There have been years for bitcoin to adapt the protocol - even in non-forking ways - to ease the transaction backlog. Those with commit access and authority have chosen not to.
I got out of it mainly for that purpose. I was interested in a universal currency, not a get rich scheme based on enticing people with the promise of the future just to use that promise as a means to pump exchange rates. Going forward, it is a perfectly serviceable crypto-gold, but it has no greater aspirations anymore.
I think there is absolutely still room in the market for a cryptocurrency that isn't a ponzie scheme that can actually function as a daily driver currency replacement, but none have become popular yet. Probably because they aren't ponzie schemes.
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of how bitcoin works by allocating responsibility to people with commit access to the bitcoin repository. It matters little if you commit a change that the 80,000 nodes that form the basis of the bitcoin network don't uninstall their existing node client software and replace it with your new version. It is this resistance to change that is the entire point of the architecture.
I was listening intently to the 1MB argument, and I'm not blaming bitcoin-core devs for trying to drive up the fee market. I would absolutely blame the ecosystem for staying on core, but the blocksize debate reflects a broader human principal than just something local to cryptocurrency. It represents change inertia. People in general resist change unless they can see immediate personal benefit from that change. The node network that dictates the bitcoin implementation on the primary block chain is interested in making money from mining, and higher fees individually only seem like greater profits.
As long as they could believe capping transaction volume and driving up fees wouldn't kill the currency or slow the appreciation in exchanges they are absolutely content with the status quo. And like I said, crypto-gold is useful. It just isn't a currency, and the way both bitcoin-core and the miner network responded to attempts to improve transaction volume reflect on the broader ideology in bitcoin itself - an ideology, like I said, I don't agree with. Not just the developers alone, but the devs and miners that both want inflation and small blocks over longer term adoption that may not translate into guaranteed profit.
Bitcoin is different than other cryptos in a fundamental way. It is inherently conservative. They resist almost any change that isn't an efficiency improvement.
The reality is that, for now, and for the foreseeable future, people are not interested in using bitcoin for over the counter purchases. I know this from personal experience as a former service provider of that specific service. It might never have a use-case that way. People say they want those things, but then don't spend their bitcoin. This is backed up but realty too : there are plenty of other cryptos with the same architecture with 10x the throughput and negligible txn fees (i.e. litecoin) and they aren't used for that. Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. Can't say. I know enough not to want to change something that works for what it is used for though.
Bingo. While there are issues with the developers and their decision making process the real issue is with the large mining conglomerates that control huge portions of the network. They have enormous influence on what changes are actually rolled out and have generally been unwilling to implement changes that will affect their profits. Google for the drama around ASICBOOST, Bitmain, and SegWit.
I completely agree, I wasn't trying to single out the bitcoin-core devs in my allegations. The core devs don't want to rock the boat because the miners would resist changes that threaten their immediate bottom lines (high fees per block minted). Its a tragedy of the commons.
Alternatively, it's a feature. The miners "are" the network, them rejecting a change is the network saying no democratically, and that was the intent of the way things were setup, this is how it's supposed to work. A change that hurts miners profits isn't good for the network because it'll reduce mining and thus reduce security of the network overall. So while a change to increase transaction volumes might be good for currency holders; holders aren't the ones providing security, miners are, and the incentives are setup this way for a reason, it keeps the network secure thus providing the value for the currency to begin with.
Err... no. Nodes define and police consensus in bitcoin, not miners. It is the fact that nodes, and not miners, not agreeing to changes that miners want that would lead to the centralization of the network into miners hands, that is the entire argument about scalability and blocksize.
> them rejecting a change is the network saying no democratically
Yes, it is the nodes rejecting change that is leading to little to no change. The nodes have overwhelmingly agreed to an upgrade, and the largest miner, bitmain, is resisting it, so there may be some truth to the assertion that miners don't want this upgrade because they perceive they will lose profit from it. The fact that the nodes are looking to 'go over bitmains head' and implement this change without the need for the largest blocking miner, that is the entire reason the 'new york agreement' was developed in the first place.
But we do agree on the core issue. The lack of the ability to easily change is a feature of the design. The incentives are slightly misaligned with the implementation of asicboost, but for the most part, they function as expected.
I think you are drinking the UASF kool-aid. A fork that is not supported by the mining power is going to get easily attacked. I guess the "economic majority" could fork and change the proof-of-work so that existing ASIC hardware is useless. However, I would argue that the fork is no longer Bitcoin and that the original POW coin would continue to be used and have value. It would be a lot worse than the ETH/ETC split.
I haven't followed the drama super close but I take the "New York Agreement" as the adults stepping into the room and saying enough with the crazy ideas. If they manage to get SegWit enabled and increase the block size for old-style transactions, I think Bitcoin will be in good shape for a while. I'm not sure it will go smooth though so I cashed out some of my BTC as a hedge.
It seems we both agree that the difficulty of changing the design is a good feature, even though it is frustrating right now due to scaling. A dictatorship is a great system of governance, as long as you can trust him to do good. Other systems are messy and frustrating.
> A fork that is not supported by the mining power is going to get easily attacked.
A chain that is attacked is easily going to shift to a different PoW that renders hundreds of millions of dollars of miner hardware obsolete. And the miners know it.
> I would argue that the fork is no longer Bitcoin
You can argue it all you like. Nodes define consensus in bitcoin, not miners.
> I haven't followed the drama super close
Clearly.
> as the adults stepping into the room and saying enough with the crazy ideas.
You mean like assuming that 80,000+ current bitcoin core reference node users are going to suddenly uninstall their node client software, and install a new unreviewed, untested node client? Because a bunch of suits got together in new york to have a pow-wow? In three months? You mean those adults?
> if they manage to get SegWit enabled
The only reason the nya is accelerating the adoption of segwit before aug 1 is because of these supposed uasf kool-aid drinkers. And isn't it kind of telling that this scalability that has been blocked by bitmain for a year is now suddenly good for everyone? Even though they've been blocking it for a year?
> it is frustrating right now due to scaling.
Take it up with bitmain. They've been blocking scalability for a year now. I'm not that concerned though. I'm happy with just the asicboost bug being fixed and no increased blocksize. Looks like I'm just going to get the blocksize anyway, and I can deal with that. But the hard-fork three months later? You can fork off onto china-coin if you want. I'll just continue using bitcoin.
Again with the kool-aid. Why does the Bitcoin protocol have a POW function and miners? Consensus is defined by the chain with the most work. If you fork and change the POW, you will not have the mining power to secure it. So, it will just be another shitty alt-coin. If you can somehow get the majority of people using Bitcoin to switch over, and somehow get enough mining power to make it secure, then you have something. Thinking that the echo chamber that is r/bitcoin represents the majority of users is laughable though. And thinking that current Bitcoin with the current POW will not continue to exist, have value, have mining power behind it is just silly.
It's strange how many of your belief structure really don't know how bitcoin works. Because if what you said was true, the miners would be able to do what they wanted anyway, wouldn't they? Well? What's stopping them? It's not the 'longest chain' it's the 'longest valid chain'. And what defines validity? The nodes, that's what. It's not like the architecture has changed.
> Satoshi from the Bitcoin white-paper chapter 12 'Conclusion' : The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
First, you have to understand what 'consensus' actually means :
> A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires processes to agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Examples of applications of consensus include whether to commit a transaction to a database (or, for example, committing blocks to a blockchain), agreeing on the identity of a leader, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts. The real world applications include clock synchronization, PageRank, opinion formation, smart power grids, state estimation, control of UAVs, load balancing and others.
Nodes are the agents in a multi-agent system enforcing consensus.
Nodes accept incoming transactions and validate them. Miners don't. Nodes replicate transactions to other nodes. Miners don't. Miners take transactions from nodes, and order them in a block, and perform a hashing function on them (the only thing they do). Miners pass the new block to the node. The node validates the transactions in the block. Miners don't. The node validates the block. Miners don't. The node replicates the block to other nodes. Miners don't.
There is only one function that miners do. They take transactions, put them in a block, and hash them. As soon as a miner produces a block that any node determines does not obey consensus rules, it is rejected. It doesn't even matter if another node has already accepted, because consensus is aligned with all nodes. Any node that replicates non-consensus blocks or transactions is itself rejected.
So nodes accept the transactions, validate the transactions, replicate the transactions, maintain the mempools, validate the blocks, replicate the blocks, serve the blockchain, and store the blockchain. Nodes even define the PoW algorithm that miners have to employ.
Nodes maintain the protocol, not miners. It is thus. It has always been thus.
> A full node is a program that fully validates transactions and blocks. Almost all full nodes also help the network by accepting transactions and blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and then relaying them to further full nodes.
You should probably question how such a fundamental misunderstanding of how bitcoin works comes about. Is there a source for your opinion?
Volatility is a sign of a lack of liquidity in a market that is rapidly gaining (or decreasing) in accumulated capital. In bitcoin, for now, it is increasing. In bitcoin the important point isn't the volatility, but the fact that it is objectively being sought after by an increasing number of people.
You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain. Etherium, for example, lets you just do fast syncs that use a fairly fixed amount of storage space.
You need a copy somewhere to have an actual blockchain, but not every node need host that chain. The major players in the economy, however, with the resources to keep around 100GB every couple years of data are incentivized to to maintain the stability of their currency network.
Because blocks are reverse-signed, you can't have a limited pool of old blocks and forge the records. Its a chain for a reason - each blocks signature is dependent on its peer blocks, and we still don't have anything close to breakable sha-256 that would compromise bitcoin.
> You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain.
You do if immutability, censorship resistance, and resistance to state capture is what you hope to achieve with your crypto.
> Etherium, for example,
If Vitalik Buterim were to be arrested for whatever, or if he were even to just have a skiing accident and die suddenly, you'd see how important that decentralization is in bitcoin. There is no single point of failure in bitcoin. That's the point.
Hey, for what it's worth, I think the tech behind ethereum is great. Most of the people who acquire it have no idea really what it is good for, but it has real potential. But as a 'store of value'? That's just one of the things that it isn't designed for.
I got out of it mainly for that purpose. I was interested in a universal currency, not a get rich scheme based on enticing people with the promise of the future just to use that promise as a means to pump exchange rates. Going forward, it is a perfectly serviceable crypto-gold, but it has no greater aspirations anymore.
I think there is absolutely still room in the market for a cryptocurrency that isn't a ponzie scheme that can actually function as a daily driver currency replacement, but none have become popular yet. Probably because they aren't ponzie schemes.