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Op-ed: why people choose onchain scaling and oppose Core and SW
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Bitcoin
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Note: Author of the op-ed is Dr. Liu Changyong. He is also a supporter of BU. Several days ago he summarized 6 reasons to support BU in the “Bitcoin Unlimited” wechat group.
1. In the beginning, SW scaling roadmap was supported by almost everyone and Hongkong agreement was reached. However, the Core Devs ceased to proceed with onchain scaling after release of SW. Instead they turned to support LW and against onchain scaling, showing a strong preference for small block.
I don’t trust Core because I am worried that Core would cease onchain scaling after SW and the SW+LN feature will turn Bitcoin from a p2p currency into a settlement network.
2. According to the SW specs, the transaction format will be modified and a hybrid of transaction formats will co-exist, which greatly increase the system complexity. Also we don’t see any mature plan for post-SW scaling via hardfork, which means that no onchain scaling will be possible after implantation of SW. Looking at the market demands and network congestion in the past six months, the 1.7 times scaling offered by SW cannot meet the current demands. If network congestion persists, Bitcoin will lose its market share and first-mover advantages.
3.
What concerns us more is that the long-term congestion and the restrictions on the market demand for mainnet might be exactly what the Core wants. That’s the only way to force the community to accept small block size, to accept SW+LN and to give up onchain scaling. This would turn mainnet into a settlement network which big financial enterprises could afford to use. It’s a major monopoly opportunity for some enterprises but a fatal blow to the Bitcoin network.
I talked about this in detail in an article: “The scaling dispute and the political and economic prospects of Bitcoin”
4. Right now the most pressing issue of Bitcoin network is not malleability. After the collapse of MtGox, most enterprises can handle the problem. The most important thing now is to increase block size to meet the rapidly growing market demands. Obviously the Core doesn’t think so.
From the perspective of technical preferences, the anarchist ideals and Blockstream’s monopoly position of SW + LN system in the future, Core believes the market is not important. This shows that Bitcoin as an economic system has gone beyond the control of a technical team. The technical team is very arrogant and refuse to accept any suggestions and opinions, and even control speech in the r\bitcoin. The censorship results in the loss of trust to them from many people.
5, From a technical point of view, many people points out that the changes made by SW may bring some major potential risks, solution of which are not fully discussed to reach a consensus. I am not professional in terms of technology. I will listen to other people’s opinion.
6, SW is not the only solution to the malleability issue, solution of which is still possible after implementation of BU. However onchain scaling is unlikely if SW is realized. By then market opportunities have long gone.
In short, in order to solve the most important issue, the market demand, and to ensure that bitcoin still serve as a p2p currency instead of settlement network, people should choose to support BU and oppose Core and its SW.
Liu Changyong, earned his doctoral degree in economy in 2007 from Bejing University, and now working as Associate Professor of Economy Department of Chongqing Business University. He has been focusing on education of bitcoin and relevant economic issues.
COMMENTS(51)
Here is the link to the original comment thread. Or you can comment here to start a discussion. Author: 8btccom
why do we care?
The thing is that with Ethereum you get the best of both worlds. On chain scaling and via Raiden payment channels scaling.
Smart guy, clearly gets it.
Once the real information got out in Chinese, I think it was game over. It just took too long.
Indeed. One of the early realizations of Ethereum is how much easier it would be to have such networks. I’m excited to see the non-Ethereum community react once Raiden kicks in.
Excellent.
Is 8btc.com currently getting DoSed or is it just me?
Edit: NM, it’s up for me now.
People? you mean centralized chinese miners…
Is the guy who wrote this around here on reddit?
They really are people, too. And mining is not all in China. Most of BU’s supporting miners are outside of that country and are spread around the world.
He is famous in China when talking about bitcoin
Most sites that are in China (ends with .cn, but sometimes a .com address is also pointing to a web server physically located inside China) usually take at least 3 extra seconds before they start to load in my web browser. At least for me who live in Sweden. So give those web sites a few extra seconds before giving up and they’ll almost always load without any problems afterwards.
All of his points are excellent. I think intelligent people will come to the same conclusions that he’s listed here.
Hi u/RothbardRand this article is a good summary. It address the point I was making regarding prioritizing bitcoin protocol improvements.
If you feel you still have a rational argument after reading it (assume you want a resolution) please I’d value your critical analysis. My opinion on the matter is still flexible.
Thanks.
There’s a recent post about the HK scaling meeting from 2015 (Scaling Bitcoin - Hong kong). Where a lot of this was proposed. Confusion seems to stem from the marketing terms overlapping with protocol terms. SW is a proposed protocol enhancement, once in place and validated, block size throttling will be lifted gradually based on miner support through configuration settings (referred to as voting).
Off chain transactions happen every day now and have for a long time, it is akin to the current monetary system with FiRN’s and debit/credit card processing etc. Long term, with decreasing block creation income, there will be a shift to transaction processing income, isn’t that what this discussion is all about? How it is brought about needs more clarification about short term and long term effects for each party involved and how the technical demands placed on systems in use now change from all that I’ve read so far.
there will be a shift to transaction processing income, isn’t that what this discussion is all about?
Yes and who’s is in control.
bitcoin is designed to work like this - Developers are subservient to miners who enforce the rules in the interest of the network. Miners are subservient to users confidence (the market price) - developers have no say but to use political maneuvering to get miners to implement new rules.
I see it’s obvious you aren’t interested in having a rational discussion. So I’m deleting my comment.
Bye bye psychos.
Her is a fact:
The bitcoin design has a consensus mechanism that’s been in oppression since inception, its called PoW, bitcoin should use it.
Developers are subservient to miners who enforce the rules in the interest of the network. Miners are subservient to users confidence (the market price)
The developers have over reached in an attempt to control bitcoin. There is no technical debate. The developers are using propaganda, lobbying and politics to get miners to include new rules.
The developers are not in a technical debate about code but a political one, in an attempt to convince miner and users to accept the new code they have made that change the bitcoin rules.
Here is a way forward, Core agree to remove the limit - miners agree to soft limit like we used before (users choose what code to run)
Then discuss options for controlling the limit and segwit integration - in an environment where there is a Gentlemen’s Agreement not to mine a block above 4MB.
And I see this sub is censored.
Ok, well there was no point in trying to debate BUttcoiners anyway.
Bye bye you religious authoritarian fanatics.
My posers are removed from r/bitcoin - when I win an argument - it gets deleted. that’s a problem.
Here everyone can see - I am not going to invest energy in exposing your false beliefs to have it removed.
Ignore the voting - anyway when the thread goes a few comments in people stop voting anyway.
make a good argument prove me wrong.
It’s debatable as to who is really in control. How do the transaction processors (said miners) enforce the rules exactly?
PoW it’s backed by over 8 years of empirical evidence, Satoshi described how the design works in 2008 and its is still working today.
This is how consensus mechanism works - Satoshi has left us written record of how bitcoin was designed to work and resolve conflicts, lets not abandon it now, there is an apolitical process that the developers are abandoning. Developers have no control, they are subservient to miners - that’s the design - it’s always worked like that.
white paper section 5
The steps to run the network are as follows:
1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.
3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.
Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on extending it. If two nodes broadcast different versions of the next block simultaneously, some nodes may receive one or the other first. In that case, they work on the first one they received, but save the other branch in case it becomes longer. The tie will be broken when the next proof-of-work is found and one branch becomes longer; the nodes that were working on the other branch will then switch to the longer one.
satoshi white paper section 12
They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale… The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.
-Satoshi Nakamoto
Thanks for the link, I’ll read through that and re-craft my question for a later time.
the link is a reference to the quote.
the bitcoin we have today is designed so any needed rules and incentives that are needed are enforced with this consensus mechanism of PoW.
It also referenced ‘Bitcoin snack machine (fast transaction problem)’ that I find interesting.
It also referenced ‘Bitcoin snack machine (fast transaction problem)’ that I find interesting
I’m not familiar with that what are you referring too?
His Name is Haipo Yang and he is - of course - not ready to commit “network suicide” (sic!).
https://medium.com/@ViaBTC/why-we-must-increase-the-block-size-and-why-i-support-bitcoin-unlimited-90b114b3ef4a#.c3alfqosp
His Name is Jiang Zhuo’er, and his prediction - of course - becomes true:
I will take responsibility for the following verdict: Core’s Segwit soft fork will never activate. It’s not a question of 95% support, or even 75%, or even 51%. It has no hope of activation.
https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-segwit-soft-fork-bitcoin-miner-jiang-zhuo-er-tells-you-why-28f820d51f98#.5858kqrle
His Name is Jaqen Hash’ghar and he came to the
Conclusion
Segregated Witness is the most radical and irresponsible protocol upgrade Bitcoin has faced in its eight year history. The push for the SW soft fork puts Bitcoin miners in a difficult and unfair position to the extent that they are pressured into enforcing a complicated and contentious change to the Bitcoin protocol, without community consensus or an honest discussion weighing the benefits against the costs. The scale of the code changes are far from trivial — nearly every part of the codebase is affected by SW.
While increasing the transaction capacity of Bitcoin has already been significantly delayed, SW represents an unprofessional and ineffective solution to both transaction malleability and scaling. As a soft fork, SW introduces more technical debt to the protocol and fundamentally fails to achieve its design purpose. As a hard fork, combined with real on-chain scaling, SW can effectively mitigate transaction malleability and quadratic signature hashing. Each of these issues are too important for the future of Bitcoin to gamble on SW as a soft fork and the permanent baggage that comes with it.
As much as the authors of this article desire transaction capacity increases, it is far better to work towards a clean technical solution to malleability and scaling than to further encumber the Bitcoin protocol with permanent technical debt.
https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179#.3kkuobz34
Nobody knows his Name, but he has letters that even the blind will be able to see:
The market doesn’t need any centralized dev team “giving us” any fucking blocksize.
The debate is not about 1MB vs. 1.7MB blocksize.
The debate is about:
a centralized dev team increasing the blocksize to 1.7MB (via the first of what they hope will turn out to be many “soft forks” which over-complicate the code and give them “job security”)
versus: the market deciding the blocksize (via just one clean and simple hard fork which fixes this whole blocksize debate once and for all - now and in the future).
And we especially don’t need some corrupt, incompetent, censorship-supporting, corporate-cash-accepting dev team from some shitty startup “giving us” 1.7 MB blocksize, as part of some sleazy messy soft fork which takes away our right to vote and needlessly over-complicates the Bitcoin code just so they can stay in control.
SegWit is a convoluted mess of spaghetti code and everything it does can and should be done much better by a safe and clean hard-fork - eg, FlexTrans from Tom Zander of Bitcoin Classic - which would trivially solve malleability, while adding a “tag-based” binary data format (like JSON, XML or HTML) for easier, safer future upgrades with less technical debt.
The MARKET always has decided the blocksize and always will decide the blocksize.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5pcpec/the_debate_is_not_should_the_blocksize_be_1mb/
His Name is Gavin Andresen, Satoshi Nakamoto’s successor, and he suggests: “Run Bitcoin Unlimited”
谢谢
This is very eloquent and is exactly to the point. Cannot agree more with this.
No one knows for sure what will happen with either segwit implementation, or BU block size increase, too many variables. Best you can do is assess a probabilty for future success or failure.
So it basically comes down to this: Which pilots do you trust to fly this aircraft. I can’t fly the plane. But I get in one because I believe the pilot has as much incentive to take off and land safely, as I do.
If I have to trust BU, or Core pilots to fly this BTC jet forward, sorry, but 100% Core for me. I’ll go down with ship with those folks, no way, no how would I trust what BU has to offer to both get off the runway, and then land her back safely.
It’s not even close.
Maybe in 30 or 50 or 70 years, all the development in bitcoin will be behind us earthlings (flat earthlings for me), just a few tweaks here and there necessary to keep things on autopilot.
But in this time frame, early days of bitcoin, with so much scaling to do and so much opportunity out there to be had, development is so crucial at this point. I don’t see how sane minds could turn things over to a minimal BU crew, hard working and conscientious as they may be.
Love, from Pyongyang
So it basically comes down to this: Which pilots do you trust to fly this aircraft.
Yes, if you are a flat earther who believes in a world where the sun orbits the earth, you will trust the North Corean pilots.
Which is perfectly okay. Fly with them! Fork with them! Into their bizarre world of censorship and inquisition.
What does this have to do with Meni Rosenfeld?
Meni Rosenfeld explained why he supports core. Liu Changyong explains why he does not.
It’s easy, for any side, to collect quotes from supporters. Not very interesting.
Meni posted his own message and stayed around to discuss it.
I don’t see how sane minds could turn things over to a minimal BU crew, hard working and conscientious as they may be.
Same reason why sane minds risked to change their fiat savings into a currency that has been designed and coded by a single person. We are the libertarians, they are the totalitarians. Freedom vs. Censorship. Only one side can win. That’s us.
Best regards to Pyongyang.
My name is Chandler Guo and I jump to #BitcoinUnlimite today!
That’s not how science works. Science is always based on the opinions and inventions of others and predecessors. It makes no sense always trying to invent the wheel yourself.
Meni was obviously bought by the BlockstreamCore mafia and is now working for the banks and AXA, there’s no other explanation. What a fucking sell-out.
His name is also Gavin - and he already had a Scalability Roadmap in October 2014, supporting gradual blocksize growth for simple & safe on-chain scaling:
21 months ago, Gavin Andresen published “A Scalability Roadmap”, including sections called: “Increasing transaction volume”, “Bigger Block Road Map”, and “The Future Looks Bright”. This was the Bitcoin we signed up for. It’s time for us to take Bitcoin back from the strangle-hold of Blockstream.
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43lxgn/21_months_ago_gavin_andresen_published_a/
Like basically every prominent dev or miner who supported simple & safe on-chain scaling via modest blocksize growth, Gavin was viciously attacked by the central bankers and censors and sockpuppets and low-information losers supporting Core/Blockstream and rbitcoin:
“Notice how anyone who has even remotely supported on-chain scaling has been censored, hounded, DDoS’d, attacked, slandered & removed from any area of Core influence. Community, business, Hearn, Gavin, Jeff, XT, Classic, Coinbase, Unlimited, ViaBTC, Ver, Jihan, Bitcoin.com, r/btc” ~ u/randy-lawnmole
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5omufj/notice_how_anyone_who_has_even_remotely_supported/
But nobody actually wants centrally planned 1MB 1.7MB blocksize based on SegWit’s dangerous “anyone-can-spend” spaghetti code:
Initially, I liked SegWit. But then I learned SegWit-as-a-SOFT-fork is dangerous (making transactions “anyone-can-spend”??) & centrally planned (1.7MB blocksize??). Instead, Bitcoin Unlimited is simple & safe, with MARKET-BASED BLOCKSIZE. This is why more & more people have decided to REJECT SEGWIT.
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5vbofp/initially_i_liked_segwit_but_then_i_learned/
Brock Pierce’s BLOCKCHAIN CAPITAL is part-owner of Bitcoin’s biggest, private, fiat-funded private dev team (Blockstream) & biggest, private, fiat-funded private mining operation (BitFury). Both are pushing SegWit - with its “centrally planned blocksize” & dangerous “anyone-can-spend kludge”.
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5sndsz/brock_pierces_blockchain_capital_is_partowner_of/
Actual people who actually use Bitcoin just want simple & safe on-chain scaling via modest blocksize growth - and it’s inevitable that we’re going to get it - it’s our code and our network and all the central bankers and censors and sockpuppets and low-information losers supporting Core/Blockstream and rbitcoin can never stop us:
“I’m angry about AXA scraping some counterfeit money out of their fraudulent empire to pay autistic lunatics millions of dollars to stall the biggest sociotechnological phenomenon since the internet and then blame me and people like me for being upset about it.” ~ u/dresden_k
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5xjkof/im_angry_about_axa_scraping_some_counterfeit/
For the past 3 years, we haven’t stopped fighting against these central bankers and censors and sockpuppets and low-information losers supporting Core/Blockstream and rbitcoin:
I think the Berlin Wall Principle will end up applying to Blockstream as well: (1) The Berlin Wall took longer than everyone expected to come tumbling down. (2) When it did finally come tumbling down, it happened faster than anyone expected (ie, in a matter of days) - and everyone was shocked.
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4kxtq4/i_think_the_berlin_wall_principle_will_end_up/
Inevitably, the market will adopt bigger blocks - simply because bigger blocks mean more Bitcoin profits for all of us - and there is nothing that a bunch of central bankers and censors and sockpuppets and low-information losers can do to stop us:
Bitcoin Original: Reinstate Satoshi’s original 32MB max blocksize. If actual blocks grow 54% per year (and price grows 1.542 = 2.37x per year - Metcalfe’s Law), then in 8 years we’d have 32MB blocks, 100 txns/sec, 1 BTC = 1 million USD - 100% on-chain P2P cash, without SegWit/Lightning or Unlimited
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5uljaf/bitcoin_original_reinstate_satoshis_original_32mb/
Core/Blockstream are now in the Kübler-Ross “Bargaining” phase - talking about “compromise”. Sorry, but markets don’t do “compromise”. Markets do COMPETITION. Markets do winner-takes-all. The whitepaper doesn’t talk about “compromise” - it says that 51% of the hashpower determines WHAT IS BITCOIN.
https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5y9qtg/coreblockstream_are_now_in_the_k%C3%BCblerross/
http://nodecounter.com/#bitcoin_classic_blocks
I’m not on any side but the side of bitcoin.
Censoring the truth is a problem. This forum among very fiew tolerate competing ideas and the scientific process.
No one known for sure what will happen when you drive a car into a wall. No one can tell where the paint will chip if the tiers will berst or if the driver will be ok. No one.
But some how we can use our intuition, knowledge and experience to know the change will not be good for people who like cars to drive.
Stop being ignorant and use some critical thinking examine all possibilities, make an informed choice.
The doublespeak here is something Winston would recognize
I’m a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
[/r/bitcoin] Hi Meni Rosenfeld! His Name is Dr. Liu Changyong, Professor of economics, and he does - of course - NOT support Bitcoin core! • r/btc
If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don’t vote in the other threads.(Info/Contact)
Hilarious.
In case it went over some heads, the main reason I’ve included my name in the title is that Reddit threads have a tendency to be cross-posted, and then it’s not clear who it is that is making the statement.
I must suck at being a sellout then. I’ve heard that good sellouts actually get paid for it.
No problem with your name. The problem is that you suport those censorship supporting devaluators and vandals who are trying to destroy this former libertarian project.
Please sign in first