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.
Lightning protocol addresses that. You can make millions of transactions per second [1]. Quite a lot of crypto sites are already supporting it and wallet support is increasing too [2].
It's sound engineering. Like in other systems by composing layers you can achieve the advantages of each component while addressing their costs, without creating insurmountable complexity... "have your cake and eat it too".
Particularly, the central Bitcoin system is a global broadcast medium-- necessarily for its security. Global broadcast is inherently somewhat limited in its scalability (though less than some assume). Other layers effectively add "transaction switching" to Bitcoin, radically improving scalablity and performance with their own costs which are good trade-offs for their applications.
As far as the status quo of traditional finance... If you're happy with the status quo! Use it!
(I'm going to assume you don't mean the status quo of Bitcoin--because 28kb/sec isn't something only large entities can keep up with, it adds up over time-- but even cumulatively its managable)
You could recreate the status quo of centralized finance with Bitcoin, but it wouldn't be obviously better: at least systems like visa and paypal are purpose build to do what they do. Bitcoin takes on a lot of costs and tradeoffs to achieve decenteralization.
Bitcoin was created to be money that existed above and outside of the vulgarities of immediate human politics, just like how strong encryption made it effectively impossible for some sysadmin to just read your files based on some excuse.
I think having that option in the world is extraordinarily valuable.
It's laughably bad engineering to try to solve the scaling issue of the base layer by adding another layer on top. It's like you'd try to solve a throughput problem of IP by layering TCP or HTTP on top.
But this is the logic of one of the main devs who championed the "fee market" idea of Bitcoin[0], that high fees are required for Bitcoin to function. And who in 2017 celebrated when fees were around $50.[1]
2nd layer avoids bloating the ledger. Once limits of 2nd layer are being explored, you can make adjustments to 1st layer with information about how that'll improve 2nd layer throughput. This is like arguing that we shouldn't have in-memory caches, we should just have faster disks
Once limits of 1st layer are explored (the Bitcoin developers have never even bothered to research where the limits are) you can augment it with 2nd layer solutions. Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other.
Even the Lightning Network whitepaper states it needs much larger blocks, and for it to work well you need to be able to settle quickly and cheaply on-chain, which is not the case with full blocks.
Let me get this clear: You want to WAIT until it's evident that we can't scale anymore, and then add 2nd layers?
And this, you want to do after significant adoption?
So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?
> Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other.
I have no issues with developing 2nd layers, but ignoring on-chain scaling and not even looking at what can be achieved is beyond stupid.
In fact we know that moderate blocksize increases are safe (we can increase it many times before block propagation time becomes an issue for example). Yet we've thrown that out and placed our hope that 2nd layers will magically solve this for us.
> So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?
No, that's exactly what has happened to Bitcoin, and what the Bitcoin developers have been saying the last few years. It's what I'm saying is so stupid.
The Lightning Network has been "ready in 18 months" the last 4 years. And it's still not ready.
Are knobs for scaling the primary network already well understood? They are limited. Block size and block frequency. So shouldn’t we delay irreversible changes to primary layer until we understand the additional capacity and knobs of second layer solution?
The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience.
The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.
Contrary to the claims of the article the term "fee market" was introduced and promoted by Jeff Garzik-- rather than people opposing him as the article claims. (Fee market is kind of a bad term, the correct term would be blockspace market, but it actually made sense in the original usage which was about wallets paying 'fees at market rates').
> The answer is lies in the free market. Move transaction fees away from hardcoded limits, and towards something more dynamic, with economic feedback between merchants, users and miners. ... Also introduced is an anti-spam rule that avoids relaying transactions whose value is below that of the transaction fee required to send it. This rule self-adjusts over time, as the "tx fee required to send" changes over time. In a dynamic fee market, it might change a lot.
> 2010-11-19 20:55:42 <jgarzik> eventually we'll all be paying TX fees, sooner or later. and competition to get -some- fee (at lower prices) versus no fee kicks in.
> 2011-02-28 04:13:57 <jgarzik> amiller: it's inevitable that fees will be required. nobody should be assuming bitcoin transactions are / will always be free.
> 2011-03-01 20:32:21 <jgarzik> fees are inevitable
> 2011-03-10 22:14:34 <jgarzik> I think TX fees are a great feedback
system; a healthy attribute of bitcoin.
> 2011-11-07 22:43:12 <gavinandresen> Lolcust: yes, but I worry because transaction fees are broken right now-- clients and miners really need more flexibility to let fees go where the market decides, instead of us guessing what the right fees are.
> 2012-10-11 17:01:27 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I think storage and network
will be cheap enough that any non-zero fees will be interesting to
miners
> 2013-03-16 00:47:40 <gavinandresen> So: I have no idea what the right answer for fees is. We need to create a market between miners and users, and let the fees go where they belong.
> 2013-03-17 21:12:04 <jgarzik> TD: Satoshi obviously wanted fees to
support the system long term. If there is no scarcity, there are no
fees.
And people being willing to pay substantive fees to use Bitcoin is absolutely something to celebrate, Bitcoin's long term security is completely dependent on fee income. Getting a non-trivial part of the rewards from fees is a basic validation of the concept.
> 2013-03-17 21:12:44 <jgarzik> TD: The current situation, where block
subsidy dominates other incentives, clouds thinking on block size
> 2013-08-12 17:59:33 <jgarzik> auctions make me want replace-by-fee :)
> 2014-05-12 15:13:22 <gavinandresen> hearn: fee cap, meaning what? Fees need to be a market, and rise or fall based on supply and demand for block space
> 2014-08-15 12:37:53 <jgarzik> Merge this useful change, and next will come the call to remove block size limit altogether, which will throw a nuclear bomb onto any nascent fee market.
> 2014-08-15 12:38:37 <jgarzik> All the VCs and execs want an infinite
block size limit. It's a sad fixation.
> The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience.
That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.
> The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.
Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees. I'd say even better as people will stop using Bitcoin or move to other cryptocurrencies when fees grow.
Saying that the "fee market" (or "blockspace market" if you want) is supported by the white paper extremely dishonest. The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees. Zero fee transactions were on the other hand accepted from day one.
> That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.
How so? I'm fairly proud of my actions, and I'd be happy to discuss any of them with you.
> The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees.
There is nothing that actually supports that the claim that it was spam protection, thats just blind unsubstantiated assertions.
The system has anti-spam mechanisms in it all along that worked independently of the blocksize.
I think it's fairly likely that Satoshi didn't give these details a lot of thought... It's a champagne problem, and for as many things as he clearly thought through there were many others that were a little rough (e.g. like the broken original longest chain rule).
> Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees.
This is being slowly disproved in practice. Bitcoin currently pulls in $3m per month in fees. The most popular fork with no blocksize limit pools in a couple thousand dollar at most, with a substantially lower amount of fees per transaction. Even if their block was 95% full at their current rate, it wouldn't be more than a few percent of its funding from inflation (while bitcoin fees currently are as much as 25% of that altcoin's inflation).
Assuming it isn't inhibited by node resource usage, propagation centralization pressures, or other considerations it could always be increased in the future... going the other day with an ecosystem that depens on effectively zero fees would be much harder. I don't think it's an accident that analysis supporting unlimited block sizes assumes perpetual inflation instead of limited supply.
> I don't think it's an accident that analysis supporting unlimited block sizes assumes perpetual inflation instead of limited supply.
Agree, although this assumes that the free market cannot be trusted to regulate the size of the blockchain which seems possible with automatic transaction rebroadcasting. Are you familiar with the technique? Thoughts on it?
I'd be curious what you think about the approach. The basic idea is that forcing new and old transactions to compete for space on-chain pushes the blockchain into an equilibrium where data-in equals data-out. On either side of the equilibrium point block producers can increase their profits (and reduce costs) by moving towards equilibrium. So no need for a hardcap and no need for perpetual inflation.
That approach allows temporary censorship by miners to be converted into permanent coin loss (thus increasing the value of the attacker's non-censored coins). It also (by itself) doesn't produce an ongoing rate which is necessarily compatible with decenteralized operation of the network.
TCP wasn't build on IP because it wasn't scalable. It was build on it because it was.
But that aside, calling Lightning on BTC a second-layer is a bit misleading: Lightning data is not encapsulated in BTC data, more like the other way around; so Lightning is more like layer 0 and BTC layer 1 in that model. (That's also not entirely correct either but much closer)
> At the start, TCP handled both datagram transmission and routing, but as the protocol expanded, other researchers started to recommend that these two functions be split into layers.
> One of these researchers, Jonathan Postel of the University of California’s Information Sciences Institute and an editor for the Request of[sic] Comments (RFCs) which is a document series capturing the development of the Internet.
> Postel has stated:
> “We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering”
> Basically, the monolithic design of TCP would soon become inflexible and unable to scale efficiently. Therefore TCP was split into two protocols, TCP & the Internet Protocol (IP).
I'm not all too familiar with the history of IP and TCP but my point still stands. Protocols aren't build because the underlying protocol doesn't scale in term of throughput, it's for the opposite reason that they scale very well. I could also have used HTTP and TCP.
Bitcoin has very strong properties for _security_ which is the inherent property that makes it possible to build other automated trustless systems on top of it.
The comparison with TCP and IP is limit in that TCP data all goes inside IP packets. With second layer transaction systems the relationship is different: the security and stability comes from the underlying blockchain. The higher part adds capacity.
Bitcoin forms a trustworthy robotic court system upon which the wheels of automated commerce can ride.
Amusingly enough ... The rates there are, in fact, significantly slower than what plain old Bitcoin developers. Bitcoin dev's probably should make the syncing status print the number of inputs per second being processed.
But being able to barely keep up means that if you fall behind for even a moment (say, if your connection drops... or if miners get lucky and mine a bunch of extra blocks) then you will _never_ catch up. Operating anywhere near the limit of your processing rate is non-viable for that reason.
You need to be able to process many times the network's capacity so that you can catch up in a reasonable amount of time.
Sure, but OP said 2GB. A node able to process 4GB blocks would be able to sync at 2x realtime. Most people who run nodes will probably bootstrap new ones in the future anyway and most people don't need to run full nodes in the first place (the majority don't do so today and haven't since light wallets became available).
To get back to reality, I don't think any sane person has advocated for anything close to a 2GB blocksize cap at any point in the near future. Bitcoin Core uses a maximum 4MB block weight and Bitcoin Cash uses a 32MB cap currently. This cheap VPS could sync the entire Bitcoin (Core) blockchain from 2009 to present in less than 12 hours. The biggest block size cap (not full blocks, the cap) being tested seriously is 1GB. I'm sure you know all this, though.
It’s not sound engineering whatsoever, it actually is horrible engineering especially when the base layer is congested - Engineers and developers who are far more proficient than you have already chimed in on this, including Vitalik the creator of Ethereum, who also firmly supports the path to scale Bitcoin Cash is taking:
That’s not the status quo at all. You can buy a raspberry pi 4, a 1TB SSD, and have a perfectly functional bitcoin node, and lightning node and BTCPAY server all in one for close to $200.
Secondly, Lightning isn’t “additional complexity” fir bitcoin— it’s taking complexity and putting it where it belongs— at the platform layer.
TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger. Same with bitcoin. And the application layer should be kept separate from the transport layer.
On-chain scaling does not prevent that. In fact, it reduces complexity by removing the Lighting requirement.
Tangent: I would not recommend running lightning on such hardware. State is local to the node, unlike with on-chain scaling. That implies you need server-grade (read: redundant) hardware.
> TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger.
Technically larger MTUs can increase performance somewhat by reducing per-packet overheads... but the effect marginal and not that enormous with good nics and drivers.
Right, because no nic vendor was ever retarded enough to purposely cripple their product by restricting throughput to thousandths of actual potential theoretical physical capacity at the driver level like you and your toxic coterie did. In fact nobody has ever been this stupid in the entire industry period that I can think of except that coterie.
Good thing for you it's in the interests of extremely rich and powerful people to see that your sabotage is well supported, and good thing for the rest of the world you have a containment chain where your stupidity is restricted from bleeding over to the rest of them, and every single other chain appears to be completely mercifully free of your idiotic philosophy.
> I don't get your argument. Block size is limited so fees can go up to pay the miners so they have incentive to mine.
Probably because that point has nothing to do with anything, as basically every single blockchain in existence has fees that go to miners. BTC isn't the slightest bit unique in that.
> Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).
Which once again has nothing to do with the artificial useless block limit. The cryptocurrency that is most mined is the one in which mining is most profitable, the US federal reserve could launch a competitor tomorrow with a goal directly opposed to every other cryptocurrency in existence and if they paid more per SHA256 hash rate unit they would become the most mined cryptocurrency.
>> Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).
> Which once again has nothing to do with the artificial useless block limit.
It has everything to do with block limit because its whole purpose is to make each block more valuable for the miners so that a lot of hashpower competes to mine that block.
Size of mining reward and transaction fees per given amount of kb of transactions is vital thing for miners. Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block. Since transaction fees will eventually become the only reward for the miners tampering with their value would be just as frightening as tampering with the block reward (like doubling it or halving it on a whim). It would affect miners. And miners are ultimately who decide with their legs on what version of crypto to secure.
> The cryptocurrency that is most mined is the one in which mining is most profitable, the US federal reserve could launch a competitor tomorrow with a goal directly opposed to every other cryptocurrency in existence and if they paid more per SHA256 hash rate unit they would become the most mined cryptocurrency.
Sure, but if you are not federal reserve and can't invest billions of your own money in your crypto then what bitcoin does is exactly how you get to be the most mined crypto.
> It has everything to do with block limit because its whole purpose is to make each block more valuable for the miners so that a lot of hashpower competes to mine that block.
Wrong, this assumes it is the only way to make each block more valuable, it is not only not the only way, it is the most stupid way imaginable; an artificial production quota completely unhinged from underlying physical reality.
> Size of mining reward and transaction fees per given amount of kb of transactions is vital thing for miners.
Transaction fees per given data volume is less important than net profit on actual services provided, a chain that has a thousand times the capacity and a hundred times lower costs is still ten times more profitable than the competition.
> Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block.
Just as stupid as saying that increasing seats on a train decreases the ticket revenue on that train. Completely false.
> Since transaction fees will eventually become the only reward for the miners tampering with their value would be just as frightening as tampering with the block reward
Tampering with the value of transaction fees is exactly what setting an unjustified artificial production quota does. And yes, this is "frightening" to a certain extent, but if you're still around on BTC by now, nothing is going to frighten you into abandoning it because it's absolutely valueless and idiotically stupid at this point in time, propped up only by the self-admitted unbacked charade that is transparent USDT manipulations.
> It would affect miners. And miners are ultimately who decide with their legs on what version of crypto to secure.
And as a miner, we will mine whatever pays the highest immediate return on invested power, no matter how ridiculously stupid that thing appears to be to us, it still makes sense to do that and immediately sell it and pocket the difference between the nearest sensible competitor to that for those who actually accrue proper genuine working cryptocurrencies with utility or whatever other legitimate financial instrument you care to mention that isn't transparently sabotaged and utterly broken.
> Sure, but if you are not federal reserve and can't invest billions of your own money in your crypto then what bitcoin does is exactly how you get to be the most mined crypto.
On the contrary; if you are the federal reserve, or that clique of financial manipulators (see AXA investment in Blockstream), and you're desperate to protect your collapsing imaginary financial system from genuine auditable competition, taking control of BTC and ploughing money into an avenue anybody with an ounce of sense could tell immediately was a dead end just from the specifications of the chain is how you get to be the most mined crypto whilst maintaining plausible deniability that you're meddling in the process at all.
>> Size of mining reward and transaction fees per given amount of kb of transactions is vital thing for miners.
> Transaction fees per given data volume is less important than net profit on actual services provided, a chain that has a thousand times the capacity and a hundred times lower costs is still ten times more profitable than the competition.
That's true but you it's not guaranteed that you'd get 1000 times more transactions when you increase capacity 100 times. It's a gamble and if bitcoin did that it would get unpredictable result but show miners that it is willing to gamble with their profitability.
>> Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block.
>Just as stupid as saying that increasing seats on a train decreases the ticket revenue on that train. Completely false.
Increasing number of seats might cause the train to be partially empty and if this one isn't the next one might be. Since people get tickets on auction then non-full trains bring no revenue because tickets for them cost zero. So it might be not sufficiently attractive to participate in the burden of sending more trains.
When there were ton of transactions fees skyrocketed but in weeks they went back to normal and tx fees revenue for miners dropped. Tx fees dropping to too low value in times where they are main income source for miners might be what kills bitcoin. Same way that low traffic might kill a train line if trains are running mostly empty and tickets don't have fixed price and their are auctioned instead.
Again. Bitcoin is built and governed for survivability first. You can do it differently with other cryptos. You can even fork bitcoin. People did. Miners voted with their legs on which solution they prefer. It's really miners that decide everything.
I don't get where you were going with federal reserve tangent. I'm just getting a vibe that you overestimate politics and underestimate economy.
> That's true but you it's not guaranteed that you'd get 1000 times more transactions when you increase capacity 100 times. It's a gamble and if bitcoin did that it would get unpredictable result but show miners that it is willing to gamble with their profitability.
This argument is stupid both because it justifies restricting the chain throughput even further to whatever arbitrary number you like above zero and assumes it's always an unalloyed positive because the artificial scarcity should always drive up the price, and because it is completely ignorant of the fact that failing to raise the limit as originally planned has already resulted in 50+ USD transaction fees as an actual result, followed by a mass abandonment of the BTC chain relative to the volume at the time, followed by an uptake of competitive chains.
All existing empirical evidence makes a complete mockery of it, as if it weren't enough from an economic perspective to actually be trying to justify an artificial production quota forcibly imposed from a central committee up front.
> Increasing number of seats might cause the train to be partially empty and if this one isn't the next one might be
And yet still the promotion of artificial scarcity in volume businesses is seen as idiotic, which it is. Perhaps your assumptions are wrong and capacity planning actually aims to serve estimated demand in every other field except the BTC one.
> Since people get tickets on auction then non-full trains bring no revenue because tickets for them cost zero.
This is false, tx fees on non full blocks on chains that aren't sabotaged like BTC are still not zero, and there's no arbitrary limit on what they might be. Suggestions have even been made that the tx fees should be set by a second lowest bid auction where all transactions above the second lowest fee are accepted and that is set as the net as both the most customer and revenue friendly option in BCH for example.
> When there were ton of transactions fees skyrocketed but in weeks they went back to normal and tx fees revenue for miners dropped.
Which is to say a business failed utterly to scale and was largely abandoned by its customers, with the knock on effects on the share price of that business, yes. This is not by any measure a success, and only a complete moron like Greg Maxwell would "pop champaign" (sic) over the event.
> Tx fees dropping to too low value in times where they are main income source for miners might be what kills bitcoin.
This doesn't make even theoretical sense, if the miners don't want to mine blocks at a given revenue level, it is up to the customers to raise their tx fee bids in order to ensure the flow of blocks, and it doesn't matter what the block limit is in question for that to be the case, no matter how high or low it is, it's still true.
> Same way that low traffic might kill a train line if trains are running mostly empty and tickets don't have fixed price and their are auctioned instead.
And this is even more idiotic, low traffic might indeed kill a train line, setting auctions on the tickets that exist in order to save it absent demand isn't a solution, it's a ploy of abject desperation guaranteed to fail, which is why nobody else in the history of time perhaps has ever been that stupid.
> Again. Bitcoin is built and governed for survivability first.
BTC is built and governed to be hamstrung and useless, and the post-hoc narrative after changes that implement that hamstringing will be whatever idiots suck up and accept. By and large actual usage moves on because customers don't care about unconvincing and frankly idiotic justifications for obviously stupid moves. And that's exactly what we actually see in reality on this question.
> You can do it differently with other cryptos.
And every single other crypto in existence agrees that it is in fact stupid to do it the BTC way and does indeed do it differently. Which is supposed to be "just some weird coincidence" or everyone else in the world being wrong and the core coterie being inexplicably right.
> You can even fork bitcoin. People did.
As well they should, since BTC is useless and sabotaged.
> Miners voted with their legs on which solution they prefer. It's really miners that decide everything.
Wrong, miners mine what is most profitable, not what solution they prefer, and according to the core coterie, miners decide absolutely nothing, in fact your idol gmaxwell has literally said that if miners disagree with the way that the core council runs bitcoin that they should be fired. In response, miners have demonstrated that they don't give a damn if BTC dies completely and will happily mine whatever else is more profitable than it as a result. The fact that the BTC faithful aren't concerned about this despite the slow adjustment of the BTC DAA is just another indication of just how stupid said faithful actually are, as it's an obvious existential risk to the chain.
> I don't get where you were going with federal reserve tangent. I'm just getting a vibe that you overestimate politics and underestimate economy.
This, like every other point you made, is wrong, but since you admit you don't even understand the point I'm not going to bother discussing it. What "vibe" you get from admitted ignorance on a subject isn't worth addressing.
I wrote down my understanding of bitcoin and influence of the block size as a train analogy. Here it is for you to make fun of:
Imagine there’s a train line.
Trains go at regular intervals and have fixed number of seats.
Operator of the train line gradually issues unfalsifiable coins which there will eventually be specific number of and not one more. You can carry any amount of coins while you ride the train. People started to find them valuable so you can buy them before departure and sell on arrival.
Tickets for the train are auctioned for coins. Only the people who bid most can ride the next train. You can even bid 0 coins and get on the next train for free if not enough people outbid you.
Making train go is the cheap and easy part. What’s expensive is securing it from robbers that could disrupt the service and tank the value of the coins. Operator outsources this task to Miners&co. They make the train secure proportionally to the amount of real money they spend. To compensate them operator pays them with freshly minted coins for securing each train. Since operator intends to emit a predetermined number of coins in total it has to periodically lower Miners&co reward for each train secured.
There’s a risk that the price of the coins won’t grow fast enough and securing trains will get less and less profitable for Miners&co and they will secure trains less and less until train line falls victim to the robbers.
To create a second source of income for Miners&co operator gives them the fees that people bid to be on the next train. Operator is not sure if it will suffice but that’s the best he could come up with.
There’s a surge in coin price and people start to ride trains like mad to sell their coins at places where there are buyers. People outbid themselves to be on the next train to the point that travel becomes uneconomical for casual travelers. Some of the travelers say: “Make the trains larger so we can all fit in for cheap”. Operator could do that at no cost, because running trains of any size is the cheap and easy part.
If the operator decides to make the trains larger he is lowering the amount of coins that people will have to pay to travel and thus lowers income of Miners&co and thus lower the incentive to maintain high security of the trains. Incentive that the operator already wasn’t sure was sufficient to keep Miners&co interested forever. Operator would be taking away profitability from Miners&co and make them worry that he could just take away more of their profitability in the future on a whim. What’s next? Even less fees? Maybe no base reward for securing trains? Maybe fixed or increasing reward that makes coins not scarce anymore and thus less valuable in terms of real money?
If the operator decides to not make the trains larger, he makes the casual travellers that like to travel often with a small amount of coins unhappy, to the point of using other trains and coins altogether. But the operator keeps Miners&co profitable and communicate to them that he doesn’t intend to change any core rules in a way that negatively affects their profitability
Travellers say, if the operator makes the trains larger, and as a result makes travel faster and fees lower then more people will travel and coin will become more valuable offsetting any loss of profitability that Miners&co suffers as a result of larger trains.
But the operator knows that what makes his coins valuable is not that his trains are fast, or large or cheap or used often. What makes coins valuable is that they are in strictly limited supply and that the trains will operate forever secured strongly enough to never get disrupted by robbers. So the operator chooses not to make trains larger because Miners&co profitability and trust must be considered before anything else because security they provide is one of the two necessary things for the coins to be valuable.
Some people are very upset and they make their own train line and coins (which they give to people that own operators coins). Miners&co prefers to secure operators trains more and the new larger ones less. Price of operators coins doesn’t suffer and follows usual curves it previously followed around moments of high interest. Operator can infer from that that he chose correctly.
Will the operator be able to keep trains running safely forever? Nobody knows, because outside of well modeled problems, nobody knows what the future will be. And this train line is the first of its kind. I you think it’s doomed you are free to ride any other. There are so many now that do various things differently. Choose wisely because many of them already died abandoned by Miners&co.
> I wrote down my understanding of bitcoin and influence of the block size as a train analogy. Here it is for you to make fun of:
You and people like you think I am making fun of you because you are flatly wrong about so many things in the space, and seem to have no idea that you have been conned. I'm not making fun of you at all, I'm pointing out the ways in which you are wrong.
> You can even bid 0 coins and get on the next train for free if not enough people outbid you.
Wrong, you can have an empty block with bids in the mempool below the threshold which miners are willing to incorporate, and they still don't get into the block. You don't magically get into the block on a zero bid just because it's not full.
> Making train go is the cheap and easy part. What’s expensive is securing it from robbers that could disrupt the service and tank the value of the coins.
Wrong, on the security front we have proof of work output in the ~800k USD equivalent every hour range, on the actual functionality front, the primary chain has been sabotaged to be so dysfunctional it barely matches a fax machine in raw throughput, this is equivalent to a depleted uranium armoured rail car with a convoy of tanks as an escort, but it's only 5x5 inches and it runs on a mousewheel. Other node software not subject to the BTC sabotage runs enormously better, things like flowee the hub getting up into tens of thousands of validated transactions per second on commodity hardware, but they're so poorly adopted as to be basically unknown. In terms of deployed infrastructure, we're stuck with the 5x5 mousewheel pushcarts because of the BTC sabotage.
> Since operator intends to emit a predetermined number of coins in total it has to periodically lower Miners&co reward for each train secured.
Wrong once again, there's no "has to" about it, the emission schedule could have been a completely linear flat rate. It was chosen to be a steeply declining curve to bomb the project if it turns out not to actually be a useful service for which people are actually willing to pay, that is, uptake and increased usage is intended to make up for the lost value of the decreasing block reward. The steeply declining curve ensures that the interests of all the maintainers of the Bitcoin network are aligned, as only an insane fool would ever try and actually sabotage the network to be dysfunctional knowing that this would be the inevitable fate if they did.
The BTC sabotage turns this on its head and assumes that instead scaling should be crippled on purpose, and an artificial limit should be forcibly imposed in order that the supply quota can hopefully address the diminishing block reward over time.
This, like basically everything else in BTC, is extremely, indescribably stupid. The inevitable fate remains the inevitable fate for the aforementioned stupidity.
> There’s a risk that the price of the coins won’t grow fast enough and securing trains will get less and less profitable for Miners&co and they will secure trains less and less until train line falls victim to the robbers.
Wrong, because the price of coins is not the only variable that dictates how much security is invested into each block. BTC simply attempts to force it to be so for no good reason and this is transparent sabotage.
> Operator could do that at no cost, because running trains of any size is the cheap and easy part.
Wrong. Operator alone does not get to choose to do that period, a block limit of x does not imply a block floor of x, miners can and do still choose to emit blocks significantly below the block ceiling.
The entire rest of your analogy collapses because it based upon these incorrect assumptions.
> ... it justifies restricting the chain throughput even further ...
Yes. There might come a time when block reward is miniscule, volume of transactions is too low to support mining at reasonable level, and the only way to incetivize the miners will be to reduce block size.
> already resulted in 50+ USD transaction fees as an actual result
Briefly. And 50$ is not an unreasonable fee if you are transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars in value to sell it at the peak.
> followed by a mass abandonment of the BTC chain relative to the volume at the time, followed by an uptake of competitive chains
Which is completely fine because small fraction of bitcoin value comes from it being transferred. Bulk comes from it being scarce and secure which limited block size helps to ensure.
> This doesn't make even theoretical sense, if the miners don't want to mine blocks at a given revenue level, it is up to the customers to raise their tx fee bids in order to ensure the flow of blocks
Single miner can ensure flow of the blocks once difficulty adjusts. Bitcoins doesn't die because it stops transferring. Bitcoin dies when so many miners leave it to make double spend attack trivial.
There's no reason for any bitcoin user to give any transaction fee if all transactions fit in the next block. Even if all but one miner leave bitcoin.
> low traffic might indeed kill a train line, setting auctions on the tickets that exist in order to save it absent demand isn't a solution
You misunderstood. I'm not saying that auctioning tickets is supposed to save train line dying to low traffic. What I was saying is that train lines can die to low traffic even more likely if tickets don't have fixed price but they are auctioned instead (like bitcoin tx fees).
> Suggestions have even been made that the tx fees should be set by a second lowest bid auction where all transactions above the second lowest fee are accepted and that is set as the net as both the most customer and revenue friendly option in BCH for example.
From what I'm getting, you don't only want to increase block size but also change how should fees work.
Maybe you should focus your advocacy efforts on other crypto that's closer to your liking because you don't seem to like anything about bitcoin except for the name and perhaps popularity that it managed to accumulate from the ground up and hold without your enlightened guidance.
> Wrong, miners mine what is most profitable, not what solution they prefer
They prefer the solution that is most profitable for them. Or are you saying that they cry all the way to the bank?
> ... your idol gmaxwell ...
I have no idea who that is.
I'm speaking purely from what I know about how bitcoin works and what I think makes it successful. I'm not familiar with other peoples opinions on the subject let alone which specific people hold which specific opinions.
> gmaxwell has literally said that if miners disagree with the way that the core council runs bitcoin that they should be fired
Not sure if you can fire someone you never hired and have no relationship with. But in a sense yes. If you don't like what bitcoin is you are free to mine something else. But statistically you will want to mine bitcoin because it's built to be most profitable for you.
> they don't give a damn if BTC dies completely
Can you show me some data that indicates that bitcoin is close to dying?
Also, why do you give so much of a damn if BTC dies or not? There are so many cryptos. You can jump ship at any time. Why are you so attached to bitcoin?
General remark: When I think something is stupid, innane, idiotic, moronic and useless that's usually for me an indication that I don't quite understand the thing or at least the reasons why a lot of seemingly reasonable people pursue it and I should learn more.
> What "vibe" you get from admitted ignorance on a subject isn't worth addressing.
Do you admit ignorance often? Because it is a declaration of openness to information and it usually prompts people that have some point worth communicating to clarify it. If you do not admit ignorance you are missing out on a lot.
> Yes. There might come a time when block reward..
And if artificial scarcity to increase miner revenue is not only not objectionable but desirable as well as entirely effective, there is no reason that this should not be done repeatedly, and right now.
Of course, that's not actually true, and that's why it's not happening. The argument is invalid.
> Briefly. And 50$ is not an unreasonable fee
In a competitive free market, any fee is an unreasonable fee if it's imposed ignorant of the fact that you are in a competitive free market that doesn't impose the artificial scarcity promoting production quotas your inefficient operation does. This describes the state of every other blockchain absent the sabotaged and useless BTC chain.
> Which is completely fine because small fraction of bitcoin value comes from it being transferred. Bulk comes from it being scarce and secure
A pile of dogshit from a particular dog now deceased close to the reactor
meltdown site in Chernobyl is both scarce and secure, it is also completely valueless because it has no utility and even as fertiliser there is a universe of potential substitute goods available. BTC has no value beyond stupid people heavily invested in it unaware they have been flatly conned and not understanding how any of this works or what the original plans actually were. The end result of that is obvious.
> Single miner can ensure flow of the blocks once difficulty adjusts
Which will never happen if the rate of the departure of hashing power exceeds the rate at which the chain proceeds towards the next DAA interval. That rate is not even 8% per day. The chain will be destroyed entirely if hashing power departs faster than that, and the only way to "fix it" will be a hard fork, which BTC morons have been propagandised to believe is dangerously fatal, and thus as a final fate for BTC it can't be ruled out.
> There's no reason for any bitcoin user to give any transaction fee if all transactions fit in the next block.
Flatly wrong no matter how many times you repeat it, because miners choose which transactions go in the block and their choice is not contingent solely upon available block space.
> From what I'm getting, you don't only want to increase block size but also change how should fees work.
I don't care at all what BTC does, I consider it a useless lost cause at this stage and have no opinion of it beyond that. My point was many other chains are looking at many other alternatives to ensure that their chain is the one that ends up with the most economically optimal usage of hashpower, and I cited an example of that as something I had heard come up in discussions for BCH.
> Maybe you should focus your advocacy efforts on other crypto that's closer to your liking because you don't seem to like anything about bitcoin except for the name and perhaps popularity that it managed to accumulate from the ground up and hold without your enlightened guidance.
I was a Bitcoin maximalist from the very beginning, largely ignored every single other coin in existence, and frankly when Mike Hearn left his description of the situation and the suggestion that the chain would actually refuse to scale in the future even when the demand was clearly there was so puzzling to me I flatly refused to even believe it until the 2017 BCH split actually happened and everything unfolded exactly as he had said.
You and those like you don't seem to grasp just how utterly idiotic what has been done in BTC actually is. It is so foolish, and the justifications for the behaviour so hamfisted and constantly shifting, that the only reasonable conclusion to explain it is outright sabotage.
And I do focus my advocacy efforts solely on other crypto, and warn people in as strong terms as I am able since the BCH fork that BTC has been outright sabotaged to uselessness and is very likely doomed.
> They prefer the solution that is most profitable for them. Or are you saying that they cry all the way to the bank?
Every miner who I've spoken to about the situation who actually understands what happened is indeed very concerned for the long term health of the ecosystem given the equilibrium which the BTC sabotage has resulted in. Not a single one of them ever intended for this idiocy to actually take hold, and yes, we're all just trying to make the best out of an insanely bad situation. If you want to call that "crying all the way to the bank" go right ahead.
> I have no idea who that is.
The person largely responsible for the sabotage in question, and from whom the flatly wrong arguments you are attempting to throw around actually originated.
> But statistically you will want to mine bitcoin because it's built to be most profitable for you.
Until it's not, and then you will very happily see it destroyed and be relieved this insane episode is over and done with.
> Can you show me some data that indicates that bitcoin is close to dying?
Everything we've discussed so far.
> Also, why do you give so much of a damn if BTC dies or not?
Because all fatally stupid ideas should die, and the more fatally stupid, the more so this is. BTC is about the most fatally stupid architecture I have ever heard of in my entire life, and its continued existence is an affront to sensibility.
> here are so many cryptos. You can jump ship at any time. Why are you so attached to bitcoin?
I jumped ship to actual Bitcoin BCH back in 2017 already. I'm not attached to BTC at all, I only want it to die.
> General remark: When I think something is stupid, innane, idiotic, moronic and useless that's usually for me an indication that I don't quite understand the thing or at least the reasons why a lot of seemingly reasonable people pursue it and I should learn more
Great, follow your own logic and stop bothering me, go watch Jersey Shore re-runs, a lot of seemingly reasonable people pursue that as well as a raft of other things I'm equally confident as marking out as absolutely without value. In the meantime, I'll be happy with the observation of many decades of experience in the technology industry which tells me what the BTC chain doing is in fact utterly idiotic, completely unjustified as a point of fact, and it has indeed been the victim of a well financed external sabotage attack.
> Do you admit ignorance often?
I admit ignorance whenever I know that I am ignorant of something, or when I find out post-hoc that I was previously ignorant of something. This doesn't apply in this case, it is you and the people like you who are so clearly and flatly wrong, and it is extremely easy to in detail dismantle your position and explain precisely why.
I'd like to comment here just to say that you're my hero.
Signed,
Another Bitcoin early adopter who became totally disillusioned with the BTC/Bitcoin Core project due to precisely the BS you've highlighted in this thread
I can answer part of that question. You can't make it much more frequent because the amount of time for the difficulty has to be balanced against propagation time for blocks or else you will have lots of forks. Probably you can make it work, but there are a fair number of assumptions in the Bitcoin protocol about this and it would probably be better to start a new coin if you want to do that. The 10 minute update was chosen specifically to avoid common network partition events.
As for block size, it's been ages since I looked into this stuff at all (and I've only ever watched out of the corner of my eye), but my impression is that the block size is currently limited for relatively arbitrary reasons. I don't think there is actually a lot of resistance to increasing the size sometime. It's just that the developers want to limit the size now to guide development in certain ways.
And really, as far as I'm concerned that's totally fair. If you don't like it, fork the coin. Or start a new one. Or stick with Bitcash. The developers are in control because that's the whole point -- to guide development in the way that they think will work best. Not everybody is going to agree. So what?
I think the only reason people get upset is because of the ludicrous amount of potential money on the line. And again: if you are controlling that ludicrous amount of potential money, you are able to vote with your feet -- to the extent that you can convince other people with ludicrous amounts of potential money to follow suit. If all that insane speculation and fraud were to vacate Bitcoin, the developers could happily code away and there would be nobody left to complain.
Let's face it. If we believe that there are billions of dollars tied up in BTC, the owners of that coin could easily afford to hire programmers to fork the protocol. They don't do it because the politics of doing so is essentially impossible. Most people want to stick with the dev group. Again, I'm left with saying, so what?
> You can't make it much more frequent because the amount of time for the difficulty has to be balanced against propagation time for blocks or else you will have lots of forks.
The same problem also limits block size, since large blocks take longer to propagate.
But that's why Ethereum went with GHOST, which was originally proposed for Bitcoin. Instead of choosing the block with the most hashpower behind it, you choose the block with the most hashpower in the entire tree after it, so that forks contribute to a block's security. The original paper calculated that this allowed both faster blocks and higher throughput, and it's the reason Ethereum has 15-second blocks.
> non-conflicting transactions of blocks outside the main chain are included in the ledger
I am pretty sure that isn't true. I'm looking at the code, and the only thing I see included for 'uncles' is the header. This has the beneficial property that higher orphan rates increase difficulty which should lower orphan rates.
OTOH, it doesn't appear that including other people's orphans is incentive compatible without the rest of ghost (because it lowers your own future income).
"a version of" -- there is no close in cryptography. :) Security analysis usually do not apply well to approximations.
Indeed; the market has clearly chosen to prefer optimizing for low cost of full system validation (running a full node) over lost cost of transacting (cheap block space.)
Lightning also requires funds recipients to monitor their channels continuously, to make sure they're not closed early with obsolete balances. At least you can pay someone to do that for you.
Hardly, because building LN on the 1MB base layer is like building a pyramid upside down, it's unstable and creates more problems than it was meant to solve.
Lightning was supposed to make tx fees low right? Well it technically has, but it also introduced the following problems that Bitcoin never had:
- LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.
- If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.
- In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. Well when Bitcoin fees hit $3 a few months ago, 60% of the Lightning network capacity was locked up in miner fees lol... defeating the purpose of microtransactions and the LN network
- In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. In addition to stealing your LN private keys, a bad user can attempt to steal your funds when you're offline. Which is why LN requires a 3rd party service called Watchtowers to watch over your funds. Way more complicated than Bitcoin
- The unsolvable routing problem. A good chunk of LN transactions will fail simply because the routing is weighted and chanes constantly. Compare that to Bitcoin's gossip network which doesn't require any weighted routing. FYI weighted routing is currently a mathematically unsolved problem.
- LN is centralizing around LNbig.com At one point LNBig.com had over 70% of the entire LN network capacity. LN will continue to centralize around these big hubs, because they can offer cheap connections and low fees than a regular peer can. Welcome to Bank of America LN Hub TM.
- With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.
- Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved. Like the race condition when a big hub closes and hundreds of users all attempt to race to transmit their transaction to miners.
- In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion... And Blockstream blocked a minor 2MB increase. So good luck.
So congrats to Lightning, for "solving" 1 problem and creating 12 new ones.
There's many more, but these are the ones easily digestable by users without going into the deeper technical problems with LN. There's a reason Lightning is always 18 months away from completion....for 5.5 years now. While Bitcoin Cash just works.
> - Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin
[citation needed]
The initial presentation of the paper was titled "SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Scaling Bitcoin to Billions of Transactions Per Day". If we didn't mean it to help scaling, what was it meant to be?
[note: am one of the authors]
> LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.
Correct, but this is clearly stated in its whitepaper and is one of the tradeoffs to get massively more txs and privacy.
> If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.
Correct, but you can also move those funds to other channels you have already opened. Also, loop-in and loop-out are coming. Also, receiving multiple bitcoin transactions on a single UTXO is a privacy hit for all involved.
> In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. (...)
You need to if you don't plan to aggregate your settlement and opening txs, or aggregate those transactions with others. All if that tech is still coming.
> In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. (...)
This is your first statement rewritten. I will not address it again.
> The unsolvable routing problem. (...)
And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.
> LN is centralizing around LNbig.com (...)
Like bitcoin was centralizing around Satoshi's mining farm in the first year of Bitcoin? LN is at infancy stage, and has a hard cap on what amount of BTC you can open a channel with.
> With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.
Besides the fact that bitcoin will still be there, all of these points are explained as part of the network. I don't understand why you are harping about these sorts of issues when the whitepaper or easily found literature about LN clearly state these issues. Also; don't forget that LN doesn't have to be the only second layer on Bitcoin. I can imagine banks building a second layer walled garden with the feature of settling onchain. Heck, this could be made in less than a year, and would basically give every user in the world the option to buy bitcoin. They would however need to have the right volume of BTC available, so it would be utterly devastating to those vested in fiat (which is why they aren't doing it yet).
> Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publicly stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved.
Drya is, to my knowledge still very positive on LN, don't know about Poon though.
> In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion (...)
With the then current code, and the then current block size. Block size has increased with Segwit. Taproot will further increase capacity. Channel factories are a thing thought of after publishing the white paper, etc.
> While Bitcoin Cash just works.
Bitcoin Cash works. I agree. It's miners will keep raising the block size and spammers will keep filling those blocks to make the ghost towm seem inhabited. Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online. After that, it will centralize to a small set of players that will be able to change the consensus rules to their wish. Is that the decentralized peer-to-peer money you wanted? This attack vector is a considerably more important threat than reduced adoption will ever be.
> And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.
Oh that's funny. While you're right that payments failing for not finding a route is a big problem, it's not even the real problem with routing.
The problem is for LN to function at scale, it have to centralize around a few big hubs. Because otherwise routing is impossible, and transactions will fail.
Decentralized routing is an intractable problem, and LN have to choose between centralization and scaling.
Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.
Definitely not true.
As I previously mentioned in this thread, lightning has over $6 billion USD in liquidity, nearly 11,000 nodes and tens of thousands of transactions every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980404
Those stats are either false, or are actually evidence that the network is tiny. Tens of thousands of transactions per day means it's not even doing a single transaction per second, which is miniscule.
According to a recent study, the privacy properties of the lighting Network are weak.
The problem with lightning privacy is that to get good privacy you need more than about 2 hops. The problem is that every hop locks up money equal to the amount transferred: increasing the cost of the transaction.
The study also finds that the LN is currently subsidized, and based on the capital costs alone, fees should be comparable to on-chain (BTC) transactions. BCH transactions are currently subsidized as well, but not to the same extent (I estimate 3cents/kB would pay for processing and storage).
> Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online.
Why do you assume BTC/LN will improve scalability properties but not BCH? On-chain capacity can be optimized over time without increasing the average cost for running a node.
Ha! Another empty prediction that we'll happily call you out on once it expires. Remember when you predicted that Bitcoin would completely cease to exist by the end of 2019? https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1211707215620530176
> Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.
The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.
The creator actually suggested that it could scale fine if they increased the block size and mentioned future miner farms in 2010.
However, it would make sense that exchanges and credit-card-like institutions would want to keep bitcoin unscalable for the foreseeable future and stall scalable development.
Hal Finney, one of the main developers of PGP and Bitcoin's first user wrote in 2010:
> I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as... well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.
That sort of view was well known and understood by others in early 2011 when (now former) Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen had recently started he wrote of the future:
> I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks (I have no idea what their transaction clearing/processing networks look like or how they work).
Or, look at other discussions early in Bitcoin's life-- and instead of quoting myself from back then, I'll show that these views were broadly understood:
> 2010-12-09 02:14:28 <gavinandresen> jgarzik: that seems like a bad idea; I have a niggling feeling in the back of my head that the optimal bitcoin-like system would have even smaller blocks/transactions than current bitcoin....
> 2011-07-15 03:42:22 <jgarzik> moa7: it is presumed by many that a future bitcoin (if successful) will involve a secondary layer that can handle higher volumes, microtransactions, etc.
> 2012-09-09 20:00:32 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I am against changing block size, FWIW. I think the market will properly intervene, bitcoin will reach a steady state where all blocks are 1MB, and the best bidding gets block placement. SatoshiDICE and other data apps automatically
solve themselves, once 1MB is normal.
> 2012-09-09 20:00:48 <jgarzik> I think I will be overruled, but that is my position.
> 2012-09-09 20:03:24 <jgarzik> bitcoin exists _because_ of certain constrained limits. money creation is one of them. block space is another.
> 2012-09-09 20:03:35 <jgarzik> that is a fundamental constraint; messing with it massively changes the economics
There are plenty of tough trade-offs in Bitcoin and reasonable people can have no end of a disagreement about them. But these discussions, mostly from before any credit card company ever heard of Bitcoin-- show that a nuanced understanding existed all along.
Disagree if you like, but the conspiracy theories are an insult to everyone's intelligence borne out of a malicious and dishonest rewriting of Bitcoin's history pushed on by court decreed fraudsters like Craig Wright. You have plenty of alternatives-- if they're better then they should stand on their own without the abuse and deceptive FUD.
> Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.
He was talking about people like you. He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit. Stop trying to twist his words.
Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise. At least here I won't get censored by theymos like on r\bitcoin and bitcointalk.
> He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit.
I don't know about 'centerally planned' but he hardcoded a limit into the consensus rules.
> Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise.
That's the point. And I a pointing out that they said all these things in 2010-2014-- as you can see some of the quotes (esp from Jeff) are quite emphatic. I could quote a lot more.
The narrative a lot of people are transmitting about Bitcoin is untrue, and by showing the diversity of these views going WAY back from people who later tried to push through changes I think makes that point pretty well.
He "hardcoded" a spam protection measure at a time when it was legitimately expected an attacker would spend a few dollars and clog up the blockchain significantly.
This was always intended as a temporary measure and it was understood by the community at large that the limit would be removed as soon as it started hindering adoption. As an example, see this reddit thread of mine 86% upvoted: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35hpkt/please_remi...
As history will remember, what happened then is that you decided you had missed out on the boat and you started raising money for your stupid little layer 2 solution while censoring everyone suggesting it had to coexist with a bigger block size.
I'm not going to mince words, you are the reason Bitcoin is a speculative scam instead of a real payments revolution as it was intended to be. It had one chance and thanks to you and your cronies the only people benefiting from it are the ones liquidating noobs on bitmex.
The counter argument to this is that the white paper refers to Bitcoin as “a peer to peer electronic cash system.” If high fees force users to centralized, custodial second layers, then it ceases to operate as peer to peer cash. It becomes Venmo.
It might be prudent to note that "cash" has meaning in the context of electronic payment research, going all the way back to DigiCash in the 90s. That system required a trusted third party to operate, but it was still cash in the sense that it is a transfer of value, not debt. The way most payment systems operate is that they are settled at a later date (in some cash equivalent). In that sense, credit card payments as well as Venmo are layer 2 solutions.
Bitcoin has decentralized non-custodial second layers.
But if they didn't-- which would be sad-- your logic doesn't follow: Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used?
Venmo is venmo. Venmo adoption Bitcoin as a currency on their platform would not turn Bitcoin into venmo. It would just create another option for using Bitcoin-- one with it's own positive and negative trade-offs.
There is a balance. The system is not very valuable at the extremes of resource usage or limited capacity, like many other systems.
> Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used?
It would be very easy to argue that it would not be if the present mechanics of the cash system were restricted to a maximum global throughput of 3 transactions a second. But no other monetary system would actually pursue such an asinine goal on purpose except as a means of sabotage.
Don't worry Greg, we will get to you in due time. It's always interesting how you love to cherry pick and take things out of context. Then this was always your motive.
The reference you like to quote about my wanting to limit the size of the blockchain is of course completely out of context. The creation of overlay networks allows bitcoin to act as a single reference source while also having different quorum systems that act independently. You will note that I did not say I would get increasingly piratical regarding the block size. Rather, I note in December 2010 just before I left the public development of bitcoin fact that users of bitcoin were getting rather tyrannical. I do understand that you failed to complete your education, but to help increase your erudition, this is a reference to others seeking to objectively restrict something that should not be restricted in the way that you're proposing.
Eric Vorhees, Garzik and others like you wanted a system that could not be controlled. Unfortunately for you, you chose a project, bitcoin, that is highly resistant as it scales to your type of shenanigans.
Yes, I do understand that having a system outside of government control helps with your side projects such as selling malware, ransomware and other projects that have are generally tainted feel. However, you will find that bitcoin isn't good for this.
I do wonder if you pointed out to anyone that the entire purpose of having a Merkel tree is scaling. In fact, if you take the basic structure of bitcoin and limited to 1 MB blocks, the entire need for a Merkel tree is obfuscated. Where you have limited numbers of transactions, a simple index would do. But then, you are not seeking to educate people about bitcoin are you...
Unfortunately for you, lots of things have been happening in the background. You never understood a single percent of what bitcoin was about. I don't blame you for this, I don't think you're smart enough to understand why I created bitcoin or even the origins of any of the parts or components. You're a great troll. You're also a useful idiot. In separating out the fools you have allowed me to finally manage to take bitcoin to where it needed to be. It was never EGold or any of the other anarchist systems that you wished to create.
Did you forget that I said the protocol was set in stone? No, I don't think you did. But then, you have a habit of taking things out of context, twisting them, outright lying. The problem you seem to not understand is that you haven't stopped anything. The time you figure it out I will have a patent on everything needed to scale blockchains. Then again, you will bitch and complain and say it's not fair. But a public yet but we have it a target of 1,000 patents (in total) this month and the pipeline will take me to 2,500 papers this year.
It is a real shame, well not really, that you're going to have to watch is all you have tried to corrupt falls apart around you this year. Have a nice life Greg, I wonder what rock you're going to crawl under next time ?
You might be asking a bit much of him, this technology stuff isn't super easy for everyone.
In two easy steps:
$ ./bitcoin-cli signmessage 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB "Digital signatures are to scammers as garlic is to vampires. I am hn user nullc, but you are not Bitcoin's creator."
$ ./bitcoin-cli verifymessage 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB "HJ0VgbIY9BAud6MiZ4Qh0KSwhmA7gwkFm07tjPJeHsYNcj5oIAVlVR2JnKTF7EjqTWEaD9QbAPzk8QII8QJxW4s=" "Digital signatures are to scammers as garlic is to vampires. I am hn user nullc, but you are not Bitcoin's creator."
No, Satoshi is enjoying privacy right now. But everyone claiming to be Satoshi isn't looking for privacy. If they want to convince tech audiences, proving their claims is the easiest way forward.
DrCraigWright has had his account blocked, he states (Why!?), so he asks this to be posted:
---
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.
that you want to use the _Dread Pirate Roberts_ defense - I was only just handed these keys... But that will never be. It does not matter at all what you say. You shall learn just how far gone you are this year and just how many people see you as the fool.
Enjoy failure... It has been your life and it shall remain so.
You suffer from the misapprehension that your opinion matters. I'm sorry it doesn't. HN does little for the real-world contrary to what many in Silicon Valley culture seem to think.
A large reason for the creation of bitcoin stems from the promise of micropayments. Therefore Google and Facebook collapsed into the shit show that they are, they couldn't solve it. Your belief is not needed nor warranted. I'm not seeking money or investment from you and nor do I really care about you or even know you. We have companies coming to use my technology, and I'm not talking about ICO pumpers or other scammers seeking to replicate the frauds of the 90s. I'm also not talking about the bucket shops that pose as pink sheet scam markets under a new name.
We have companies such as Nike now getting into blockchain. Basically, the idea being to save data. Interestingly, the focused concept in the Nike patent is covered by my 2016 filings placing me two years ahead of them. Which is fine, they now have a choice. They can use BSV freely or they can pay my company royalties.
So why is it you think that I need to convince you?
Why do you think that it matters that I have you believe me or come on board as my disciple?
I hate to tell you that you're a little bit deluded if you believe that. You see, people will build on my platform whether you like me or not. I have a technical solution that works, I have solutions that scale, and mostly I've had the time to patent every aspect of how bitcoin works. You see, while other people have been trying to understand my protocol, I found that the best way of stopping people hijacking it further was to start building what some people call a patent fortress. You can't scale without SPV. Unfortunately, people didn't understand what it was. So much of bitcoin was not understood even though was common.
It is interesting how people think that I invented the concept of blockchain. It was published in the mid-90s. However, it was a set theoretic mathematical construct and not as simple as it was resented in the paper.
And I know, bad Aussie man. Scary bad man doesn't want our form of Internet anonymous money. You seem to think that it matters all that get funding because you run round saying that I'm nasty and mean and I hurt your feelings. I'm sorry to tell you but none of that actually matters. I'm sorry to tell you that bitcoin is not anonymous and cannot be made such. It is a concept known as traceable pseudonymous transactions. If you look you will find a number of papers dating to around 1994 on this concept.
And whether you like the fact that I created bitcoin are not or whether you believe me is irrelevant. You see, when I file a patent it is independently verified and passed and granted without reference to who I may have been and what I've done in the past. I know that's a difficult concept to some of you, but every time I create something it is tested based on the merits of what I've created that time and not the laurels that I wear.
You seem to think that I'm creating another shit coin. No, I'm just freeing up bitcoin do what was meant to do. The way designed it. Not so that you can speculate, so that businesses will be able to use low fee transactions that are fast and cheap. See, in the next five years we will have transactions that process for under 1/10000 of a cent. And yes that is the correct number of zeros. It's not about a political circle jerk that comes from this fallacy of code is law (which was discredited in 2001 by Prof Timothy Wu). It is about the technology. In this is the point, while you guys circle jerk talking about how you're going to change the world with anonymous money that helps drug dealers and terrorists...
We are building something that will actually help the world.
And no, your liking me, your wanting to be aligned with me, your care as to what I'm doing matters to less extent than you could imagine.
BSV is the future, if all goes well. Code is not law. It is as clear as dawn.
Results are what matter in this space. Let the results speak for themselves. Blockstream with LN, Nchain with big block scaling.
Blockstream (Which funds Core developers) was funded by AXA Strategic Ventures with about $80Million in two rounds.
Digital Currency Group, which has investment in a lot of Bitcoin companies has a controlling interest from MasterCard.
That alone does not prove anything, but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale. When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.
Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).
The truth is that BCH forked from BTC after 4 years of obstructionism. We forked just in time: because the huge transaction backlog on BTC happened within months of the fork. The result was an entirely predictable result of failing to scale.
> When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.
The upgraded version of Bitcoin is the version that holds consensus among its users. Bitcoin Cash never held that position, and probably never will. Calling it "Bitcoin (BCH)" shows your bias.
> Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).
If I were to run a direct blockchain copy of Bitcoin and change some arbitrary rule (such as making the difficulty readjust every 2000 blocks), that does not a bitcoin make. I would be running a dead chain nobody uses. If I were to argue the change and everyone follows my chain and runs my code, only then would it be Bitcoin, since it carries consensus.
> The truth is that BCH forked from BTC
Correct. You forked off, and aren't bitcoin. The 2017Q4 spike in transaction fees was probably due to a number of separate issues and misconfigurations, such as wallet fee estimation being mostly broken, users feeling FOMO and wanting in at any price, and transactions not optimally filling the space alotted to them (which SegWit partially fixed, as designed).
BCH forked off to reject the SegWit+RBF add-on that ain't Bitcoin. Replace by Fee has caused ATM hacks and breaks trust in 0-conf. BCH upgraded version holds consensus among its users & fees are low as P2P Electronic Cash System was designed to have had.
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.
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.
No we are not. Lots of devs, miners and businesses got together and forked to BCH.
The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.
Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions):
- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.
- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!
* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.
> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions
That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.
> Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash
How so? As far as settlement is concerned, a cash transaction is pretty much exactly like a bitcoin transaction (and quite unlike a credit card transaction).
>That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.
Until it doesn't. A payment network is graded on how it handles disputes, not regular transactions. Bitcoin can't do refunds or chargebacks, making it rife for fraud.
Sure, you can implement escrow, but then it's no longer competitive like GP said.
Still limited to 1 000 000 bytes per 10 minutes and then some for segwit which was a unnecessary hack job that actually makes blocks bigger without much added throughput.
In Bitcoin the block size limit was eliminated and replaced with a block weight limit which better reflects the long term operating costs for node. The raw 'size' of transactions inherently is becoming less meaningful in the long term with things like transaction compression and compact encodings.
The weight limit doesn't map perfectly to any size limit because its limiting different things, this evening most blocks have been about 1.3 MB.
Probably technically true, but, it is just a part of the dishonest language-shell-game to fool people into thinking BTC can really scale to become a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. 1.3 MB is still tiny! Pretending a small difference matters is so disingenuous.
Blocksize is clearly not literally a rate; that's a ridiculous statement. When you artificially cap it, like putting a limiter on your car in your analogy, it can be rate limiting, i.e. limiting the transaction rate - an actual rate. That chart you posted in meaningless in this context, but clearly just greg being greg, trying to manipulate; are you seriously trying to suggest that the tiny increase from segwit shenanigans is responsible for that (cropped) decrease in tx fees? That's demonic.
It is literally a rate. It is the rate of bytes added per block (which by the system's design is once per ~10 minutes).
Increasing supply above demand radically drops fee rates. That is the logical, predicted, and observed behavior-- both in Bitcoin and in other similar systems.
Look, I'm not one to harp on semantics, but this is bullshit, you can't* just make something a rate by using the word 'per'. If I'm a doughnut shop, and I sell 12-packs of doughnuts, my doughnut-box-size is not a rate, the amount of doughnuts I sell in an hour, or a day etc., is a rate. If my store has a policy of only fulfilling orders once every 10 minutes on average, but only up to one box, or 12 doughnuts per 10 minutes, the doughnut-box-size is still not a fucking rate, even though the shop could say they only sell 12 doughnuts per 10 minutes. Edit: Let me rephrase this somewhat; it's clear greg is trying to use semantic chicanery and multiple definitions and senses of the word 'rate' to obfuscate any actual points. Rate is typically used and understood (let's say in STEM anyhow) to be a measure of 'flow'. Thus his speed example, distance per time, is a rate, or tx per second. It doesn't have to use time as measure, but here what greg is trying to do is say that, using the most generic definition of rate, you can compare doughnuts and boxes and say that doughnuts-per-box (blocksize) is a rate, even though he's really using as example "(dougnuts-per-box)-per-((10 minute)time interval)", which is a rate, and pretending they're the same thing . Of course if you increase the size of the container, the flow, or actual rate of tx/time interval will increase, but saying that the size of the container itself is a rate, is contextually insane.
Of course the fees would drop after raising the blocksize.
The current fees are well above the marginal transaction costs of processing and storing those transactions. (I estimated it was 3cents/kB, assuming GB scale blocks on ~1000 4U (36 bay) servers with 10Gbps networking distributed world-wide.) Other analysis I have seen erroneously assumes the POW is a marginal cost: which is only true with a tiny, limited, block-size.
During the September 1, 2018 "stress test" on the BCH network, the average transaction cost actually went down. All while the network processed 2 million transactions in a day.
Pretty much this. I don't think greg has read any economic theory, let alone introductory microeconomics where you would see the idea of 'marginal analysis'. I mean his reply suggests that demand is entirely static, or inelastic, which would be interesting to study, but certainly shouldn't be assumed, and is likely completely false.
Yes this is true because Bitcoin core plays by the speed of the weakest link.
It's not true for Bitcoin Cash which plays by the "if your node is not making you money why are you running it"
When we upgrade every 6 months or useless nodes just get stuck on the old chain forever and that's it.
Last upgrade there was one miner who upgraded one block to late and lost about 1000 USD. That miner will be the first to run the new software in may.
We had a hacker who got a smart card to get Bitcoin cash to work like a credit card without needing to be online.
Bitcoin cash tx are instant and take on average about 2 seconds to spread to about 1999 out of 2000 mempools.
They settle on the chain on average 10 minutes.
Credit card tx also take a couple of seconds but much longer to settle.
Right now BCH can not yet scale like Visa but we already have the capacity to compete with paypall.
Satoshi's design works at scale but only when you don't delete point 6 from the whitepaper which is "Simple Payment Verification"
Core tries to make you belief the whitepaper was written without points 6 and 7.
7 is how to make the blockchain smaller by pruning it using merkle trees.
Nobody does that yet because storing 200 GB for 10 years is super cheap.
But 6 and 7 are ESSENTIAL in the design to scale.
Core completely ignores them or says: Well SPV is not 100% secure there for it's insecure and should not be used.
Gmax does this with everything, he flips it to extremes.
Meanwhile right now on LN there is couple of hundred thousand dollars that is very easy to steal from non technical people.
1) you find people that want to open a channel with you. These people go online to post their ip addresses and open ports on /r/bitcoin. These posts are encouraged on /r/bitcoin.
2) You open a channel with them for like 100 USD in BTC.
3) You push the balance to their side of the channel by using a swap side that accepts both LN and other coins.
4) You sell this 100 USD for another coin.
5) You publish an old state.
6) You do this to nodes you monitor using nmap to see if they go offline on a regular basis for longer then nlocktime.
7) You can't lose money on this, only win with people that should not be running LN but are.
There is like 6 million USD locked up in LN and about 10% is for grabs.
8) The victims have nowhere to go because if they post about it on their channels they get called stupid and banned and their post deleted.
9) People are already doing this but the victims are still not speaking out. They just belief it was their own fault and move on. Meanwhile the watchtower software is not there yet and if a node does not go offline for nlocktime you can easily DDOS that node for 144 blocks and you doubled your money.
If you read the bitcoin core release notes going back at least the past 5 years, and look at the road map, every release and every planned addition has improved scalability— many of them very significant improvements.
The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive.
Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes.
But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.
Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi.
You're missing the keyword 'network'. If you're routing a payment across the lightning network, then it is technically not peer to peer. You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on.
As you said, any two parties are able to open (and close) a channel. However, these actions require an on chain transaction, and your funds are locked until you close the channel. Unless you're going to be exchanging many transactions in a short period of time with your peer, you would be better off creating transactions directly on chain.
I won't get into this here, but the lightning 'network' has its own set of scaling problems, which imo are much worse than that of the bitcoin network itself.
Torrents also go through network, but we call them peer-to-peer. I think you don't understand what peer-to-peer means. It means you don't need central authority, a central node that would handle the connections, match them together. And that is true for Lightning, torrents, and all other things we call peer-to-peer.
> You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on.
It's not technically a payment at that point, since the payments is atomic end to end. But yes, you send a message your peer, which sends it to another peer, which sends it to another peer...
I don't think that "Peer-to-Peer" in the whitepaper's title ("Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System") refers to the network structure being p2p - and that's probably also not what most people mean when they talk about bitcoin being peer-to-peer. The very first sentence makes it pretty clear that peer-to-peer means person-to-person without any intermediary:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1]
Furthermore, the previous title was "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" [2]. So reading "Peer-to-Peer" as "Person-to-Person" would mean that the title hasn't changed in meaning, it just became a bit more catchy.
Also, when analysing the incentives of participants in the bitcoin network, it turns out that network nodes do not actually form the ideal-typical p2p mesh network (where all nodes are equally distributed and connect to a few other nodes) but a more densely connected network where connectivity to mining nodes is strongly incentivised. This topic has been researched and discussed by Dr. Wright (See [3] for more information).
Yes, and lightning does the same. The other bitcoin nodes that route your messages are not a trusted third party, no more than the bitcoin nodes that relay your transaction when you transmit it any time you use Bitcoin.
Wrights comments on topology are technobabble and largely meaningless, so it's difficult to say something about them... however, to the extent that we can assign any meaning at all to them don't you notice that saying your transactions need to go through particular nodes sounds an awful lot like the property you're using to argue that lightning is not peer to peer?
Unlike the base layer, the LN uses source routing: which was abandoned years ago. Requiring the endpoints to know the structure of the network graph leads to intractable routing problems at scale.
Many source routed networks work fine, including Tor. All MPLS usage is source routed. Source routing isn't used for _IP_ (generally) but for reasons which have nothing to do with 'scale'.
Not a problem if you don't intend to have nodes sufficient to actually be considered "at scale" and your plan from the very beginning is a centralised hub and spoke network.
Comparing the lightning network with a bank is totally incorrect. Your funds cannot be seized and the middlemen privacy aspect is very similar to the Tor network. I don't think there is a better way of solving a decentralized payment system.
Bitcoin will not accept a settlement if the wallet no longer has funds.
Banks throwing away checks is not a problem. Bouncing checks are a fraud problem, which is why most everyone have moved on from using checks is many situations.
Lightning's solution is to just 'watch' everyone you do transactions with, which is a lazy, non-viable solution analagous to continuously watching an anonymous stranger's bank account when they write you a check.
Tor is a privacy nightmare; not sure what the situation is currently but at one point the US government ran something like 10% of the exit nodes. This is how a lot of the "dark web" operators got caught until folks caught on and switched up their opsec.
Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though.
I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.
I disagree that the LN paper made conservative assumptions.
A "black swan" event like a major lightning hub going down may force more channel closings than the network (as currently implemented) has time to process before time-out.
The LN simply does not work if the base layer is congested.
You have no idea what lightning transaction volume is, for all you can tell I'm currently making 1000 transactions per second in a loop between a set of lightning wallets. :)
Because lightning is actually relatively scalable it doesn't broadcast every action to everyone.
The current implementation of LN does broadcast to everyone. At any given moment, every node on the network needs to know the size of every open channel on the network (for routing calculations) so every time a transaction happens, the updated channels sizes get broadcast to everyone. The volume is almost zero right now.
That isn't so. You learn that a channel doesn't have enough capacity by attempting to use it, failing, then updating your knowledge and trying again. It typically takes something like 1.25 tries on average in the current network.
See Bolt 7:
> Note that the htlc_maximum_msat field is static in the current protocol over the life of the channel: it is not designed to be indicative of real-time channel capacity in each direction, which would be both a massive data leak and uselessly spam the network
You have to pre-setup a connection to others that you know and hope they know someone that knows someone that has a connection to the person you are trying to buy from.
This is how the design of lightning network incentivises mega hubs that know most people. So if facebook made a big hub with all its users it would work smoothly.
Also: You can not receive payments if the computer/wallet that hosts your lightning node is not online. Not super smooth.
The system has routing, and it turns out that it doesn't take much for the probability of a graph to be connected with low average diameter. See: The six degrees of kevin bacon.
If lightning doesn't work for a particular payment, you can simply make a payment without using it, potentially by splicing out funds from one of your channels.
Yes, Lightning has trade-offs. You have to be online (though there is ongoing research into changing that), and some moderately complex software had to be written to create it.
But in return you get get massive efficiency increases and instant irreversible payments.
For the transactions that it's intended, I think for these are pretty good trade-offs... though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.
> though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.
No true: due to limited block space on the base-layer.
I am not convinced you get any efficiency increase with the LN: just more difficult capacity planning because everything is suddenly so hard to measure.
Sending a payment, whether on the first or second layer, will take a certain amount of: bandwidth, processing and storage.
Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires.
Even is we assume the processing and storage requirements are equal: it will be more expensive on the LN. On the base layer, your data is protected from Byzantine faults by having each node verify the transactions as they come in. With the LN, state is local to each node. That implies you need redundant hardware to protect against Byzantine faults. I have been migrating my machines to ECC RAM and redundant storage: it is not cheap. What I save on hardware costs by buying old servers I pay in extra power use.
The above paragraph did not even mention the capital requirements of maintaining a Lightning node.
> Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires.
Today sending a transaction communicates 10 messages for each of ~100k nodes in the network. Once its confirmed, that transaction will additionally be sent once to every new host to join the network, forever.
Lightning sends a couple of messages back and forth among the nodes directly involved in the transaction... maybe 4. (The average shortest path length is about 2.8 currently).
So the marginal communication cost for a transaction is literally hundreds of thousands times lower-- even ignoring the cost to future nodes joining the network-- and this advantage grows as the number of nodes increases.
Lol, no LN does not solve almost anything. It will be good for some centralized and KYC-rich uses by businesses and their customers. It will not make BTC into a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.
Among the "Bitcoins", only Bitcoin Cash is keeping that dream alive.
So having a “currency” (its not really; is an asset) being controlled by an unaccountable “Tony cabal of developers” instead of a central bank is better how exactly?
It's good you don't understand it, because it wouldn't be better. It be much worse, because as unaccountable as central banks can be they'd be more accountable than that.
But that simply isn't how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin developers have no such authority. People with no special power beside respect and goodwill, write software on their own as they're free to do just are you're free to do. Other people voluntarily chose to run it. If people don't run it, it's completely inert. They cannot force anyone to run it. Subject to the limitations of public review, they cannot make hidden changes. The software has no automatic updates, and the developers have a long history of being extremely vigorously opposed to automatic updates.
Because whatever effect the software has on the network could only be slowly realized as it's deployed (short of something like a crash bug or an RCE or similar) there is ample time for the public to review a new version -- even if they chose to ignore the open development process -- and sound the alarm against running it if they judge it to be adverse.
If you don't like software put out by one developer, you can run software from another. You could create your own (or pay someone to do it) from scratch. You could run an old version. You could take a version you don't like and make modifications until you do...
Moreover, the biggest community of developers in Bitcoin makes their software all free software, develops it on public lists/websites/irc channels, and has taken considerable efforts to maintain compatibility with other software specific to maximize your ability to choose to not run it without feeling too much conflict or hesitation-- You can happily go take Bitcoin 0.8 from 2013 or and years old copy of knots or a number of other forks or alternative implements... start it up and it will sync and come to consensus with the network. (I wouldn't necessarily recommend running something that old exposed to the internet-- due to vulnerabilities-- but you could and it would work fine.)
I would say your freedom is like your freedom with free software, but it isn't quite: If almost everyone else chooses to run something incompatible you can still keep running your original, but you might find yourself on a separate currency from everyone else. Since money gains it's value from network effects you might fine that less than ideal. But that's the limit, and it's also why the Bitcoin community is cautious with incompatible changes-- essentially never having intentionally made one. Faults in version prior to 0.8 make them self-incompatible, unfortunately. If you want to run a version prior to 0.8 and come to consensus with the network today you'd have to patch a database handling bug in it.
I think this is better. It's certainly very different properties than a trusted third party, and even if you're not sure it's clearly better-- perhaps you can agree that diversity and choice is useful and that you're better off for having the opportunity to use it should the need arise.
Yeah let's increase block size without a way to control the precedent of size increase so only a very select few groups have the compute power to mine. Yay centralization
"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..."
No... we're not.
There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin.
To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_
Big blocks are probably easier to censor and harder to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.
Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority.
You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.
Only if they get extremely big, and the clients cannot handle them.
> to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.
These people should use light wallets or SPV wallets, which is what we already use on mobile phones.
> Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison.
Only Siths deal with absolutes. This is a false choice.
Small blocks, and large fees, also have a centralizing effect on the network as small miners gets priced out as the transaction fees removes a larger fraction of their income.
And miner decentralization is the most important type of centralization there is, because that's what provides censorship resistance and network security.
With Segregated Witness (SegWit) enabled on July 21, 2017, the Bitcoin block size has been increased by approximately 1.6 - 2 times. So the TPS should be increased correspondingly.
Bitcoin already scaled on the Bitcoin Cash chain all whilst Bitcoin Core dev payroll was taken over by Blockstream co and Chaincode Labs co who's vested interest lies in limiting the core protocol to sell side-chain tech. The market still trades BTC as Bitcoin because of the strong branding and censorship in various online communities.
All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.
Absolutely, there is no good reason for private entities who take over an open source project and limit it for private interests when a major chunk of people reject it.
The allegation of "take over" is both dishonest misinformation and a really abusive attack. The people you're accusing of taking Bitcoin over have been there essentially all along, -- long before you ever heard of it. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have also been with Bitcoin all along: as a look into the history shows, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347
Sorry, the real attack was by the group led by Adam Back who himself dismissed Bitcoin initially before having a VC fund him to cater to his plan http://cashbleed.com/
Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past.
The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side.
On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC..
The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.
> when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access
It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.
Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.
Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.
It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.
(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)
Gavin being silenced is just a tip of the iceberg out of the continual banning and censorship of people discussing ideas around scaling Bitcoin Core chain since 2016. Most of the folks have left for other projects since then and all BTC is left is as a tether propped exchange pair while merchants give up on accepting BTC (thanks RBF too).
Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has been gaining merchant acceptance and I've enjoyed using BCH same like I did enjoy using BTC since 2012. The honeybadger of P2P electronic cash is truly unstoppable.
That's stretching the truth far too thin. Gavin was never being "silenced" by anyone. Ask himself yourself, he replies to email. It was very much his decision, and while he may have held some controversial opinions in the community, he never let this interfere with maintaining the software which he did in the best professional manner.
He makes no secret about his disappointment with some of the decisions (or, rather, non-decisions) around the project as of late, but this was several years after he stepped down maintaining the software in favor of his chief scientist role for the foundation.
Adam, the only person who's name is mentioned in the body of the bitcoin whitepaper, was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.msg2371674#ms... though Adam has never been actively involved with the bitcoin software project itself-- beyond some mailing list discussions and such.
Aside, the numbers on the website you linked are randomly generated nonsense. Embarrassingly for its author, their made up numbers which are trying to claim to be astronomical fail to make their point because they're not that high when compared to other highly paying tech companies ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJDgs... ).
That whole allegation is odd. Blockstream has (had?) a program where a significant part of employee pay was in the form of pre-purchased Bitcoin which vested over time. This was intended to create a significant incentive for employees to see bitcoin's value grow-- specifically to address concerns that somehow Blockstream could create incentives against that when it employed a couple long time contributors. ... it turns out that buying Bitcoin at $450/each was a really good deal, and it panned out well for employees. It worked exactly as advertised, and some anonymous troll is spinning it as some kind of fraud?! Weird.
> 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit,
Not going along with a proposal you think is bad is not an "attack"-- it's the actualization of your own personal freedom.
> The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access
Gavin's commit access was removed by Wladimir, -- not one of the people associated with Adam or our company. When it was removed it had been completely unused for a year and barely used for several years. Its ultimate removal was triggered by Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer as being Satoshi which was especially concerning given his comments about "handing the repository over" to 'Satoshi'.
Good security practices should have had the access dropped long before then, and he'd been asked by Wladimir to resign them but kept responding that he'd sleep on it. Wladimir had wanted to avoid the drama of revoking them, but once Gavin was loudly endorsing a scammer the threat of poorly maintained access seemed a lot more serious.
> he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi
Wladimir (and the other people you are insulting) were also there back when Satoshi was still active. Even back in 2011 Wladimir was the most active contributor, with two commits for every one by Gavin (348:152). In 2010, Satoshi made 215 commits and Gavin made 35.
Leading in a open source collaboration is a complicated question. Gavin was an extremely valued contributor, including valued for his public speaking at a time when many of us were keeping a low profile because we were really concerned that our involvement in Bitcoin might result in legal prosecution. That, however, doesn't mean he was leading in strong sense like you'd apply to the leader of a business. If you look at actual decision making in the project it, once Satoshi was gone it was always an extensive collaboration.
This fact is why e.g. some people have falsely accused me of controlling it when I didn't have any particular authority at all, just a history of reasonable insight and persuasive arguments.
> and DDoS
Bitcoin nodes got DOS attacked with some regularity in the past by people trying to interfere with block propagation to cause competing blocks to get orphaned (and still do, though less often now-- because we implemented countermeasures to make those attacks much less effective). There is no evidence that anyone saw any DOS attacks other than those. None of the people I know would have bothered not expected a DOS attack to do anything: the system is designed to be designed to resist DOS attacks.
The falsity of those "nodes" was also demonstrated by their near overnight disappearance once the pumping of competing altcoins stopped...
> we've come a long way with optimizing transactions
I don't believe that bitcoin abc has deployed any scalablity improvement not previously existing in Bitcoin. The primary one in it over the original p2p protocol, compact blocks, was designed by myself...
> was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it.
His public comments would say otherwise and many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it for private interests.
> Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer
Classic nullc way of putting it.. Gavin simply said that CSW was able to sign a message from one of the keys he had interacted with Satoshi's account. The signing itself has be debunked many a times, Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself, like giving bitcoin repo access to CSW..
The entire drama created a path for new folks like Adam who showed up in 2013(from your bitcointalk article) to see opportunity to gain control of the core client.
Bitcoin Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations.
Overall, only time will tell how the Bitcoin story will play out. For a fact though, we have 2 chains developed centrally planned (BTC & BSV) while BCH keeps the checks & balances of power with distributed teams.
> CompatBlocks is just one of the developments that BCH has completed and released
wtf. man, stop taking credit for other people's work. Compact blocks were completed and released by Matt Corallo, myself, and the other Bitcoin developers at the time long before BCH existed. It had absolutely no involvement from any BCH developer.
> many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it
When your link in the earlier post is an article ranting about how much money blockstream employees are making because it pays its employees partially denominated in Bitcoin and Bitcoin has increased a lot in value.
> Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself
In fact Gavin stated that he was convinced Wright was Satoshi long before he ever met him or witnessed any signing.
> folks like Adam [...] to gain control of the core client.
Adam doesn't have any control over Bitcoin Core and never has. I don't think anything he's ever proposed has ended up in in it, in fact.
> Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations
Actually, BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.
The fact that in Bitcoin we took the time to fully think through, write a clear and complete specification https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawi... , and thoroughly test and review the implementation before deploying it while BU has been occasionally abused by the BU organization and their supporters to dishonestly claim that compact blocks came later (or were somehow derived) from their work.
Users on the sidelines were easily deceived by this marketing because BU rushed their implementation into production while Bitcoin took a more deliberative process.
BU's "thinblocks" implementation was, in fact, severely flawed both due to an implementation vulnerability that resulted in almost every BU node on the network being crashed near simultaniously, and due to a design error introduced because BU's "chief scientist" strongly believed that it was computationally intractable to produce a collision in the first 64-bit of transaction IDs (a sha2 hash), even though one can be computed on a fast desktop computer in seconds.
So the history is that: Bitcoin developers proposed and tested an idea for faster block propagation using filters and found it lacking. Later, it came up again as a possible way to mitigate segwit's bandwidth increase, so I wrote a design to address the known issues and we started working on implementing it. A few weeks later BU developers picked up the old work and started improving it. Within a couple months they had it deployed it in public and announced 'mission accomplished', but their deployment was unspecified and ultimately faulty. As a result of those issues and the superior relay latency of compact blocks thinblocks was replaced in the Bitcoin Cash network with the protocol from Bitcoin.
There is no common protocol feature in BU's xthinblocks that wasn't also in Bitcoin's original work that inspired both efforts. There could have been no influence on compact blocks' design by xthinblocks because it would have been physically impossible for there to be due to causality. That hasn't seemed to stop BU developers and people like you from repeating this lie.
> wtf. man, stop taking credit for other people's work. Compact blocks were completed and released by Matt Corallo, myself, and the other Bitcoin developers at the time. It had absolutely no involvement from any BCH developer.
Sorry, I did not say or mean to take any credit, all I'm pointing out is that BCH was able to get that tech out in prod.
> BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.
This is flat out wrong, the BCH developers meet monthly to review roadmap and sync up on development in a decentralized fashion. The clients that were not maintained were deprecated as expected, nothing out of the ordinary here. The Bitcoin XT client was compatible with BCH chain when Core activated the SegWit.
The bi-annual BCH client upgrade actually helps keeping users empowered as to which ruleset they accept, a choice which is not available for Bitcoin Core users as they are held hostage to the code that governs their money.
The new "owners" of BTC will not let it grow. BTC was intentionally captured and development-centralized to stop it from being able to scale and become peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.
No, the block size must remain small. I just don't transactions and speed won't be handled on a second layer solution. people who think they want a bigger block size can go with Bitcoin cash or Gavin or whatever consortium was the fork and go with that. Good luck.
Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling.
Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit.
Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.
Every release of Bitcoin ever made has had the capacity limitations it has now, or more restrictive.
It's true that Satoshi added the 1MB limit after the first release, but at that time and before then blocks were _implicitly_ limited to somewhat a bit over ~500KB-ish due to issues in the database layer.
This is the reason that you cannot sync a pre-0.8 node all the way to the tip today without modifying it. 0.8 fixed the database problem and made actual 1MB blocks a possibility and the larger blocks triggered pre-0.8 nodes to randomly split off the network.
The limitations are not just the block size. It's all the little things stripping the usability crippling the ecosystem. Amongst other elements:
- Abandoning instant payment by introducing replace-by-fee where you can "undo" a transaction not in a block yet.
- The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.
- Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.
Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.
> Abandoning instant payment by introducing replace-by-fee where you can "undo" a transaction not in a block yet.
Unconfirmed transactions are inherently at risk for being replaced, which is why confirmation exists in the first place.
When transactions are explicitly market non-final the software makes replacing easier instead of having to broadcast to the entire network yourself. Replacement for non-final transactions was a feature in the very first version of the software but it was disabled because it was vulnerable to a DOS attack (replacing a transaction over and over again in a tight loop). When a fix was found for the vulnerablity the feature was restored.
This is no way inhibits "instant payment"-- if you don't want to honor _non-final_ transactions until they're confirmed or replaced with a final version, just don't! (However, actual testing shows that doublespends of unconfirmed transactions are highly successful even without making them replaceable.)
Regardless, this wasn't a "stripping"-- it was _original functionality_ which was restored.
Aside, I see you are promoting Craig Wright's scammy BSV coin in other posts. I assume you are aware that the "Genesis hardfork" which they are about to release activates replacement in BSV too? https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/blob/dev-Genesis-be...
> The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.
Vulnerable opcodes were disabled-- by Satoshi back in 2010. There has not been a single opcode disabled in bitcoin by anyone except Satoshi.
More recent softforks such as BIP141 have made it easy to reenable (fixed versions of) and add new opcodes. But there has been only moderate interest in reenabling any of the disabled opcodes, particularly since on altcoins and test networks (like elements) where they're enabled they've gone unused.
More interest right now is going into bip-taproot, since its structure enables users to use fancy scripts in an extremely efficient and private way-- allowing them to invoke the script only in exceptional cases.
> Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.
That was also done by Satoshi for attack mitigation reasons, but it hasn't been the case for several years now.
> Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.
That is an outright lie. Vitalik never made any made any contact to the bitcoin developers or community related to this. Had any such effort been made it would be easy to point to public evidence of it. It simply doesn't exist.
Moreover, "build(ing ethereum) on bitcoin" would have made it impossible to "premine" 72 million coins (2/3rds of the current ethereum supply) and pocket tens of millions of dollars, as he's done. The folks that he collaborated with to create ethereum had done several prior altcoin pump and dumps and went on to do several others after ethereum.
It's unsurprising that he didn't seek out collaboration with Bitcoin however: He was well known as a scammer in the Bitcoin community at that point because shortly before starting etherum he had been making a nuisance of himself soliciting investments for a "quantum miner" scam. https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e...
For readers, BSV is an Bitcoin clone created and promoted by Craig Wright. An austrialian man who fraudulently and without any evidence claims to be Bitcoin's creator and that BSV is his (Satoshi's) Vision (thus the name).
Well not just 'not any evidence' -- he claimed to provide a cornucopia of "evidence" all of which turned out to be easily proven to be forgeries. Things like editing his old blog posts to insert mentions of bitcoin (archive.org shows they were added years later), or claimed "digital signatures" by satoshi which were just literally copies out of the blockchain, or trickeries of unsound cryptography ( https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone... ).
Unfortunately, the media loves a headline, and all too often doesn't care much about the facts. And cryptocurrency appeals to a diverse collection of people including many that are highly exploitable by Wright's bombastic approach, including a number of business leaders.
Wright has a long personal history of fraud with numerous judgments in courts and administrative bodies against him. His Bitcoin related fraud appears to have begun with an R&D tax rebate scam where he claimed millions then attempted tens of millions in tax credits which he couldn't have possibly earned without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. To justify that he had hundreds of millions to spend, he claimed to be Bitcoin's creator.
From there it appears to have evolved into an advanced fee fraud plus scammy cryptocurreny pump. Essentially he's been claiming that he owns a million bitcoin but it's locked in a trust and asking for investments that he'll repay or getting people to buy his crypocurrency which he assures them will go up in value when he 'dumps' his Bitcoin and uses the income to buy up BSV.
Annoyingly, to pull of this scam he's and his representatives engaged in a massive campaign of harassment and fudding towards people involved in Bitcoin, particular developers and former developers like myself... lying about the history of Bitcoin, our activities in Bitcoin, etc. He even falsely accuses me of funding ISIS and other such nonsense (e.g. https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 ). ... and generally just making a mess and turning a previously fun domain to work on into a frightening morass of attacks and threats from conspiracy filled crazy people or people pretending to be ones.
By attacking the credibility of the people most able to call out his deceit he isolates his marks from the very people who would protect them. Walking over all this has clearly had a protective effect, but it doesn't save everyone.
I love the main business proposition from BSV: that the protocol is set in stone. Its makes sense to invest time and development power into something that is aware of not changing the logic that I'm building a business around.
This liberates me from having to focus on who initiated the project - because it is meant to be frozen whoever initiated it can not change the setup at will.
To me it's not important who made visa or who runs it. I use it anyway because it got utility letting me pay at the bakery on a tiny island on the other side of the world.
I don't care about who made the HTTP protocol. I use it every day without knowing.
