
Segregated Witness, Part 2: Nitty-Gritty Technical Trick - mrb
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/segregated-witness-part-why-you-should-care-about-a-nitty-gritty-technical-trick-1450827675
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3dfan
It's crazy how currently all kind of "tricks" are being invented that would
make Bitcoin more complicated.

Great hackers who had a real world impact always excelled at making small,
logical systems. And avoided adding complexity to achieve short term fixes.

The logical solution to scale up Bitcoin is the new Bitcoin Unlimited client.
I would be very surprised if it did not get traction. I expect it to become
the new standard client.

It will be super interesting to see if other, incompatible solutions get
traction at the same time and we will see a real world split of the
blockchain. My guess: This will not happen. The pulling power of the most
popular client will be so strong that everybody flocks to it. And alternative
clients will have close to zero usage.

~~~
deftnerd
I agree that the Bitcoin Unlimited client is pretty great.

In the end, it might not be enough. Ever since BlockStream poached so many
Bitcoin developers with commit access and ran off the others, they've decided
that their business model will be to change the Bitcoin protocol to be the
plumbing of their commercial offerings.

Why they didn't fork and just build their own private change like all the
other upcoming bank blockchains is beyond me.

They've stated that their goal is that Bitcoin become the settlement layer for
their "Lightning Network" and drive away all use through increased transaction
fees.

I'm personally a Bitcoin believer and it's disheartening.

~~~
3dfan

        They've stated that their goal is that Bitcoin become
        the settlement layer for their "Lightning Network"
        and drive away all use through increased
        transaction fees.
    

What is the URL of this statement?

~~~
deftnerd
"Right now our focus is on building out the base infrastructure so that there
is actually a place to build the revenue producing business we'd like to have,
and then we hope to circulate that back into building more good technology."
\- Greg Maxwell (nullc)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2k3u97/we_are_bitcoin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2k3u97/we_are_bitcoin_sidechain_paper_authors_adam_back/clhoo7d)

"A lot of people think that Lightning is supposed to be some separate thing as
well, but that's also planned to be transparently added to Bitcoin Core at
some point. " \- Michael Marquardt (theymos)

"without an effective block limit and a functioning fee market the rational
fee level is ~0; since POW security can adapt to any level, difficulty can
fall to zero if fees are only paying for cpu and bandwidth, and then the
system is left insecure" \- Greg Maxwell (nullc)
[https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/358dz7/a_nondevs_pe...](https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/358dz7/a_nondevs_personal_view_of_the_block_limit/cr2d58n)

"Fees approach zero without block constraints. Therefore, we need a low
blocksize limit and layer 2 solutions like Lightning." \- Lightning Network
dev Joseph Poon
[https://youtu.be/fst1IK_mrng?t=1h31m29s](https://youtu.be/fst1IK_mrng?t=1h31m29s)

"Some people have called the prospect of limited block space and the
development of a fee market a change in policy compared to the past. I
respectfully disagree with that. " \- Pieter Wuille
[http://cointelegraph.com/news/114966/garzik-predicts-
chaos-i...](http://cointelegraph.com/news/114966/garzik-predicts-chaos-if-
changes-made-to-both-fee-structure-and-block-size)

Just a few I found in 10 minutes.

~~~
3dfan
Thank you!

