Topic: [2017-05-24]Bitcoin Scaling Agreement Officially Met: Segwit + 2MB Hard Fork (Read 11261 times)

I assume that you're referring to the period of mostly 60 days that allows whatever entity to charge back? In most cases this is only a concern to selling parties, and not so much to the buyers. Buyers just walk into a store, complete the payment, and then walk out with the goods. In this matter, the usability of credit cards hold still the main advantage when it comes to purchasing stuff.

Easy mining ended over 5 years ago, even 7 years depending on just how easy.

Confirmation time on a credit card is on the order of months - that is much slower than 10 minutes.

With the average time between blocks of 10 minutes bitcoin was never supposed to be lightning fast, any credit card or cash is faster than bitcoin when making transactions face to face, bitcoin really shines when it comes to sending money over long distances at a low cost but the mining fees keep getting higher because there are too many transactions going on.

No. THIS does not mean that. Monopoly in btc mining is about its dumb hashing algorithm which is conquered by ASIC. As a 'regular user', you better to forget about mining and stick to btc trading.

Does this basically mean monopoly in btc mining and no chance for regular user to mine for any meaningful fee? (newbie)

*sigh*

Neither 4MB Segwit (proposed by Core devs) or 8MB Segwit (proposed by the BarryCoin cartel) do anything to scale Bitcoin. Scaling can happen as a consequence, but neither do anything to change the scale the Bitcoin network runs at, we need actual efficiency gains to achieve that, and none of these 2 Segwit proposal improve the efficiency of the Bitcoin network at all

Won't happen. Bitcoin core will block consensus. They have said they never
will back a hard fork block increase, because it is not backward compatible like
a soft fork. Thus imho, they will push thru UASF to the miners dismay and get
more decentralized bitcoin at the miners expense to boot.

Miners only choice then is to fork. But again, imho with USAF consensus say
likely, as the reason to do this, miners could find themselves with an alt and
Bitcoin just moves away ....leaving them stranded in a bad no win position when
the emotions settle.

Again I know zip. Just how it seems in a risk/reward manner to me. Much risk and
little chance it would work.

If they got rid of hard fork and were assured a soft fork bump, with input, after
Seq Witness, 2mb say, that, again imho COULD fly.

This is in the good direction. Scalability issue need to be resolved urgently so bitcoin can be better adopted easily.

I was just reading through what it says on the DCG website.  Here's an interesting point about altcoins in one of their employees' articles recently:

It's great to see that DCG is trying their best to get Bitcoin scaling happening soon instead of running off to whatever altcoin seems shiniest at the time.

Wow! It is World War II and they have defeated the enemy! Congrats heroes ... but what about those 50 million bodies and billions of dollars damages and god knows how much lost opportunities?

Heh?  What the f*?

Pools will have to switch over to the majority as they otherwise risk wasting a huge amount of resources for nothing. Pools that play hard to get right now will not take that risk, and thus will follow the rest. And yes, even Ver and Jihan will have to admit their 'defeat'.

Things are already approaching the level of insanity for Bitcoin scaling problem. It is about time that Bitcoin stakeholders show the whole world that they are up for the challenge. Bitcoin is supposed to be faster than lightning and cost-efficient but what is happening right now is damned the opposite.

We are used to, already.

Know what? I'm thinking of a new chain with the same code base , fine tuned parameters and, most importantly, tweaked algo to put this ASIC owner corporates out. Let them pay core devs we will just use their codes.

Don't be afraid, you will learn to like being controlled by a corporation paying the devs.

What happens to the other %20 if not activate will die off or could they keep mining on another chain?

I think it is best if all the %100 miners+nodes agree on the change and activate for everyone's benefit.

Barry Silbert-led Digital Currency Group (DCG), arguably the most prominent investment firm in the bitcoin and blockchain industries, revealed that miners and businesses came to a consensus to solve bitcoin’s underlying scaling issue.

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On May 23, DCG announced that a group of companies representing the bitcoin industry and community with 83.3 percent of hashing power, 20.5 million bitcoin wallets and 5.1 billion on-chain transaction volume, agreed to the activation of the Bitcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability fix Segregated Witness (Segwit) and a 2MB hard fork within six months thereafter.

The planned execution of a 2MB hard fork is a crucial compromise that needs to considered and acknowledged in this agreement. Initially, On February 21, at the Hong Kong Bitcoin Roundtable event, the mining community and bitcoin industry agreed upon the execution of a hard fork to expand the bitcoin block size to 2MB and address the network’s growing user base and daily transaction volume.

“This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community. We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core,” read the agreement.

However, when the Bitcoin Core development team allocated its resources and time solely in the development and activation of Segwit, a conflict arose between the mining and development communities. Mining pools, especially those operated by Chinese companies including Bitmain and ViaBTC, felt that the Bitcoin Core development team as well as the industry abandoned the Hong Kong agreement without first conducting a discussion with the mining community.
Compromise Reached

Today, DCG announced that a compromise between the mining community and industry has been made. In return for the activation of Segwit by, the industry has agreed on the execution of a 2MB hard fork, which would further expand the bitcoin blockchain’s capacity.

Ultimately, the recently made consensus amongst miners and businesses can be referred back to the original Hong Kong Roundtable agreement wherein miners agreed to “only run Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems, eventually containing both SegWit and the hard-fork, in production, for the foreseeable future.”

The Bitcoin Scaling Agreement at Consensus 2017 essentially represents the identical vision miners always had, which is, respect the mining community’s request for on-chain capacity increase and it will support solutions of the Bitcoin Core development team, including Segwit.

Aside from the execution of the Segwit2MB proposal, which entails the activation of Segwit at an 80 percent threshold and the activation of a 2MB hard fork, miners and businesses that participated in the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement at Consensus 2017 stated that more technical mechanisms will be developed to optimize and further improve the Bitcoin network.

“We are also committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve signaling in the bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the design, integration, and deployment of safe solutions that increase bitcoin capacity,” read the agreement.

The Bitcoin industry’s decision to conduct the 2MB hard fork to increase the current bitcoin block size cap isn’t merely a compromise developed to convince the mining community to support Segwit. Currently, Bitcoin has a severe blockchain congestion problem with which users are struggling to transact even with optimal and high fees.

Segwit is expected to result in 75 percent optimization of current bitcoin blocks. However, based on bitcoin’s exponential growth in terms of user base and daily transactions, within six months or a year, Segwit’s scaling solution may not be sufficient to address bitcoin’s evolving scaling issue. Hence, the 2MB hard fork is a relatively long window of time for the Bitcoin Core development team, the industry and mining community to figure out the next steps to take in order to scale Bitcoin.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-officially-met-segwit-2mb-hard-fork/