
A Thinking Person's Guide to the Latest Bitcoin Drama - deegles
http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/04/05/bitcoin-drama-response/
======
sciurus
"Greg Maxwell ... announced that a certain chip contained the ASICBOOST
optimization, and suggested a BIP that involves a Segwit-style commitment,
which in practice would be coupled for a call to activate Segwit."

If, like me, you didn't understand any of that sentence, I've found what I
think is a more useful guide: [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/breaking-
down-bitcoins-...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/breaking-down-
bitcoins-asicboost-scandal-solutions/)

~~~
sayurichick
"Treat any [gmaxwell] posts with extreme suspicion.." "He rationalizes his
opinion as the only one that matters,.."

-Andreas Antonopoulos : [http://i.imgur.com/UzMFKgZ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UzMFKgZ.jpg)

~~~
bdcravens
You're appealing to authority while assuming that the conventional HN reader
automatically knows who Andreas is.

------
sayurichick
Here are some interesting facts.

-Theymos (Michael Marquardt) controls all the major bitcoin communication channels from r/bitcoin, to bitcointalks, as well as the core slack channel, and the bitcoin mailing list (being the person who sniped bitcoin.org).

\- Every Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) used to have some specs to follow
before being introduced to the community to be discussed and possibly merged
in. This is how things have always been since the start. That is, until SegWit
(a softfork implementation by Blockstream that fundamentally changes Bitcoin
to benefit Blockstream ).

\- SegWit gets its own website, it's own logo, and if you have been following
the news the past 5 or 6 months, you'll also notice its been shoved down the
community's throat as if it were god's gift to man.

\- Segwit is a solution to fit whatever narrative needed at the time. From a
"blocksize increase" to the scaling debate, to a "malleability fix" to a
"quadratic hash fix" to blah blah blah.. It's a fix for all the things for all
the things except the one thing we need right NOW, and that is a scaling fix.

\- New Users are tricked into believing that the "economic majority" are in
support of segwit, but this is due to not being able to speak out against
segwit (see point 1 about major communications being controlled ).

\- All the drama is actually about forcing segwit into bitcoin.

\- Blockstream owns patents which they claim they have no plans on using
offensively.

\- If Segwit were introduced as a softfork (dangerous), it would be almost
impossible to undo in the future versus a hard fork (which requires
consensus).

~~~
sanswork
>a softfork implementation by Blockstream that fundamentally changes Bitcoin
to benefit Blockstream

How does it benefit Blockstream?

~~~
stale2002
Blockstream is working on the lightning network, something that greatly
benefits from segwit.

~~~
kobeya
Blockstream has said that their work on Lightning is purely for the benefit of
the community -- they hired a known open source developer and gave him free
reign to develop his implementation of Lightning (there are 5 competing
implementations from other organizations!) in the open, on github, with public
purview and no strings attached. It is not covered by any patents by
Blockstream, and written to be compatible with a community agreed upon
standard. It is a fully peer-to-peer protocol with no central clearing house.

So explain to me how Blockstream benefits?

~~~
stale2002
Blockstream benefits because the company is doing lightning network
consulting.

That is their entire business model. If the lightning network doesn't come to
fruition, their company is screwed.

~~~
sanswork
So their entire business model is lightning which came around 2 years after
they launched? How did they convince investors to give them $76m prior to
their entire business model existing?

------
Animats
So somebody invented a hardware optimization that provides a 20% improvement
in mining power. Big deal. Bitcoin miners with a close connection to an ASIC
fab, or who are close to a cheap power plant, have a bigger edge than that.

Now if someone comes up with a way that gives a much larger improvement, like
an order of magnitude or two, that's a game-changer. But 20% is not.

~~~
kylebenzle
Exactly, this is not a "big deal" for Bitcoin users or Miners, but for Bitcoin
Core Developers this is like a golden ticket. The "Core" Bitcoin
implementation, headed by CTO (of BS) Greg Maxwell is currently being
overtaken in popularity by the "Unlimited" implementation in mining power.
Most of the Bitcoin community (by hashing power) support larger sized blocks
and on chain scaling. Greg's BS company is trying to sell a solution called
"off-chain scaling" which is only necessary if the block size is not
increased.

One of the largest chip manufactures in the Bitcoin space supports Bitcoin
growing on its own and not depending on a 2nd layer support system that is
known as "SegWit". This is why Greg and his company are spending untold sums
(like hiring Twitter hype man Samson Mow recently) pushing SegWit Code (which
is copyrighted by BS) onto bitcoin, by trying to destory the competitioin with
bull shit like saying there is a remote access bug, or some miners are
"cheating" by optimizing their chips...

Bottom Line. ALL of the superficial infighting you see in the Bitcoin space
right now is over scaling on chain as inventor Satoshi Nakamoto intended or
using a patented second layer developed by BlockStream, Greg Maxwell's
company. Most devs in the know, of course, support Bitcoin scaling on its own,
but Blockstream is well funded and laser focused on getting their patent code
into the Bitcoin codebase and any cost necessary.

~~~
9BillionMistake
It is funny how much "support" a little money can buy.

My experiance is that a lot of "Core/SegWit supporters" don't really
understand at first that Unlimited is trying to help Bitcoin continue what
Satoish intended. They have been feed lies through the toxic reddit/r/bitcoin
site that they assume if you are against "Core" you are attacking their
beloved Bitcoin.

Just like Trump, Core has cornered the market on support from the under-
educated and in both cases the tactic seems to be working.

~~~
elznebelyk
No need to delve into politics for an apt metaphor.

No one ever lost betting against the stupidity of people.

~~~
refulgentis
For me, the second sentence parses into the opposite of what you mean

------
nosuchthing
This is a nice case study in the power balance within a cryptocoin ecosystem.

    
    
      1. Developers
      2. Miners
      3. Users
      4. Hardware manufactures
    

Also funny to hear ASIC hardware targeting BTC only becomes a fresh news story
now that a single hardware manufacture has a monopoly on optimization to
exploit the algo via a patent.

ASIC optimizations against BTC were an early complaint, and that's a major
reason for LiteCoin and other cryptocoin designs attempt to solve in various
ways.

Even if the developers choose not to address this exploit, the users and
miners could just jump ship to any of the other more advanced cyptocoin
designs.

~~~
vkou
> Even if the developers choose not to address this exploit, the users and
> miners could just jump ship to any of the other more advanced cyptocoin
> designs.

Yes, just like Americans will jump ship to the SUDO-Dollar, because its
printing presses have a technically better implementation then the US-Dollar.
People who own billions in US-Dollars are probably chomping at the bit to
transact in a technically better currency. :)

They most certainly could, but unless their investment in BTC will become
worthless tomorrow, they most probably won't.

~~~
nosuchthing
Your analogy is a complete false equivalence.

Different cryptocoin designs have very significant differences in feature sets
and algorithms. There is much more difference than name, or "printing press
implementation(..?)"

------
xg15
Bitcoin noob here, but I'd like someone to explain:

> _Building more efficient mining chips is what miners are supposed to do, as
> it secures the blockchain._

The first part (each miner has motivation to mine as efficient as possible) is
obvious. But how does that benefit the blockchain as a whole?

So a miner implements a way to find, with fewer operations, a hash with the
required difficulty properties. Next iteration, the system adjusts the
difficulty to keep the number of signed blocks per time unit roughly the same,
effectively undoing the optimization.

If each miner had their own blockchain (with the new difficulty) then an
optimizing miner could now sign about as many blocks as they could before
while a non-optimizing miner could mine less blocks.

Because in reality, they all share the same blockchain, the optimizing miners
instead take over the blocks that the non-optimizing miners are not anymore
able to sign.

Woudn't that lead to more centralisation of miners in the end?

~~~
davidgerard
> Woudn't that lead to more centralisation of miners in the end?

This happened long ago. These days you need chip designers to compete.

------
RichardHeart
"Counter to popular opinion, empty blocks help bury other blocks and thus
provide security. (Thanks to the ever insightful Dan Robinson of Chain for
bringing this up!)"

Empty blocks are almost equivalent to a successful 10 min DOS attack on the
network. The Poisson distribution and network hasing power overshoots affect
whether it is really likely to be 10 minutes of DOS or not, plus a very small
amont for empty blocks not being orphaned as often. Then you could subtract
from the harm that a block even empty has perhaps the smallest of value for
burying the last block, while still being a denial of service to the new
blocks that some other block would have loved to have buried the transactions
of.

It takes a twisted logic to love ones denial of service.

------
iplaw
Hypothetically, what if someone developed a paradigm-shifting quantum computer
that was able to near-instantaneously compute solutions and mint BTC for some
finite amount of time? Would those BTC be invalid? Would the mining community
say that it wasn't fair? Seems to me like miners always chase optimizations,
from CPU to GPU to FPGA ...

~~~
Animats
That's essentially what happened when custom hardware ASIC vendors and Bitcoin
mining companies got together. Right now, the top 5 mining pools, all in
China, control more than 50% of the hash rate. At one point, one pool had
almost 50%, but they split up, or at least pretended to. Mining outside an
organized mining pool is down to about 1% of hash rate.

The original vision was that end users would do Bitcoin mining as a background
task on their CPU, and mining would be highly distributed. That's totally
dead.

------
mquander
It seems to me like this is a natural thing to happen in a political system
where a large minority is sufficient to block changes, but not pursue changes
that they prefer. If the minority wants to have their concerns heard, they are
incentivized to block changes that the majority wanted as leverage.

------
wmf
Previous related HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14073062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14073062)

