
Bitcoin Under Political Attack – Contentious Fork Segwit2x on 16th November - funyug
https://blockchaind.net/bitcoin-political-attack-contentious-fork-16th-november/
======
Expez
Here's a quote from the conclusion of the whitepaper in which Nakamoto laid
out Bitcoin:

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.

This is Bitcoin's consensus mechanism and it's called Nakamoto consensus.

In turn, this means that 'Bitcoin' is whatever chain has the most cumulative
work done to secure it.

Nothing is 'contentious' about this. It either has the most cumulative PoW, or
it doesn't.

If the minority chain has some value it might survive. If it does, that's
fine. You'll have coins on both chains and you can choose to care or not.

~~~
Rmilb
Longest PoW being the main chain was not described in the context of
contentious changes to consensus code. By that definition, a 51% attack that
censors transactions would be the longest PoW and be defined as 'Bitcoin'. The
great thing about Bitcoin is that the users are able to each make their own
decision on what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin needs to be anti fragile and will
constantly be under these attacks, because if it fails, we need something
better.

This is all new territory and the appeal to authority by citing the white
paper is less helpful than most people believe.

~~~
Expez
You're absolutely correct. The 51% example that you bring up would be an
undesirable outcome (from our PoV), but the incentives are in place to ensure
that it is extremely unlikely to ever happen.

Distributed consensus is a non-trivial problem, and for sure certain tradeoffs
were made by Satoshi to make it both distributed and permission-less.

Unless you want a benevolent dictator of some sort all you can do is set up a
system that's robust from a game theory perspective.

------
mads
Its like watching a religion unfold in accelerated time. Heretics separating
themselves into sects with different practices and beliefs from the orthodox
groups.

Is Bitcoin turning into a social experiment instead of an economical one? :)

~~~
Kinnard
It always was a social experiment.

~~~
mads
Yes, I suppose. If I had only known back in the days, when I started mining
back in 2009 with my shiny dual Xeon workstation.

Are you Satoshi? ;)

------
thisisit
I have so many questions here:

a. I was under the impression it was Satoshi who had put in the 1 MB size
limit. This is the first attempt to increase the size. But then the article
says:

"Until now, Bitcoin has been operating by simply increasing the block size
whenever bitcoin needs to scale. This allows more transactions to process in a
single block."

These size increases were under which BIPs?

b. "....to firing current bitcoin developers and taking over bitcoin
development"

My understanding is the decentralized nature of bitcoin and the consensus
mechanism meant no one can actually be fired. The worst case scenario is that
I am stopped from accessing the bitcoin-core code repo but I can still rally
people to take up my changes and vote (consensus) on it.

d. "Inspite of this, Segwit2x people kept pushing the hard fork on the
community just to fulfill their agreement as they have the mining power
support."

Wasn't that the whole point of bitcoin? Miners are needed to do most of the
heavy lifting which means they have a say in what direction bitcoin goes.

Additionally, what is the mechanism to show the non-mining support for any of
the changes?

c. Any links which show there is support for the current chain?

~~~
funyug
a. The limit has been changed quite a few times in the past. It has both been
decreased and increased when required. I think they were soft limits which
didnt require a hard fork. I dont have links right now. Will post them as soon
as i find any.

b. You are right but their is still a maintainer of the repo that merges the
code in the repository and do releases. Core developers don't believe in
capability of segwit2x developer i.e. just Jeff Garzik to handle this task.

c. There are two pools slushpool and f2pool that are currently supporting the
original chain. Other than this several twitter polls have been done and
several meetup groups have posted articles on medium denouncing their support
for segwit2x. I am not good with saving links but I am sure you will find
several polls with a simple google search.

d. Miners are not a part of bitcoin consensus mechanism. They are a way of
safely executing the chosen decision. All issues must be raised before merging
code in the bitcoin repo. By blocking the activation of segwit for over an
year, miners lost the confidence from the community. Also around 40% of mining
power is currently controlled by Bitmain and the rest is also dependent on
them as they are the only mining hardware manufacturer.

~~~
CyberDildonics
> Miners are not a part of bitcoin consensus mechanism.

Miners ARE the bitcoin consensus mechanism. Saying anything different is
ridiculous. The miners are signaling 2MB blocks in an overwhelming majority.
[https://coin.dance/blocks](https://coin.dance/blocks)

Blockstream and 'core' are scared that the miners will finally stop using
their software and take control back of bitcoin, allowing them to expand it's
throughput to what other chains already have. This will alleviate the
ridiculous $3-$5 fees to make the smallest transaction. Before 'core' and
blockstream decided to suffocate the throughput of bitcoin so that their
company could profit off of side channels, fees were a few cents.

> just Jeff Garzik to handle this task.

This is not true at all. First, Jeff Garzik was one of the very early
developers of bitcoin before the current crop ousted the original group who
wouldn't go a long with their plan. They are the ones that took it from
something no one knew about to a working system with millions of users. It
isn't only Jeff Garzik working on this task and the 'task' is mostly raising a
number from 1 MB to 2 MB. There isn't anything technically difficult about it.

> I think they were soft limits which didnt require a hard fork.

The 1 MB limit was put in place as temporary spam protection and satoshi was
very clear about this. Bitcoin HAS hard forked before (and many other coins
have hard forked multiple times as planned upgrades that have gone perfectly
smoothly).

If you are getting your information from /r/bitcoin you should know that it is
HEAVILY censored. They ban anyone who has an opinion they don't like, they
grey list comments they don't like, they change the sort order of threads that
don't go their way, they keep their moderation logs closed and they have a
long list of rules that are arbitrarily enforced as justifications for all
their nonsense. Check out /r/btc or any other source of information, but not
/r/bitcoin, that place is 100% toxic.

Edit: Every post speaking out about /r/bitcoin usually gets rapid downvotes
with no explanation while also getting slowly upvoted over time. This seems to
be no exception.

~~~
funyug
Thanks for the presenting the other side of the argument. I have been a part
of the bitcoin community since 2013 so I am pretty aware of both sides of the
debate. I am actually a supporter of bigger blocks. But i know that we cannot
keep increasing the block size everytime we need. It is not about Jeff garzik
not being competent enough, it is about the amount of work he will have to do.
Current bitcoin developer group is huge and many developers review the same
code, work on new stuff and much more. Segwit2x havent shown anyone else other
than Jeff garzik who is going to work on Segwit2x codebase.

Both r/bitcoin and r/btc are terrible. You wont ever get a proper discussion
for bigger blocks on r/bitcoin and r/btc has basically turned into a place for
bitcoin cash and is not anyway related to bitcoin now. They even celebrate
everytime bitcoin price dumps.

~~~
philbarr
> Both r/bitcoin and r/btc are terrible

Are there good communities online for decent bitcoin discussion?

~~~
funyug
You can join us IndiaBits at [http://t.me/indiabits](http://t.me/indiabits) I
am an admin of the group and we try to keep the discussions as clean as
possible.

------
tmlee
In light of the hard fork in Bitcoin world. This graphic
[https://imgur.com/y4D0XEC](https://imgur.com/y4D0XEC) should get you up to
speed with all you need to know about the state of Bitcoin forks.

~~~
Rmilb
This graphic is useful but misses the context of past failed hardforks/attacks
such as BitcoinXT and BitcoinUnlimited.

~~~
tmlee
Good to hear that. Yeah, I think we can revisit a new version of infographic
covering those forks too someday.

------
zaarn
I don't think any of these bitcoin forks are particularly helpful to the
entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Additionally, the cult of bitcoin and the various sub-cults make it hard to
actually be interested in bitcoin as a technology without being forced to
invest ideologically by thousands of fanboys claiming all other sub-cults to
be evil.

Personally, I've moved my assets into other cryptocoins and I hope I can
weather the storm of bitcoin's inevitable and eventual collapse there.
Hopefully.

~~~
Rmilb
What do you see as the core value bitcoin provides? Outside of wild
speculation?

~~~
zaarn
It's main value lies in a mostly irreversible ledger of transactions, which in
my opinion, has the potential to disrupt atleast some parts of global
economics (online shops maybe). For international transfers, bitcoin is ahead
of the current banking system (though banks are catching up in terms of fees
and speed... or is bitcoin getting worse?)

On the other hand, bitcoin is also an interesting exercise in distributed
consensus (though blockchain/PoW consensus is largely overhyped)

Other cryptocoins have improved on all these concepts or plan to develop them.
Bitcoin might be remembered in the same way modern computer scientists
remember the Turing Machine or the Zuse Z1.

------
linuxps2
>Several polls were done and it was made clear that segwit2x had no support
from the community.

That has to be the most laughable part of the article. "Hey guys, I posted
this poll on a pro-core forum and what do you know, not a single person
supported S2X...". It's like the polls posted in /r/btc about Bitcoin Cash -
everyone in the bitcoin world lives in their own bubble and use those around
them to validate their opinions.

~~~
funyug
Here is a poll by Ryan X charles who is core opposer and a signee of the NY
agreement
[https://twitter.com/ryanxcharles/status/927568458849533952](https://twitter.com/ryanxcharles/status/927568458849533952)

~~~
linuxps2
That poll has nothing to do with support for S2X though (or more generally,
doubling the block size irrespective of the particular implementation)...
rather just which chain would get the name 'bitcoin'

------
sschueller
This is getting very messy. Already a mess trying to deal with just Bitcoin
and BitcoinCash.

~~~
127
The good thing about these Bitcoin forks is that you don't really have to do
anything if you don't want to. You can just forget about it and hold. You will
own the same amount of Bitcoin for every fork out there.

~~~
funyug
Not in this particular hard fork. If you spend coins on the other fork, it can
get replayed on the original bitcoin chain and you may lose your coins. Read
my article about replay protection linked in the article.

~~~
Beejeepa
You still own coins on both forks, but add a step to split them to another
address you control on the second fork.

------
funyug
Segwit2x has been cancelled.

