Topic: can someone point me to hard (objective) technical evidence AGAINST SegWit? - page 3. (Read 2666 times)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.18177918


There's nothing slanderous about stating facts. And what I stated was a fact; the programmer who devised FlexTrans and xThin produced poor designs with large quantities of bugs that are sufficiently bad that they span the broad codebase in the case of FlexTrans i.e. bugs that are essential aspects of the actual overall design, and so cannot be fixed without using a different design altogether.


designing incompetently is incompetent. Pointing that out is not impugning someone's reputation, it's an important part of what their true reputation actually is. But sure, keep shrieking about ad hominem attacks when you simply don't like the facts the other party presents, go right ahead

I very much think that this will be the case, but bitcoin's price will not be affected negatively by that.  Bitcoin's price is not determined by people doing on chain transactions, but by people gambling on exchanges, and that doesn't need a solution for on chain transactions.  You will never have problems getting your coins on or from an exchange, because these exchanges will have bought chain room with their preferred mining pools.  You simply won't be able to do anything else.  At that point, bitcoin became a reserve currency which is in any case its fate.  But it can hold a very high price.

Are you referring to this? As far as I understand, that are simple bugs which with some testing could be surely resolved. If there are fundamental problems with FlexTrans please share links to them.

(I am neutral, for now, I prefer Segwit; but if its easiear to achieve consensus with miners for FlexTrans as a malleability/quadratic hashing fix, I would have no problem with it).

Ad hominem won't help in finding a solution. If we stay on this discussion level, in one year we'll have still no LN (/Thunder/Rootstock etc.) neither a blocksize increase - and sub-500 Bitcoin prices again (and very probably, some kind of fork).

I think it is the "immutability consensus mechanism" at work: the protocol remains what it is, because people cannot agree upon a change that would give advantages to some, and disadvantages to others.  That's why the block chain is not unwound (it would give advantages to some, and disadvantages to others) ; it is why the block halving happens (advantages to coin holders, disadvantages to miners)... and why the number of transactions per second is not modified (advantages to users, disadvantage to fee collectors).

Of course, this appears like "political battles" between those that have advantages and disadvantages for each possible modification, but this is exactly what maintains status quo (immutability consensus).

I think he's just trying to prove a point. It's a political debate rather than a technological one. People are just dick measuring and want to make sure they win no matter what. It's been years. Just hard fork it ffs.

OP, maybe you are wasting your time. Segwit has been out for 6+ months and the masses aren't buying it - it's around 99.9% certain that it will not be adopted before the deadline. Even if repackaged with a blocksize increase compromise it's likely Segwit won't get adopted. In one sentence: It's just too radical a departure from Satoshi's orginal vision, gives too much clout to Blockstream, and creates too much technical debt.

Literally all experts in the field are advocating for segwit and lightning network, the ones that don't always have BU-ties.

I would respect that someone finds segwit unsafe for some reason, but I can't when everytime someone claims segwit will be the end of the world, they are on the other hand supporting BUchina which is insane.

Both FlexTrans and xThin were written by the same member of the Classic team, that's correct. And in no way does that contradict what I said at all, you're confused

Are you referring to the assert bug? The FlexTrans developer had nothing to do with that.

FlexTrans is technology from BitCoin Classic, not Bitcoin Unlimited.

No, not really.  You simply have to be a "customer" to a local LN bank ; that is, having opened a LN channel with them, under their commercial conditions, and send your transactions through them each time you want to spend your coins.   Like normal banking.

One could do that using multi sig transactions today, and no-one does. It's an attack that costs alot of money compared to it's effectiveness, hence it doesn't happen in practice. Filling every single block with nothing but attack transactions would cost a fortune, the attacker would push the Bitcoin price to the moon all by themselves in order to pay the fees to do it. Only the ultra rich could do it, and it seems they're not interested to throw that amount of money away.


That attack is possible now. The ratio of signature to tx-data can be expanded massively in a regular 1MB block, DoS'ing block space from people who wnat to use it benignly. Segregating the signatures doesn't alter an attackers ability to do this at all. It falls into the same category as the attack in your first paragraph, far too expensive to do, except for the ultra rich.

You should try to understand Segwit better before you make such ill-considered assessments.


There are huge problems with FlexTrans that you've demonstrated already you prefer to ignore. Let's not forget that FlexTrans was designed by the same incompetent who gave us xThin block propagation, which carried not 1 but 2 fatal bugs, 1 of which was recently exploited to BU's demise.

Snake oil can be freely sold in the Marketplace sub-board, I hope your business goes well  

Even if SegWit were technically perfect, it doesn't actually provide a meaningful scaling solution.  The notion that SegWit is for scaling is totally absurd.  That is the technical evidence against.  

What SegWit does is provide a means for Lightning to work with the blockchain.  Some patches for malebility.  Lightning - a very stupid scaling solution that is proprietary will radically change the network in favor of private ownership of a bulk of the traffic.  Blockstream.  Even if SegWit were without technical fault, it is not, its true function is to enable Lightning.  

Bitcoin/Lightning strategy omits a HUGE class of transactions.  Those transactions which are small in value and one-time only.  'Payment channels' are great when you want to do many microtransactions.  But Lightning does work well for those situations where you want to do a one time small payment - like buy a cup of coffee.  Then you are screwed and the network fails.  

Don't worry.  Many wonderful off chain solutions will come.  However, they should not come because one private company is intentionally limiting the transaction capacity so they can sell their private off chain scaling solution.  


The technical evidence against SegWit - it doesn't actually provide any appreciable scaling solution.  It is merely a needed patch for Lightning to work.  

My biggest objection is that by splitting the transaction it makes it very difficult to have meaninful block size increases.

If you do not increase the max block size, it makes it possible to spam the blockchain with traditional transactions so that not even SegWit transactions make it in.

But if you do increase the max block size to make that harder, then it is possible to spam the blockchain with SegWit transactions that are really heavy on the witness data causing blocks that take a lot more space. For example with the current 1MB blocks you could craft SegWit transactions that result in 4 MB of actual data, which is far greater than what most people are currently proposing.

If instead of segregating the witness data to become part of the coinbase, you use something like FlexTrans - then when you set a max block size, that is the actual max block size whether the transactions use FlexTrans or not.

That first link looks very good and the sort of thing the OP is looking for. My quick take on it is that the risks he raises look manageable and defenses against the manipulation he illustrates can be implemented (such as Bob's client monitoring for just this sort of activtiy and giving warning dialogues if it sees anything suspicious).

The second link doesn't raise actual issues so much as rave about how "dangerous" Core's approach is - a complaint that appears ludicrous in light of yesterday's BU troubles. It wastes a lot of time on premature triumphalism and childish cheerleading, the sort that makes r/btc look like a propaganda effort rather than a serious discussion forum. It would also be much more readable if the author had stopped repeatedly declaring how "open minded" he is for first liking and then disliking SW.  

https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179#.mcr2xiqez


https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5vbofp/initially_i_liked_segwit_but_then_i_learned/

anyone? no?

I could find none. Only political whimsical yadda yadda.
In order to exclude a cognitive BIAS, I hereby ask to be pointed to $SUBJECT.



Rico