26 ms·

The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

124 points by cryptowizard 7y ago

cryptowizard 7y ago
If you have access to university libraries this academic article describes how Bitcoin production operates through centralized control points
- gl00pp 7y ago
  Enlighten the graduates. How is BTC centralized. I'm waiting.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - danans 7y ago
    From the article abstract, it appears that this paper is more about how the governance behind modifying the bitcoin code itself is hierarchical, and not the separate but dependent issue of mining power for the current protocol being concentrated in relatively few hands: "The overall political framework for altering the Bitcoin code is described as senatorial governance: a (de)centralized model of bureaucratic parties who compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol. This model shows how Bitcoin is not an autonomous system but is assembled and maintained via human discretion."
  - cryptowizard 7y ago
    Bitcoin decision making is channeled down a funnel: Core Developers make suggestions and the Lead Developer (and those given commit access) sign off on those decisions. Those decisions are then voted for by miners who are (relatively) centralised in that roughly 5 mining pool companies control the vast majority of hashing power used to vote on those decisions. Meanwhile large wallet/exchange companies who control vast amounts of on-chain transactions can lobby miners to pick certain decisions by upgrading their nodes to reflect new rules (miners will want to follow large companies because they create liquidity for coins with the new rules and so they can sell their coins more easily and, theoretically, for a higher value). So while this is still a decentralised systems because multiple parties have a say, there are still lots of points of centralised control in the governance system. In other words, not everyone is equal. "Individual developers submit to those with commit access, individual miners submit to mining pool operators, and everyday users submit to Bitcoin companies" (478). The Lead Developer acts as a centralised decision maker, mining pools act like centralised voters, and Bitcoin companies act like centralised lobbyers. So there is a certain structure to Bitcoin governance.
    - awt 7y ago
      Holders of Bitcoin also have a say in what forks are viable.
      - roenxi 7y ago
        Holders of bitcoin are the only people who don't have a say. Buyers, miners and developers decide what is and is not viable (in roughly that order). Holders have a say only as much as they are still buyers.
        awt 7y ago
        How do you sell a fork if you aren’t holding it first?
        roenxi 7y ago
        By creating the fork on demand. The only part of Bitcoin that is technically hard to recreate from scratch is the huge hashing power of its mining network. If buyers were happy with bitcoin-but-a-different-brand then there isn't much existing bitcoin holders can do to hold their market together. There is an unlimited supply of numbers out there, the constraint is numbers that are backed by whatever silly number of hashes per second the Bitcoin network is up to. The holders don't have any particular influence over that constraint.
        awt 7y ago
        I think we may not be understanding each other.
    - nullc 7y ago
      This is not an accurate model of how bitcoin works. :( Not at all.
      - cryptowizard 7y ago
        Can you explain what's wrong with it?
robcohen 7y ago
Hopefully some of the PoS coins can help with this, we’ll see.
- cryptowizard 7y ago
  Possibly. But you still need a Lead Developer to sign off on decision making. And high net worth individuals will have consolidated voting rights on those decisions. Perhaps if PoS is mixed with other development models?
moneytide1 7y ago
Once all 21 million coins are "produced" - what powered hardware will be required to manage transactions?
- jwilliams 7y ago
  The same hardware. Miners get both a reward for mining (the fixed set of coins) as well as collecting fees. After they’re all mined, it’ll just be the fees.
  - httpz 7y ago
    But after all the blocks are mined, how does the blockchain even work?
    - wmf 7y ago
      Transaction fees.
    - dmitrygr 7y ago
      Blocks continue to be mined. It is just that the reward for doing so becomes zero
      - egdod 7y ago
        This is wrong and doesn’t even make sense. If there were no reward, blocks would not keep getting mined.
        etherael 7y ago
        It's kinda wrong in the sense that the fees still exist, but it's right in the sense that the "block reward" is terminology used to refer to the fraction of miner revenue in each block which increases the total supply. That part does indeed stop after 21m according to the current codebase.
    - theboywho 7y ago
DennisP 7y ago
By way of comparison, here's an interesting recent article on Ethereum's development model: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-bazaar-development-model-will-pay-off-in-2020 https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-bazaar-development-model-...
EGreg 7y ago
Well, all projects can be changed by humans. However, the problem with Bitcoin is that it's built on a monolithic blockchain, so it's actually got a bottleneck. The miner is the bottleneck. Every transaction in the world must be sent to every potential miner, making it even more inefficient. In most other distributed systems, when you increase the number of computers, the amount of transactions the system can handle increases. Not so with these monolithic blockchains. Ethereum has the same problem. Vitalik even admitted it this year: https://community.intercoin.org/t/vitalik-scalability-is-a-big-bottleneck/772 https://community.intercoin.org/t/vitalik-scalability-is-a-b... We need systems that are sharded from day 1, such as MaidSAFE and Holochain. "Embarrassingly Parallel" systems!
- cryptowizard 7y ago
  That's an interesting way of putting it. Scaling will always be a problem with monolithic records like you say. I have worked on a couple of distributed ledgers with sharding and these governance models seem to be more promising. Often there is some sort of democratic voting system for stakeholders when it comes to making change to the code which can be reduced by certain cryptoecnomic rules (e.g. demurrage fees for hoarders if it uses a proof of stake consensus). You're right though, its the fact that software needs to be updated by humans so that it stays relevant and reflects stakeholder interest over time that demands decision making. And this decision making often tends to materialise in (some sort of) centralised form due to the need to regulate and promotes good decisions (i.e. by experts). The same happens through Wikipedia moderating.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Considering the other comment here about Holochain I feel like this whole comment was just meant to be an incognito way to shill Holochain.
  - neffy 7y ago
    Quite possibly, but they are also quite correct - you cannot scale a full mesh network to anything remotely resembling the capacity required, it has to be some kind of sharded, p2p topology. At which point, and the irony here is quite profound I agree, you are starting to look at something that looks a lot like the existing banking system.
wmf 7y ago
Note to commenters: In this context "Bitcoin production" is not mining; they're talking about the development of the protocol being centralized.
- filleokus 7y ago
  In the same vein: Could we perhaps have the titled changed to something more descriptive? "The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money" better describes that this is about the governing process of the protocol development rather than mining.
  - neffy 7y ago
    The mining is also pretty centralised these days: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/ And the Chinese company that produces the most asic miners (Bitmain)... also runs a mining pool. Gambling. In a Casino. Shocking.
    - filleokus 7y ago
      Yes, true, and as the paper points out they are related. But the mining centralisation story is basically "water is wet" in 2020 for people interested in this. And as a many commenters here show, the mining centralisation problem is being thought about in technological ways ($BUZZWORD)... The paper seems to focus more about the political/organisational problem, which to me seem more inherent and harder to solve.
      - ozzmotik 7y ago
        i don't wanna be that guy but... ah who am I kidding, of course I do! is water actually wet tho?
      - cryptowizard 7y ago
        Exactly. Bitcoin governance can still be called decentralized but there are still certain degrees of centralized control in decentralized systems (just look at the Internet). The political/organizational problem is hard to solve because humans have to coordinate to make decisions and often this is done from (centralized) points of authority (Lead Developers, Mining pools, Bitcoin wallets/exchanges). This is not a direct democracy but a represantative one because not everyone in the network is equal: 1) Core developers elect the Lead Developer to make decisions on protocol rule upgrades, 2) miners increase the likelihood of coin rewards by using mining pools and in the process elect mining pool operators to make voting decisions on their behalf, and 3) users use Bitcoin wallets to take on technical procedures associated with accessing bitcoins and in the process elect them to make lobbying decisions on their behalf (instead of running their own Bitcoin node). This creates a type of decentralised structure with centralised pieces. "The cost for collective action is [some form of] hierachy" (481).
rolltiide 7y ago
are there any recommendations in this paper? Many times with cryptocurrency projects I've found it easier to get anonymous contributions added or considered more heavily compared to having a known persona, since the gatekeepers are not impartial and more often very emotionally driven
treelovinhippie 7y ago
Also centralized: one global ledger with one global consensus mechanism. Switch to Holochain.
uoylj 7y ago
I mean, literally anyone can fork the codebase, or run alternative node software.. since I'm not going to pay 44USD to read the paper, I'm not sure what his point is.
6510 7y ago
The proof of work isn't actual work.
- once_inc 7y ago
  no, it is merely the proof of having done that work. Hence, the name.
  - 6510 7y ago
    "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result." I get it, I have to work to make money while others mine virtual coins. It's a great deal for them is it not? It's just a power grab. I'm sure the people who use to have the exclusive right to print the money are very upset. Centralization of mining and decision making is just another power grab. I get it, I should shut up and get back to work.
seibelj 7y ago
There is both an overt development bureaucracy of Bitcoin and a shadow group. The overt effort is managed by MIT https://dci.mit.edu/ https://dci.mit.edu/ MIT developers have merge access to the Bitcoin official repo, which is truly the real power. The shadow is who influences these people, and why. It really isn't conspiratorial - it's the long tail of influencers, media, meet-up groups, conventions, exchanges, and people who have a stake in Bitcoin. Anytime there is a major disagreement, there is a fork. This is how numerous forks were created, the biggest of which are Bitcoin Cash, which later itself forked into Bitcoin Cash SV. A fork is just a group of developers who disagree with the official Bitcoin bureaucracy at MIT. If these dissenters have enough support then the new coin has value. Bitcoin is old and stable, and through its age and stability it has gained trust. Major changes to Bitcoin simply won't happen anymore. The Lightning Network required very minor changes to the core protocol, and using Bitcoin's constrained tooling developers have (heroically!) engineered a scaling mechanism. It is not yet perfect nor easy to use, but over time the client services around it will improve. The extreme wariness of core Bitcoin developers ensures that trust is maintained in the protocol. A major disaster in Bitcoin would be very bad for the whole industry. If you don't like Bitcoin, just create your own coin, or fork from Bitcoin! Such is how so many new coins are made.
- nullc 7y ago
  I don't believe any active Bitcoin developers work for MIT anymore. Bitcoin development is almost entirely done in the public (obviously security issues are handled in private), not really much place for any kind of 'shadow'. I don't think meetups/conventions have much role in Bitcoin development either. I stopped going to them entirely because every event is reliably taken over by ICO/altcoin pumpers-- groups who stand to gain a lot by expanding their audience and are willing to pay to send representatives to events.
Empact 7y ago
Not having read the article but having participated in Bitcoin "production" a decent amount[1], I see a lot in common between Bitcoin and the organization of the intentionally non-hierarchical Quakers. Quakers, despite being religiously-motivated to pursue non-hierarchical expression[2], necessarily adopt organizational structure: committees, clerks of committees, group decision-making about who will take certain roles, i.e. "meetings for worship with attention to business." There is some natural and arguably necessary inclination toward roles and authority for the sake of organizational clarity and efficiency. What it does not have is empowered leaders with explicit authority, rather positions are cast as being in service of one another, in organizing groups of effort rather than controlling the outcome of the group, and thus tend toward eliciting the active participation of all. Care and attention are taken to minimize the gravitation toward arbitrary and unaccountable authority. Bitcoin takes a similar approach - necessary roles expressed in service of one another / the general effort, with attention toward guarding against arbitrary or negative expression. The other side of this relates to thought leadership - in some sense speakers naturally have authority via the Pareto Principle's natural tendency to distribute virtues unequally. However, by embracing a consensus-oriented development practice, the general perspectives are a check against individual mistakes or abuses by those empowered by position or circumstance. I think maintaining the balance between the gravity of centralization vs the beauty and safety of decentralization requires a continuous effort. Thankfully, it is not solely up to the developers to ensure this - developers, node operators, and miners can each and all be active by refusing to upgrade or otherwise by forking the codebase. I would say that's the key ultimate check against the centralization, that every individual has the ability to vote with their node / personal activity. I'll be curious to hear if the article addressed any of that. [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_equality
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
- tapland 7y ago
  I didn't know it was that bad. That couldn't scale to a small city =/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - once_inc 7y ago
    That is the price to pay for decentralization. That said, further optimizations will increase the number of transactions per block, and second layer solutions can scale bitcoin to a vastly larger size.
  - trickstra 7y ago
    Don't listen to him. The whining about small blocks is just a narrative BCH folks want to push. Yes, it's true that currently bitcoin blockchain processes about 7 transanctions per second. But mempool is almost empty, 1sat/byte transactions go into next block - there really isn't any pressure to make blocks bigger right now. No emergency. And making blocks bigger comes with a big risk of spammers, so if we have other alternatives, we should take them. By the time people need much more than 7 transactions per second lightning will be fully usable, so there really isn't any problem.
    - varvar 7y ago
      Name checks out. No I don't think it's "just whining", and not everyone criticizing the obstructionist enforcement of small block size is part of the BCH team. Thats ridiculous. It's plain for everyone to see and converse about. Framing it as one team vs another is divisive and blocks honest conversations.
stephanlivera 7y ago
Commenters will be interested in my interview with Bitcoin Core developer James O'Beirne on the real nature of 'power' in Bitcoin. See here: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/66/ https://stephanlivera.com/episode/66/
wbazant 7y ago
Exchanges trade both in Bitcoin and BitcoinCash, and I've just learned from the paper that they form a tree with a common origin. Does it mean that if I owned Bitcoin before the Bitcoin-BitcoinCash split, I can now spend it on both chains?
- lappa 7y ago
  Yes, they share a blockchain history until a certain point. If your Bitcoins were sent in a transaction belonging to a block prior to the split, you own both BCash and Bitcoin.
  - lawn 7y ago
    Why do people call it BCash? Because it's part of a social engineering campaign to discredit Bitcoin Cash and to prevent people from learning about the idiocy of what Bitcoin is doing. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash-bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
    - BigBubbler 7y ago
      The "bcash" term is used to attack BCH. It makes many of the attackers (that are everywhere on social media) pretty easy to recognize. They attack BCH because it is the only Bitcoin still working to allow massive scaling. Dark forces captured BTC to stop it from becoming a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. BCH is keeping that dream alive and the dark forces have been attacking BCH since before it existed.
      - perceptronas 7y ago
        Amount of trolls/fake comments from BCash community is insane. BCash is just a shorthand for a pretty shady coin that it is.
        phillipsjk 7y ago
aazaa 7y ago
The article is behind a paywall, but it's essentially a revisionist account of the block size debate of 2017. This account seems pretty biased to me. For example, it not only gives short shrift to the user activated soft fork (USAF), but gets the basic facts wrong (page 15): > User activated soft forks require a large amount of coordination, particularly from industry. ... This is absurd. UASF was supported by far fewer companies than those supporting Segwit2x. A UASF is a declaration that nodes controlled by a group of users will reject generated blocks failing to conform to certain specifications. In the case of the 2017 incident, the specification was that the block must signal support for segwit, thus ensuring its activation. > ... The cohesive demand for a node-initiated upgrade of network rules gathers momentum around Bitcoin meet-up groups, forums, blog posts, social networks, conferences and company board rooms. With regard to SegWit, this momentum led to the ‘New York Agreement’ in 2017. The New York Agreement led to the ill-fated and incompetently executed Segwit2x proposal, not the UASF. The author could have discussed that initiative in detail but didn't. In short, the (single) developer was incompetent and the update didn't even activate properly.
nytf3 7y ago
tezos is attempting to solve this by incorporating on-chain governance - its dPoS and has a code deployment mechanism with a long voting process (multimonth). They have done 2? upgrades now and quorum seems to be ok so hopefully they can keep up voting % i still think the nano (formerly raiblocks) approach is cool - it scales by running parallel blockchains - each wallet is its own chain. tx's between chains are voted on weighted by % stake - dpos without lockups or slashing. this way its not a competition for space in a single ledger, its competition for voting bandwidth on the worst marginal node. a better tradeoff imho. downsides: the ledger also grows larger quicker than btc (because theres no 7tps limit so you can spam it) no voting rewards or inflation - theres no on chain incentives for voting at all, but exchanges/pos need to run full nodes to validate ledger anyway and voting is trivial bandwidth. its elegant and the security model works but its hard to tell people about without coming across as a fanatic.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  Because nano has free transactions, a big concern was indeed spamming the network because transanctions are free (as in you pay no nano). But since each wallet has to calculate their own blockchain, the prosessing power is purely on the client side and so not free in that sense, which limits the spamming to the processing power you have.
  - tromp 7y ago
    Recent spamming [1][2] has seen nano ledger size balloon by nearly 50%, negatively affecting full node Initial Block Download times as well as archive node disk space requirements. The PoW requirements go up with network congestion, but at this rate of 5-8 tps are quite minimal. [1] https://nano-faucet.org/stats/ https://nano-faucet.org/stats/ [2] https://nanocean.org/ https://nanocean.org/ (Click on Live Stream)
BigBubbler 7y ago
I see this thread is full of false claims about how BTC-Bitcoin is still a real Bitcoin and will be able to scale to fulfill it's original intended use case (peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people). I explain in this opinion piece how such dishonesty is used to fool people into continuing to support the captured, centralized and intentionally broken Bitcoin (BTC). https://read.cash/@Big-Bubbler/the-troll-army-still-cant-stop-magic-internet-money-c5ad0453 https://read.cash/@Big-Bubbler/the-troll-army-still-cant-sto...
aris85 7y ago
Bitcoin is valuable because it is unstoppable and achieves Unstoppability by putting miners into financial liability.
Razengan 7y ago
Crazy idea: 1: Create a globally-sanctioned Internet Currency 2: Allow people to convert any currency to IC 3: Make internet access free for and available to everyone worldwide 4: Charge IC for access to websites and services like Facebook, Amazon, Steam etc.
thacypha 7y ago
https://coingeek.com/spam-transactions-in-bitcoin-are-an-oxymoron/ https://coingeek.com/spam-transactions-in-bitcoin-are-an-oxy...
- thacypha 7y ago
  small blockers are crazy!
mpapec 7y ago
Ok, here is reply from @DrCraigWright as he is blocked from HN. Again. :) ============ Yes, I know you love to run around going “Craig’s not Satoshi, don't listen to him”. However, all of that is irrelevant. The simple fact of the matter is that I've taken the original protocol that I designed and implemented it and it scales and it works. Not the way that people like James A. Donald desired (and yes, he is a child pornography and paedophile and that is part of why he wanted an anonymous coin, something I didn't realise in 2008). Rather, it is a micropayments system that changes the entire nature of the Internet. It allows companies like Google and Facebook, or rather the ones that will replace them to create systems that earn through micropayments and at the same time allow individuals to earn the money to pay for this. It's not the concept that people in the cryptocurrency space think about, but then the people in the cryptocurrency space are rarely those who will take this forward. Don't worry, you can still play. I do know how to fix lightning; I have patents on it. Likewise, I have patents that would fix Ethereum but then I don't need to, bitcoin doesn't need Ethereum. It surprises me how little people bother to learn. The entire cryptocurrency space is premised on ideas that have gone before. The only true innovation that I added to bitcoin was an economic system that linked to a traceable pseudonymous series of transactions. Proof of work-based Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. Distributed Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. The entire technical and corporate space 20 years ago was larger than the entire bitcoin space and in fact cryptocurrency space at the peak a couple years ago. But then, few bother to actually do the research. Few and then fewer even bother to understand that the concept of a blockchain, of hashing a block of information into next block was not new. It was published 25 years ago. Yet none of you seem to have bothered to take the time to read the source documents. I shouldn't be surprised at this sort of attitude, I sought in students all the time. People are becoming lazy, not all of us but many. It's interesting in a way that people believe that bitcoin acts outside of government and law. In the Whitepaper I stated that bitcoin nodes, miners enforce the rules. I didn't say that they create the rules. I said that the rules were set in stone. The incentive system allows miners to act in a manner that keeps them honest. You see, in law, the definitions of used in the Whitepaper have meaning. In particular, the term attacker has meaning. Bitcoin is an economic system. Miners always end in data centres. It doesn't matter how you change the proof of work protocol. If an ASIC device was never created, it would still be more efficient for miners to end running many many computers in a data centre. In scale there is efficiency. The problem is that you guys think you can beat me. You don't even realise you've already lost. Then, commenting on information that I know when you don't and some of you will say this informational asymmetry is an unfair advantage. I'm sorry if you're a snowflake and I don't care. This collectivist, socialist mindset that has infiltrated what people call libertarian thought is rather despicable. You seem to actually believe, surprising as that seems that you have a right and that I have an obligation to give you information. That when I'm not seeking anything from you, what am not asking you to help, where in fact I don't actually care two damns about your existence that I should do something to obtain your gratification or even some respect from you. I'm sorry, I don't care about the respect that some people seem to garnish and gather from social media sites to their pseudonymous identities. It is funny to watch however. Enjoy. 2020 is going to be an interesting year and some of you are going to find out how interesting very shortly.
rechargedishtv 7y ago
https://www.rechargedishtv.in/ https://www.rechargedishtv.in/
eordano 7y ago
The article is fairly low-quality. It's more focused on fear-mongering around the perils of machine-judges and trying to make a headline around "if there's someone with commit power then in the end, it's not a decentralized system". It makes a number of errors, most notably, calling the hashing power spent on securing the network "donations" (quotation marks sic). Bitcoin has one job: securing the network of transactions. Bitcoin is a mechanism to aggregate hashing power in order to make it possible to semi-objectively measure the risk of a block being reverted, in fact, this is the only formula in bitcoin's white-paper. The paper examines a system of economic incentives, and somehow dismiss its key activity as an altruistic "donation". The article goes downhill from this statement onwards, and I couldn't feel like it makes a huge (yet ineffective) effort of deconstructing Bitcoin's governance model. Some quotes that reinforce the superficial understanding of the Author: > There are times, however, when two miners can find the correct nonce for a new block within a few seconds of each other and both broadcast their valid block of transactions (nigh on) simultaneously to the network. This causes a split, or fork, where miners go ‘rushing off’ to mine on top of two competing blocks. Because this form of divergence is endemic to the blockchain’s mechanics it is referred to here as a systematic fork; the discrepancy should be quickly resolved by network mechanisms (this happens, on average, two or three times a week). Systematic forks are temporary glitches... These forks are essential to maintaining decentralization as a mechanism to make the network secure: trust the info, not the people that delivered the data, trust the signing mechanism (hash power spent), not the people running the machines. > Furthermore, the political strategy of a user activated soft fork still requires code developers to create a client that reflects the political will of the market and thus demands the obligatory passage point of a Lead Developer found in version control systems. Not true -- the UASF measures were not merged into the Bitcoin Core branch. Some code was merged to protect users from potentially problematic interactions with Bitcoin Cash fork. Modeling Bitcoin's governance system is a daunting task. The author essentially confuses the power developers have with regards to miners: developers know there are things that would never fly with miners, and miners are way more powerful than what is described in the paper.
tharne 7y ago
Are people really trying to re-ignite the blocksize debate in the HN comments section? This battle was waged, every conceivable argument on both sides was made. Small blocks with lightning to scale won, and the big blockers forked into arguably less successful coins like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. Time for everyone to move on.
- nighthawk24 7y ago
  "Small blocks with lightning to scale won" Nope, LN is not P2P Electronic Cash. Bitcoin Core protocol kept the Bitcoin branding and continues censorship. Bitcoin Cash protocol is being actively developed and has a scaling roadmap https://www.bitcoincash.org/roadmap.html https://www.bitcoincash.org/roadmap.html Bitcoin SV was another centralized attack(from nChain+CSW) on BCH. While both BTC & BSV are centrally developed and managed, BCH has decentralized development with multiple implementations. Bitcoin has a long journey ahead, we are still handing out large miner rewards, we can check back in 3 more halvings by 2028 and see how things unfold.
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124 points by cryptowizard 7y ago

If you have access to university libraries this academic article describes how Bitcoin production operates through centralized control points

gl00pp 7y ago
Enlighten the graduates. How is BTC centralized. I'm waiting.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- danans 7y ago
  From the article abstract, it appears that this paper is more about how the governance behind modifying the bitcoin code itself is hierarchical, and not the separate but dependent issue of mining power for the current protocol being concentrated in relatively few hands: "The overall political framework for altering the Bitcoin code is described as senatorial governance: a (de)centralized model of bureaucratic parties who compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol. This model shows how Bitcoin is not an autonomous system but is assembled and maintained via human discretion."
- cryptowizard 7y ago
  Bitcoin decision making is channeled down a funnel: Core Developers make suggestions and the Lead Developer (and those given commit access) sign off on those decisions. Those decisions are then voted for by miners who are (relatively) centralised in that roughly 5 mining pool companies control the vast majority of hashing power used to vote on those decisions. Meanwhile large wallet/exchange companies who control vast amounts of on-chain transactions can lobby miners to pick certain decisions by upgrading their nodes to reflect new rules (miners will want to follow large companies because they create liquidity for coins with the new rules and so they can sell their coins more easily and, theoretically, for a higher value). So while this is still a decentralised systems because multiple parties have a say, there are still lots of points of centralised control in the governance system. In other words, not everyone is equal. "Individual developers submit to those with commit access, individual miners submit to mining pool operators, and everyday users submit to Bitcoin companies" (478). The Lead Developer acts as a centralised decision maker, mining pools act like centralised voters, and Bitcoin companies act like centralised lobbyers. So there is a certain structure to Bitcoin governance.
  - awt 7y ago
    Holders of Bitcoin also have a say in what forks are viable.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      Holders of bitcoin are the only people who don't have a say. Buyers, miners and developers decide what is and is not viable (in roughly that order). Holders have a say only as much as they are still buyers.
      - awt 7y ago
        How do you sell a fork if you aren’t holding it first?
        roenxi 7y ago
        By creating the fork on demand. The only part of Bitcoin that is technically hard to recreate from scratch is the huge hashing power of its mining network. If buyers were happy with bitcoin-but-a-different-brand then there isn't much existing bitcoin holders can do to hold their market together. There is an unlimited supply of numbers out there, the constraint is numbers that are backed by whatever silly number of hashes per second the Bitcoin network is up to. The holders don't have any particular influence over that constraint.
        awt 7y ago
        I think we may not be understanding each other.
  - nullc 7y ago
    This is not an accurate model of how bitcoin works. :( Not at all.
    - cryptowizard 7y ago
      Can you explain what's wrong with it?

robcohen 7y ago

Hopefully some of the PoS coins can help with this, we’ll see.

cryptowizard 7y ago
Possibly. But you still need a Lead Developer to sign off on decision making. And high net worth individuals will have consolidated voting rights on those decisions. Perhaps if PoS is mixed with other development models?

moneytide1 7y ago

Once all 21 million coins are "produced" - what powered hardware will be required to manage transactions?

jwilliams 7y ago
The same hardware. Miners get both a reward for mining (the fixed set of coins) as well as collecting fees. After they’re all mined, it’ll just be the fees.
- httpz 7y ago
  But after all the blocks are mined, how does the blockchain even work?
  - wmf 7y ago
    Transaction fees.
  - dmitrygr 7y ago
    Blocks continue to be mined. It is just that the reward for doing so becomes zero
    - egdod 7y ago
      This is wrong and doesn’t even make sense. If there were no reward, blocks would not keep getting mined.
      - etherael 7y ago
        It's kinda wrong in the sense that the fees still exist, but it's right in the sense that the "block reward" is terminology used to refer to the fraction of miner revenue in each block which increases the total supply. That part does indeed stop after 21m according to the current codebase.
  - theboywho 7y ago

DennisP 7y ago

By way of comparison, here's an interesting recent article on Ethereum's development model: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-bazaar-development-model-will-pay-off-in-2020 https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-bazaar-development-model-...

EGreg 7y ago

Well, all projects can be changed by humans. However, the problem with Bitcoin is that it's built on a monolithic blockchain, so it's actually got a bottleneck. The miner is the bottleneck. Every transaction in the world must be sent to every potential miner, making it even more inefficient. In most other distributed systems, when you increase the number of computers, the amount of transactions the system can handle increases. Not so with these monolithic blockchains. Ethereum has the same problem. Vitalik even admitted it this year: https://community.intercoin.org/t/vitalik-scalability-is-a-big-bottleneck/772 https://community.intercoin.org/t/vitalik-scalability-is-a-b... We need systems that are sharded from day 1, such as MaidSAFE and Holochain. "Embarrassingly Parallel" systems!

cryptowizard 7y ago
That's an interesting way of putting it. Scaling will always be a problem with monolithic records like you say. I have worked on a couple of distributed ledgers with sharding and these governance models seem to be more promising. Often there is some sort of democratic voting system for stakeholders when it comes to making change to the code which can be reduced by certain cryptoecnomic rules (e.g. demurrage fees for hoarders if it uses a proof of stake consensus). You're right though, its the fact that software needs to be updated by humans so that it stays relevant and reflects stakeholder interest over time that demands decision making. And this decision making often tends to materialise in (some sort of) centralised form due to the need to regulate and promotes good decisions (i.e. by experts). The same happens through Wikipedia moderating.
hanniabu 7y ago
Considering the other comment here about Holochain I feel like this whole comment was just meant to be an incognito way to shill Holochain.
- neffy 7y ago
  Quite possibly, but they are also quite correct - you cannot scale a full mesh network to anything remotely resembling the capacity required, it has to be some kind of sharded, p2p topology. At which point, and the irony here is quite profound I agree, you are starting to look at something that looks a lot like the existing banking system.

wmf 7y ago

Note to commenters: In this context "Bitcoin production" is not mining; they're talking about the development of the protocol being centralized.

filleokus 7y ago
In the same vein: Could we perhaps have the titled changed to something more descriptive? "The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money" better describes that this is about the governing process of the protocol development rather than mining.
- neffy 7y ago
  The mining is also pretty centralised these days: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/ And the Chinese company that produces the most asic miners (Bitmain)... also runs a mining pool. Gambling. In a Casino. Shocking.
  - filleokus 7y ago
    Yes, true, and as the paper points out they are related. But the mining centralisation story is basically "water is wet" in 2020 for people interested in this. And as a many commenters here show, the mining centralisation problem is being thought about in technological ways ($BUZZWORD)... The paper seems to focus more about the political/organisational problem, which to me seem more inherent and harder to solve.
    - ozzmotik 7y ago
      i don't wanna be that guy but... ah who am I kidding, of course I do! is water actually wet tho?
    - cryptowizard 7y ago
      Exactly. Bitcoin governance can still be called decentralized but there are still certain degrees of centralized control in decentralized systems (just look at the Internet). The political/organizational problem is hard to solve because humans have to coordinate to make decisions and often this is done from (centralized) points of authority (Lead Developers, Mining pools, Bitcoin wallets/exchanges). This is not a direct democracy but a represantative one because not everyone in the network is equal: 1) Core developers elect the Lead Developer to make decisions on protocol rule upgrades, 2) miners increase the likelihood of coin rewards by using mining pools and in the process elect mining pool operators to make voting decisions on their behalf, and 3) users use Bitcoin wallets to take on technical procedures associated with accessing bitcoins and in the process elect them to make lobbying decisions on their behalf (instead of running their own Bitcoin node). This creates a type of decentralised structure with centralised pieces. "The cost for collective action is [some form of] hierachy" (481).

rolltiide 7y ago

are there any recommendations in this paper? Many times with cryptocurrency projects I've found it easier to get anonymous contributions added or considered more heavily compared to having a known persona, since the gatekeepers are not impartial and more often very emotionally driven

treelovinhippie 7y ago

Also centralized: one global ledger with one global consensus mechanism. Switch to Holochain.

uoylj 7y ago

I mean, literally anyone can fork the codebase, or run alternative node software.. since I'm not going to pay 44USD to read the paper, I'm not sure what his point is.

6510 7y ago

The proof of work isn't actual work.

once_inc 7y ago
no, it is merely the proof of having done that work. Hence, the name.
- 6510 7y ago
  "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result." I get it, I have to work to make money while others mine virtual coins. It's a great deal for them is it not? It's just a power grab. I'm sure the people who use to have the exclusive right to print the money are very upset. Centralization of mining and decision making is just another power grab. I get it, I should shut up and get back to work.

seibelj 7y ago

There is both an overt development bureaucracy of Bitcoin and a shadow group. The overt effort is managed by MIT https://dci.mit.edu/ https://dci.mit.edu/ MIT developers have merge access to the Bitcoin official repo, which is truly the real power. The shadow is who influences these people, and why. It really isn't conspiratorial - it's the long tail of influencers, media, meet-up groups, conventions, exchanges, and people who have a stake in Bitcoin. Anytime there is a major disagreement, there is a fork. This is how numerous forks were created, the biggest of which are Bitcoin Cash, which later itself forked into Bitcoin Cash SV. A fork is just a group of developers who disagree with the official Bitcoin bureaucracy at MIT. If these dissenters have enough support then the new coin has value. Bitcoin is old and stable, and through its age and stability it has gained trust. Major changes to Bitcoin simply won't happen anymore. The Lightning Network required very minor changes to the core protocol, and using Bitcoin's constrained tooling developers have (heroically!) engineered a scaling mechanism. It is not yet perfect nor easy to use, but over time the client services around it will improve. The extreme wariness of core Bitcoin developers ensures that trust is maintained in the protocol. A major disaster in Bitcoin would be very bad for the whole industry. If you don't like Bitcoin, just create your own coin, or fork from Bitcoin! Such is how so many new coins are made.

nullc 7y ago
I don't believe any active Bitcoin developers work for MIT anymore. Bitcoin development is almost entirely done in the public (obviously security issues are handled in private), not really much place for any kind of 'shadow'. I don't think meetups/conventions have much role in Bitcoin development either. I stopped going to them entirely because every event is reliably taken over by ICO/altcoin pumpers-- groups who stand to gain a lot by expanding their audience and are willing to pay to send representatives to events.

Empact 7y ago

Not having read the article but having participated in Bitcoin "production" a decent amount[1], I see a lot in common between Bitcoin and the organization of the intentionally non-hierarchical Quakers. Quakers, despite being religiously-motivated to pursue non-hierarchical expression[2], necessarily adopt organizational structure: committees, clerks of committees, group decision-making about who will take certain roles, i.e. "meetings for worship with attention to business." There is some natural and arguably necessary inclination toward roles and authority for the sake of organizational clarity and efficiency. What it does not have is empowered leaders with explicit authority, rather positions are cast as being in service of one another, in organizing groups of effort rather than controlling the outcome of the group, and thus tend toward eliciting the active participation of all. Care and attention are taken to minimize the gravitation toward arbitrary and unaccountable authority. Bitcoin takes a similar approach - necessary roles expressed in service of one another / the general effort, with attention toward guarding against arbitrary or negative expression. The other side of this relates to thought leadership - in some sense speakers naturally have authority via the Pareto Principle's natural tendency to distribute virtues unequally. However, by embracing a consensus-oriented development practice, the general perspectives are a check against individual mistakes or abuses by those empowered by position or circumstance. I think maintaining the balance between the gravity of centralization vs the beauty and safety of decentralization requires a continuous effort. Thankfully, it is not solely up to the developers to ensure this - developers, node operators, and miners can each and all be active by refusing to upgrade or otherwise by forking the codebase. I would say that's the key ultimate check against the centralization, that every individual has the ability to vote with their node / personal activity. I'll be curious to hear if the article addressed any of that. [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_equality

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.

tapland 7y ago
I didn't know it was that bad. That couldn't scale to a small city =/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- once_inc 7y ago
  That is the price to pay for decentralization. That said, further optimizations will increase the number of transactions per block, and second layer solutions can scale bitcoin to a vastly larger size.
- trickstra 7y ago
  Don't listen to him. The whining about small blocks is just a narrative BCH folks want to push. Yes, it's true that currently bitcoin blockchain processes about 7 transanctions per second. But mempool is almost empty, 1sat/byte transactions go into next block - there really isn't any pressure to make blocks bigger right now. No emergency. And making blocks bigger comes with a big risk of spammers, so if we have other alternatives, we should take them. By the time people need much more than 7 transactions per second lightning will be fully usable, so there really isn't any problem.
  - varvar 7y ago
    Name checks out. No I don't think it's "just whining", and not everyone criticizing the obstructionist enforcement of small block size is part of the BCH team. Thats ridiculous. It's plain for everyone to see and converse about. Framing it as one team vs another is divisive and blocks honest conversations.

stephanlivera 7y ago

Commenters will be interested in my interview with Bitcoin Core developer James O'Beirne on the real nature of 'power' in Bitcoin. See here: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/66/ https://stephanlivera.com/episode/66/

wbazant 7y ago

Exchanges trade both in Bitcoin and BitcoinCash, and I've just learned from the paper that they form a tree with a common origin. Does it mean that if I owned Bitcoin before the Bitcoin-BitcoinCash split, I can now spend it on both chains?

lappa 7y ago
Yes, they share a blockchain history until a certain point. If your Bitcoins were sent in a transaction belonging to a block prior to the split, you own both BCash and Bitcoin.
- lawn 7y ago
  Why do people call it BCash? Because it's part of a social engineering campaign to discredit Bitcoin Cash and to prevent people from learning about the idiocy of what Bitcoin is doing. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash-bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
  - BigBubbler 7y ago
    The "bcash" term is used to attack BCH. It makes many of the attackers (that are everywhere on social media) pretty easy to recognize. They attack BCH because it is the only Bitcoin still working to allow massive scaling. Dark forces captured BTC to stop it from becoming a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. BCH is keeping that dream alive and the dark forces have been attacking BCH since before it existed.
    - perceptronas 7y ago
      Amount of trolls/fake comments from BCash community is insane. BCash is just a shorthand for a pretty shady coin that it is.
      - phillipsjk 7y ago

aazaa 7y ago

The article is behind a paywall, but it's essentially a revisionist account of the block size debate of 2017. This account seems pretty biased to me. For example, it not only gives short shrift to the user activated soft fork (USAF), but gets the basic facts wrong (page 15): > User activated soft forks require a large amount of coordination, particularly from industry. ... This is absurd. UASF was supported by far fewer companies than those supporting Segwit2x. A UASF is a declaration that nodes controlled by a group of users will reject generated blocks failing to conform to certain specifications. In the case of the 2017 incident, the specification was that the block must signal support for segwit, thus ensuring its activation. > ... The cohesive demand for a node-initiated upgrade of network rules gathers momentum around Bitcoin meet-up groups, forums, blog posts, social networks, conferences and company board rooms. With regard to SegWit, this momentum led to the ‘New York Agreement’ in 2017. The New York Agreement led to the ill-fated and incompetently executed Segwit2x proposal, not the UASF. The author could have discussed that initiative in detail but didn't. In short, the (single) developer was incompetent and the update didn't even activate properly.

nytf3 7y ago

tezos is attempting to solve this by incorporating on-chain governance - its dPoS and has a code deployment mechanism with a long voting process (multimonth). They have done 2? upgrades now and quorum seems to be ok so hopefully they can keep up voting % i still think the nano (formerly raiblocks) approach is cool - it scales by running parallel blockchains - each wallet is its own chain. tx's between chains are voted on weighted by % stake - dpos without lockups or slashing. this way its not a competition for space in a single ledger, its competition for voting bandwidth on the worst marginal node. a better tradeoff imho. downsides: the ledger also grows larger quicker than btc (because theres no 7tps limit so you can spam it) no voting rewards or inflation - theres no on chain incentives for voting at all, but exchanges/pos need to run full nodes to validate ledger anyway and voting is trivial bandwidth. its elegant and the security model works but its hard to tell people about without coming across as a fanatic.

koonsolo 7y ago
Because nano has free transactions, a big concern was indeed spamming the network because transanctions are free (as in you pay no nano). But since each wallet has to calculate their own blockchain, the prosessing power is purely on the client side and so not free in that sense, which limits the spamming to the processing power you have.
- tromp 7y ago
  Recent spamming [1][2] has seen nano ledger size balloon by nearly 50%, negatively affecting full node Initial Block Download times as well as archive node disk space requirements. The PoW requirements go up with network congestion, but at this rate of 5-8 tps are quite minimal. [1] https://nano-faucet.org/stats/ https://nano-faucet.org/stats/ [2] https://nanocean.org/ https://nanocean.org/ (Click on Live Stream)

BigBubbler 7y ago

I see this thread is full of false claims about how BTC-Bitcoin is still a real Bitcoin and will be able to scale to fulfill it's original intended use case (peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people). I explain in this opinion piece how such dishonesty is used to fool people into continuing to support the captured, centralized and intentionally broken Bitcoin (BTC). https://read.cash/@Big-Bubbler/the-troll-army-still-cant-stop-magic-internet-money-c5ad0453 https://read.cash/@Big-Bubbler/the-troll-army-still-cant-sto...

aris85 7y ago

Bitcoin is valuable because it is unstoppable and achieves Unstoppability by putting miners into financial liability.

Razengan 7y ago

Crazy idea: 1: Create a globally-sanctioned Internet Currency 2: Allow people to convert any currency to IC 3: Make internet access free for and available to everyone worldwide 4: Charge IC for access to websites and services like Facebook, Amazon, Steam etc.

thacypha 7y ago

https://coingeek.com/spam-transactions-in-bitcoin-are-an-oxymoron/ https://coingeek.com/spam-transactions-in-bitcoin-are-an-oxy...

thacypha 7y ago
small blockers are crazy!

mpapec 7y ago

Ok, here is reply from @DrCraigWright as he is blocked from HN. Again. :) ============ Yes, I know you love to run around going “Craig’s not Satoshi, don't listen to him”. However, all of that is irrelevant. The simple fact of the matter is that I've taken the original protocol that I designed and implemented it and it scales and it works. Not the way that people like James A. Donald desired (and yes, he is a child pornography and paedophile and that is part of why he wanted an anonymous coin, something I didn't realise in 2008). Rather, it is a micropayments system that changes the entire nature of the Internet. It allows companies like Google and Facebook, or rather the ones that will replace them to create systems that earn through micropayments and at the same time allow individuals to earn the money to pay for this. It's not the concept that people in the cryptocurrency space think about, but then the people in the cryptocurrency space are rarely those who will take this forward. Don't worry, you can still play. I do know how to fix lightning; I have patents on it. Likewise, I have patents that would fix Ethereum but then I don't need to, bitcoin doesn't need Ethereum. It surprises me how little people bother to learn. The entire cryptocurrency space is premised on ideas that have gone before. The only true innovation that I added to bitcoin was an economic system that linked to a traceable pseudonymous series of transactions. Proof of work-based Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. Distributed Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. The entire technical and corporate space 20 years ago was larger than the entire bitcoin space and in fact cryptocurrency space at the peak a couple years ago. But then, few bother to actually do the research. Few and then fewer even bother to understand that the concept of a blockchain, of hashing a block of information into next block was not new. It was published 25 years ago. Yet none of you seem to have bothered to take the time to read the source documents. I shouldn't be surprised at this sort of attitude, I sought in students all the time. People are becoming lazy, not all of us but many. It's interesting in a way that people believe that bitcoin acts outside of government and law. In the Whitepaper I stated that bitcoin nodes, miners enforce the rules. I didn't say that they create the rules. I said that the rules were set in stone. The incentive system allows miners to act in a manner that keeps them honest. You see, in law, the definitions of used in the Whitepaper have meaning. In particular, the term attacker has meaning. Bitcoin is an economic system. Miners always end in data centres. It doesn't matter how you change the proof of work protocol. If an ASIC device was never created, it would still be more efficient for miners to end running many many computers in a data centre. In scale there is efficiency. The problem is that you guys think you can beat me. You don't even realise you've already lost. Then, commenting on information that I know when you don't and some of you will say this informational asymmetry is an unfair advantage. I'm sorry if you're a snowflake and I don't care. This collectivist, socialist mindset that has infiltrated what people call libertarian thought is rather despicable. You seem to actually believe, surprising as that seems that you have a right and that I have an obligation to give you information. That when I'm not seeking anything from you, what am not asking you to help, where in fact I don't actually care two damns about your existence that I should do something to obtain your gratification or even some respect from you. I'm sorry, I don't care about the respect that some people seem to garnish and gather from social media sites to their pseudonymous identities. It is funny to watch however. Enjoy. 2020 is going to be an interesting year and some of you are going to find out how interesting very shortly.

rechargedishtv 7y ago

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eordano 7y ago

The article is fairly low-quality. It's more focused on fear-mongering around the perils of machine-judges and trying to make a headline around "if there's someone with commit power then in the end, it's not a decentralized system". It makes a number of errors, most notably, calling the hashing power spent on securing the network "donations" (quotation marks sic). Bitcoin has one job: securing the network of transactions. Bitcoin is a mechanism to aggregate hashing power in order to make it possible to semi-objectively measure the risk of a block being reverted, in fact, this is the only formula in bitcoin's white-paper. The paper examines a system of economic incentives, and somehow dismiss its key activity as an altruistic "donation". The article goes downhill from this statement onwards, and I couldn't feel like it makes a huge (yet ineffective) effort of deconstructing Bitcoin's governance model. Some quotes that reinforce the superficial understanding of the Author: > There are times, however, when two miners can find the correct nonce for a new block within a few seconds of each other and both broadcast their valid block of transactions (nigh on) simultaneously to the network. This causes a split, or fork, where miners go ‘rushing off’ to mine on top of two competing blocks. Because this form of divergence is endemic to the blockchain’s mechanics it is referred to here as a systematic fork; the discrepancy should be quickly resolved by network mechanisms (this happens, on average, two or three times a week). Systematic forks are temporary glitches... These forks are essential to maintaining decentralization as a mechanism to make the network secure: trust the info, not the people that delivered the data, trust the signing mechanism (hash power spent), not the people running the machines. > Furthermore, the political strategy of a user activated soft fork still requires code developers to create a client that reflects the political will of the market and thus demands the obligatory passage point of a Lead Developer found in version control systems. Not true -- the UASF measures were not merged into the Bitcoin Core branch. Some code was merged to protect users from potentially problematic interactions with Bitcoin Cash fork. Modeling Bitcoin's governance system is a daunting task. The author essentially confuses the power developers have with regards to miners: developers know there are things that would never fly with miners, and miners are way more powerful than what is described in the paper.

tharne 7y ago

Are people really trying to re-ignite the blocksize debate in the HN comments section? This battle was waged, every conceivable argument on both sides was made. Small blocks with lightning to scale won, and the big blockers forked into arguably less successful coins like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. Time for everyone to move on.

nighthawk24 7y ago
"Small blocks with lightning to scale won" Nope, LN is not P2P Electronic Cash. Bitcoin Core protocol kept the Bitcoin branding and continues censorship. Bitcoin Cash protocol is being actively developed and has a scaling roadmap https://www.bitcoincash.org/roadmap.html https://www.bitcoincash.org/roadmap.html Bitcoin SV was another centralized attack(from nChain+CSW) on BCH. While both BTC & BSV are centrally developed and managed, BCH has decentralized development with multiple implementations. Bitcoin has a long journey ahead, we are still handing out large miner rewards, we can check back in 3 more halvings by 2028 and see how things unfold.

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