evidence in meatspace to retract or push forward a proposal. [0] http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/fork-futures/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/fork-futures/
wmf 9y ago
You can do on-chain voting for protocol changes and this was done for segwit2x which was activated with an overwhelming majority of votes. Unfortunately only miners vote and in cases where other parties disagree with the miners you can get problems. More recently there have been chain split futures markets that gather predictions from traders; too bad that information came too late to avert the segwit2x fiasco. Tezos is trying to build more sophisticated on-chain governance mechanisms. https://www.tezos.com/governance https://www.tezos.com/governance oh whoops https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-founders-sued-securities-fraud-potential-class-action/ https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-founders-sued-securities-frau...

runeks 9y ago

Interesting move on the price chart after this announcement: https://i.imgur.com/EkxgJb2_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&fidelity=high https://i.imgur.com/EkxgJb2_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&fidelity=high The activity starts 11 minutes after the email.

xwvvvvwx 9y ago

I still don't really understand why people were so against a block size increase. I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too much, but it doesn't really seem as though increasing to 2mb really make such a big difference? Am I missing something?

wmf 9y ago
I think small blockers are concerned that short-term fixes like increasing the block size will cause long-term scaling solutions to never be developed, necessitating more and more short-term fixes.
- linuxps2 9y ago
  Which to me is just stupid - like taking 5 min to increase the blocksize is going to take away significant development effort from more novel solutions. Meanwhile, tx fees are stupidly high and bitcoin can't be used as a currency for small-ish transactions.
lawn 9y ago
There are no real technical arguments against increasing to 2MB, only political. The main actors against a block size increase are Core developers who are also part of a company called Blockstream. Blockstream's business model is about selling side chains. But why use side chains if you can use on chain transactions instead? Well if you limit on chain scaling users would be forced on to your side chains... The movement against the Segwit2x upgrade was so fierce precisely because it threatened to offset Core as the de facto Bitcoin client, making them loose their power. They profit heavily from censorship on the bitcoin mailing list, the "bitcoin" subreddit and bitcoin.org. Their consistent propaganda and abuse has now caused the miners and businesses to back down on the Segwit2x upgrade, which would have been a certainty with 95% hashpower and business support. Keep these things in mind and you should get a better picture.
- wol_ 9y ago
  peddle your conspiracy theories elsewhere.

tryingagainbro 9y ago

Bitcoin will do very well...until it doesn't.

runeks 9y ago

I guess this is one of the merits of proof-of-work: force miners to mine on one chain only, and if the token on the fork is worth less compared to their relative increase in hash rate on the fork, they lose money. In my opinion, the financial motive of miners played a big role in this decision, and that’s exactly what proof-of-work is supposed to achieve: consensus through selfish miners. Has anyone done the math on the profitability of Bitcoin Cash miners versus regular Bitcoin miners?

srwx 9y ago
It's graphed in real time: https://fork.lol/ https://fork.lol/
- runeks 9y ago
  Awesome! Not as clear-cut as I thought, though. The BCH income also seems a lot less stable than for BTC; shooting up to twice as profitable as BTC and then down to half as profitable. I assume there’s quite a lot of variance in the time-between-blocks in the BCH network.
viraptor 9y ago
All the time: https://whattomine.com/calculators https://whattomine.com/calculators

joering2 9y ago

Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees. Don't have anything against those guys but what was that part about decentralized crypto-currency that no one agency or government oversights?

659087 9y ago

It would be incredibly interesting to see who opened short positions shortly before this announcement. I'd be willing to bet at least a few of the names at the bottom of that message are among them.

thescriptkiddie 9y ago

This is just one guy, Mike Belshe, declaring his intention not to participate in the hard fork. Meanwhile, the miner support for the fork is still over 80% [0]. So it's pretty clear he doesn't speak for the majority. [0] https://coin.dance/blocks https://coin.dance/blocks

rcdwealth 9y ago

> Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has > ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and > fostering its growth worldwide. How sad that people are lured into "money" and selling and buying "money" while not understanding that provision of products and services are the most valuable in the world, and that any money is just a certificate of trust exchangeable for such products or services. Bitcoin is nothing but speculation and this kind of forks cannot make it better. Basic agreements especially relating to money shall never be changed or people loose trust in it.