
Bitcoin Cash Starts Trading - Andrew_Quentin
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/22/bitcoin-cash-starts-trading-reaches-high-nearly-900
======
hudon
A fork like Bitcoin Cash will be a boon for the blockchain community.

There is a pretty big subset of the community that believe Bitcoin is a
panacea that will replace currencies, payment networks and so on, regardless
of how technically inferior the blockchain is to other more mature distributed
databases and networks. They believe one day, the blockchain will be just as
efficient or even more so. This subset is vocal about the urgency of
increasing Bitcoin's block size limit so that we can increase transaction
throughput as much as possible and as soon as possible.

On the other hand, most developers who have worked on Bitcoin proper (either
protocol development or Core node development) believe that Bitcoin is more
about financial sovereignty and censorship resistance, not as an in-place
replacement of PayPal or VISA. This group wants to find as many ways to scale
the blockchain without increasing the block size limit because increasing the
size of blocks puts at risk users' ability to validate the chain. This is
because larger blocks means more resources required to transmit, validate and
store blocks and if you cannot validate blocks, then you are trusting
transaction validators (miners) just like you trust PayPal. Risking the
ability to validate the chain is risking the financial sovereignty or
censorship resistance they value so much.

Regardless of how well some claim SegWit2x is doing, truth is once SegWit is
activated, we still have to face the 2x hard fork which many people in the
second camp will simply refuse to support.

Having said all this, Bitcoin Cash represents an earnest understanding that
there are two camps in Bitcoin and because of the differing economic visions,
they will have different technical visions, so why not have two chains and
evolve them independently? Rather than playing tug-of-war and both parties
being dissatisfied?

~~~
h1d
The reason is not because of the vision. Also if anyone thinks about it as a
replacement of paypal/visa, they know scaling via increased block size is not
going to cut it. 7tx/s doen't do much good if scaled linearly.

It was a flaw in the Bitcoin specification that there was a conflict of
interest between miners and users that when more blocks are filled, the more
fee the miners get, thus miners have no incentive to make the blocks less
congested.

Not sure how doubling the block size suddenly disallows users from validating
the blocks, besides, as the entire data is already around 160GB or so, none of
the mobile wallets contain the full data and are delegating much of the
credibility of the chain to others' full nodes.

Bitcoin Cash is mostly built around the Chinese mining community who have been
rejecting to activate segwit for a while since their asicboost that helps
their mining speed by 20-30% was about to become unusable, though they claim
it's not used.

And with 8MB for Bitcoin Cash it would make the chain data so large after
several years, if block spaces get filled you will be able to barely host a
node on a desktop with TBs of storage not to mention hosting on clouds would
be pretty expensive leading to centralization.

~~~
taysic
"7tx/s doen't do much good if scaled linearly"

Why not? Bitcoin Cash may be more vocal in the Chinese miner community but
there are plenty of Americans who believe in it too. The storage issue both
chains will have to deal with if they are used in any big capacity

~~~
PeterisP
Because solutions that are practical for getting 2x or 10x the capacity aren't
sufficient, since getting used in big capacity requires a vision that can give
a thousandfold increase, and increasing the block size can't ever provide that
in a practical manner.

If you want to scale a huge cliff, going to fetch a 20 feet ladder will not
help you.

~~~
jgord
I think that its quite possible that we can see scaling of 1000x on the linear
blockchain, without fundamentally changing the economic/security properties.

Increasing blocksize is just the first thing to do of many engineering
optimizations. If you want to climb Everest, you first need to reach base
camp.

Even if LN works great and scales beautifully, we will still need that 100x
increase in the blockchain that it settles on. LN itself will create
transaction demand - people aren't paying $2.50 in fees now to buy a $3 coffee
with bitcoin.

~~~
Frogolocalypse
> I think that its quite possible that we can see scaling of 1000x on the
> linear blockchain

In order for your fantasy to become a reality the tens of thousands of current
users of the core ref nodes would have to uninstall their node clients and
permanently remove their ability to ever validate their transactions on the
blockchain. That is never going to happen.

------
TD-Linux
For those unaware, "Bitcoin Cash" is a proposed future fork of Bitcoin. The
primary miner supporting it also runs an exchange, so what they are
effectively trading is "future promised coins" once they start actually mining
the fork.

Because so few of % of the total coins are tradeable, I think this results in
a similarly volatile "market cap" as many ICOs.

~~~
jeppebemad
Thank you. I was about to ask for a clarification on the below statement from
the article, but that now makes sense.

"At that point, anyone who currently has bitcoin gains the same amount of BCC,
while retaining their BTC."

~~~
runeks
> "At that point, anyone who currently has bitcoin gains the same amount of
> BCC, while retaining their BTC."

This is quite important, because it means that all Bitcoin holders effectively
are given BCC for free, which they can sell on an exchange. Thus, the BCC
market risks an immense flood of BCC sellers who very suddenly earned a tidy
profit out of nowhere, which could crash the BCC price completely, because the
market is so shallow, relative to the BTC markets.

In fact, I think this is quite likely to end up being the death of BCC: a
constant sell-pressure from BTC-cum-BCC holders, who just want to cash out in
dollars. This can end up forcing market makers out of the BCCUSD market,
because they can't risk holding too much BCC with a constant sell-pressure
like that.

The BTCUSD market has grown from a small stream to a small river and, when the
BCCUSD market opens in earnest, this small BTCUSD river will be connected to
the tiny stream that is the freshly born BCCUSD market.

------
encryptThrow32
The dangers of tx replay mean that HF's like this can never be safe. Beware
those that would tell you that these forks are safe, they are not. This is
another scam from those that would try to usurp the blockchain.

You will be able to replay original bitcoin and abc tx's on each chain, unless
you opt-in to some funny new untesed hash. This will hugely disrupt the
minority chain ABC, as the mempools on cash chain fill with other valid tx's
from main chain. Its going to be a bloodbath. Steer very clear!

From: [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-
ca...](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-cash-replay-
protection)

Bitcoin Cash (aka Bitcoin ABC aka UAHF) provides two methods of replay
protection, both of which are opt in. If you do not create transactions which
use these features, then your transactions are vulnerable to replay.

The first method is a redefined sighashing algorithm which is basically the
same as the one specified by BIP 143. This sighash algorithm is only used when
the sighash flag has bit 6 set. These transactions would be invalid on the
non-UAHF chain as the different sighashing algorithm will result in invalid
transactions. This means that in order to use this, you will need to transact
on the UAHF chain first and then on the non-UAHF chain second.

The second method uses an OP_RETURN output which has the exact string:

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System as the data of the OP_RETURN.
Any transaction which contains this string will be considered invalid by UAHF
nodes until block 530,000. This means that prior to block 530,000, you can
split your coins by transacting on the non-UAHF chain first with the OP_RETURN
output, and then transacting on the UAHF chain second.

~~~
stale2002
Uhh, protecting your transactions against replay attacks in Hard Fork
scenarios like this is a solved problem.

There are a multitude of ways to split your coins, so that they are separate,
and you don't risk selling the other chain when you don't mean to.

~~~
encryptThrow32
Solved, maybe, but apparently not in this case as the replay mitigation's are
opt-in.

What would stop someone replaying a regular tx from core chain if this network
accepts either replay protected or not tx's?

~~~
stale2002
Apparently it is 1 way protection.

So the answer is that if you spend a transaction on Core, yes, it can be
stolen on the BCC chain.

Your core chain coins aren't stolen, though.

But it is safe on the BCC chain. The only people who get screwed are the main
chain people, and NOT the BCC chain supporters/users.

So it is actually the opposite of what the original comment was claiming. It
is MORE safe to be on the BCC chain, and LESS safe on the main chain, because
the protection is 1 way.

Also, apparent segwit is not going to be activated on it, so that means that
main chain segwit transactions can be stolen.

This is actually really clever, and is borderline adversarial development.

What this means is that miners on the BCC chain will be able to steal coins
from segwit transactions on the main chain, and thus this would strongly
incentivize BCC mining, while screwing over segwit supporters.

The people who it is "unsafe" for is Core and Segwit supporters, lol!

~~~
kanzure
> The only people who get screwed are the main chain people, and NOT the BCC
> chain supporters/users.

Sounds like definitely adversarial behavior to me, not "borderline". They have
the opportunity to write secure opt-out (on-by-default) replay protection--
like by choosing a new address prefix (etc)--, and they choose not to.

Your "steal segwit coins" scenario wont work when the transaction tree is
tainted by post-fork coinbase outputs.

~~~
stale2002
Hmm? The steal segwit coins senario would work as follows:

1\. Person A does a segwit transaction and sends coins to the anyone-can-spend
output on the main chain. These coins aren't really "anyone can spend" because
segwit stops invalid transactions.

2\. The transaction gets replayed on the BCC chain. Segwit transactions work
by sending via the anyone can spend output, but since segwit is not activated
on BCC, the thefts aren't blocked, and any-can-spend really DOES mean anyone-
can-spend instead of meaning segwit.

Or am I misinterpreting how it works?

I thought that segwit uses the anyone-can-spend output in order to be
backwards compatible. That means that legacy nodes, or unupgraded nodes that
don't have segwit, are perfectly fine will "theft" transactions.

A legacy fork, that does not have segwit activated, would thus be able to
replay segwit transactions, but instead of being segwit transactions they
would just be normal, anyone can spend transactions that can be stolen.

Anyways, yeah it is adversarial development.

But the other side was planning on doing the same kind of stuff, with User
Activated Soft Fork, and POW changes. User activated soft fork threatens the
other side with theft by doing a Wipeout of the other chain.

This stuff could have been solved much earlier if Core just compromised and
merged the 4MB blocksize increase.

~~~
kanzure
> Or am I misinterpreting how it works?

I had mentioned specifically post-fork coinbase output taint; if it's tainted,
there's no way to replay, that's in fact one of the proposed replay protection
mechanisms (unfortunately it's of the "opt-in" variety).

~~~
stale2002
Ahh, yeah, of course. If you taint it. But if you don't taint and don't opt
in, then it can be stolen.

So yes, if you are on the Core chain, you can protect against replay, but only
if you opt in. If you don't opt in, then they can be stolen on the other
chain.

------
eterm
Is there a crypto voting ring? I understand why most crypto articles reach the
top 10 posts but this one has nothing going for it.

* Niche website linked / breaking the news

* Non-mainstream crypto-fork

* No novel interest / features

There's nothing to suggest why this would be upvoted, even among this crypto-
friendly crowd.

~~~
thinbeige
I think that crypto news are still underrepresented on HN. The recent crypto
topics (such as ICOs, Solidity, Tezos, EOS, ETH's Parity which is btw written
in Rust) surge in word-wide traffic outperforming last year trends (AI, bots,
VR) by far.

I hunt for respective news on other sites because HN just provides the most
important crypto news. There's a lot more out there, it's new and complex.
It's good to read stuff multiple times from different sources to get familiar
with this new world order.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
....Just to double-check, you're serious right?

~~~
thinbeige
Yes, I am. There's also a lot of scam out there, almost every ICO feels like
scam, but still. The more serious stuff catches such a huge attention, just
the ecosystem around ETH got so big and mature (despite some recent exploits)
that it's hard to ignore this space.

Just compare: not just few projects raised funds within days a startup would
take months. If this is the future? IDK. But I know it's 10x better than how
fundraising was before. And this is just one part of the crypto space.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I'm not saying cryptocurrencies aren't interesting, I'm just saying you're
overstating their case relative to other technologies and the novelty (eg,
that it even is novel, as opposed to normal engineering on top of ideas that
have been around decades) in saying that it's underrepresented.

(Also, AI and bots are the _same_ topic, but that's a tangent.)

I would argue we should hear about them _less_ than automated truck driving
specifically, based on potential economic impact and current spending levels.

(Which, actually, seems to be about the trend -- we see small bursts of a few
stories a day when a major event happens, but otherwise, it's mostly just a
low murmur among other things.)

~~~
Atheros
Have there been any recent developments with automated truck driving? Has
anything actually _happened_? We all agree that automated transportation will
have an Enormous effect on society. It's been talked about a lot before. But
stuff is actually happening today in Bitcoinland.

Currently the #8 position on the HN front page is an article about Dell
releasing a new monitor.

------
saurik
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hko7c/viabtc_will...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hko7c/viabtc_will_allow_you_to_trade_your_segwit_coins/)

^ Here is some information (mostly in the form of a fragment of a video, but
also to a much much lesser extent some comments) on what seems to be earlier
versions of this plan, which I found useful for context (though I haven't
spent the time to work this all out in my head yet...).

------
Artlav
That sounds like a massive scam, in it's pumping stage.

~~~
h1d
Find who's behind and you will know it's not a scam. Not that I support such a
large block though.

~~~
Artlav
Yes, the same guys who were behind "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bitcoin
Unlimited" and other similar scams. Can't see why this one should be any
different.

------
unabridged
If you're going to fork bitcoin it should be to change the algorithm so 5 chip
companies don't control the entire mining process.

------
SeriousM
As a bitcoin newbie, I'm even more confused now as before and I don't know if
I should start with bitcoin at all..

~~~
CyberDildonics
Just make sure to read /r/btc and either ignore /r/bitcoin or know that both
/r/bitcoin and bitcoin talk are heavily censored and manipulated. Hacker News
has some of the same absurdities that pop up, but it isn't as bad. The big
question is, do you think 13KB/s AT MOST is too much for your internet
connection and computer to handle? Right now it is 1/8th of that, and the
/r/bitcoin and 'small blocker' narrative is that anything more is a disaster.
Simple math and even slight experience with bitcoin shows that it is
exceptionally more likely that this is to create a problem that the company,
blockstream, that pays all the gate keepers to the 'core' implementation, can
then solve.

~~~
Frogolocalypse
> do you think 13KB/s AT MOST is too much for your internet connection

You've quoted this number many times now, and it is completely incorrect. The
upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an absolute
minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size.

The things you're saying are the kind of things that people who really don't
have any clue of the resources required by a node would say. In fact, it's
pretty clear you don't run a node, have never run a node, and will never run a
node. So your opinion as to the security requirements of bitcoin should be
viewed in that context.

~~~
CyberDildonics
That is what it would take to sync with the chain.

> The upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an
> absolute minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size.

That doesn't make any sense, it depends on how many people are downloading
from you. By the way, you do realize that millions of people upload and
download far more than this from torrents right? How can you even say these
things with a straight face, they make no sense.

> The things you're saying are the kind of things that people who really don't
> have any clue of the resources required by a node would say.

You keep saying I don't know what I'm talking about, but I run half a dozen
unlimited and classic nodes, they cost next to nothing. I run one off my phone
with a 256GB micro sd card.

Do you really think you can't pay $15 USD per month and run even a single full
node? A node doesn't even come REMOTELY close to taking up the resources of
the cheapest VPS out there. How can anyone take you seriously when you say
things like this?

~~~
Frogolocalypse
> > The upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an
> absolute minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size.

> That doesn't make any sense

To you, I'm sure that's the case. Good thing the people who actually maintain
the network through the validation of full nodes have a better understanding
than you.

> the cheapest VPS out there.

So your solution to pressures of centralization is to use a centralized
service for decentralization?

~~~
CyberDildonics
> To you, I'm sure that's the case. Good thing the people who actually
> maintain the network through the validation of full nodes have a better
> understanding than you.

I said it depends on how many people are connected and that it is such a
trivial amount that it barely matters. Do you want to confront that?

> So your solution to pressures of centralization is to use a centralized
> service for decentralization?

How is -one option- to running a full node by paying for a cheap VPS
centralization in any respect?

After you explain that, why don't you explain how there is so much torrent
traffic zipping around the internet if this is such a big problem. Before
streaming video and netflix, torrents were a major part of the internet's
bandwidth. Completely decentralized and on a completely different scale of
bandwidth, even over a decade ago. Are you going to explain why that was
possible and this is impossible?

~~~
Frogolocalypse
> I said it depends on how many people are connected and that it is such a
> trivial amount that it barely matters.

And I provided evidence that contradicts that unfounded belief.

> How is -one option- to running a full node by paying for a cheap VPS
> centralization in any respect?

If you have to explain that, you don't even have a concept of what
decentralization means.

> why don't you explain how there is so much torrent traffic zipping

Because people don't care if their torrent takes a few hours to download,
where in a multi-agent system with rigorous consensus rules, it's important
that nodes are aligned as quickly as possible, because bitcoin block-
propagation is an adversarial system that leads to orphaning, and potential
loss of funds, when nodes aren't aligned. Yet again, to have to explain this
O.o

You really don't understand this bitcoin thing at all. Like _at all._

~~~
CyberDildonics
This all boils down to you trying hard not to say anything so you don't have
to confront the hard numbers I gave you. You keep saying 'you don't
understand' but that rings pretty hollow when you can't give any evidence that
anything I've said is wrong.

------
cjnicholls
way back link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175223/http://www.trustn...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175223/http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/22/bitcoin-
cash-starts-trading-reaches-high-nearly-900)

------
arisAlexis
This is a no go im impressed by the upvotes i think HN community is not well
informed on the subject

------
ZeusNuts
I don't think this is a joke, but it should be. Forking a chain will never
result in value-added.

~~~
bdcravens
Litecoin is the oldest fork of Bitcoin, and arguably it adds value (with
shorter confirmation times)

~~~
encryptThrow32
fork in codebase, not fork in chain. mutually exclusive genesis blocks and
different proof of work algorithms. Its like its little silver brother!

