Topic: Electrum Developer Thomas Voegtlin: Bitcoin Unlimited Is Not a Good Idea (Read 2441 times)

Well I don't want to get into their politics but one thing that I know is that BU was a bad idea and shouldn't have been introduced let alone implement it.

That happened years ago when Satoshi quit because Gavin went to the CIA.

It happened again when Gmaxwell got rid of Gavin, Hearn, and Garzik.

Maybe it's Maxwell's turn to take a fall? Or maybe development is done?

That's the way Bitcoin was originally intended to be according to Satoshi.  Big blocks, big nodes, and on chain scaling.

Sure with smaller blocks, node cost increases will be reduced, but you will be forced off the main chain and you'll instead be using KYC/AML LN nodes ran by AXA/Bilderberg funded Blockstream. 

Can you add any substance behind this assertion? When I first looked at the issue, there was definitely issues in the xthin code, which affected other versions which had ported it as well. I did wonder if the code could have been tightened up further upstream. Latest BU still doesn't seem stable though.

This is why I can't take you off my shill list (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.18699636) yet, this single-minded, obsessive big block support.

That's not the thing that crashed the BTU nodes. It was their own code. We are still waiting for you to link the fix.

That's what the other side wants to do. They want to "wear out" the people that are spreading the truth in order to manipulate more newcomers into their bullshit. It's kind of like Jehovah witnesses.

Miners do not decide what Bitcoin is or isn't. Your % of support is useless considering that the users do not want it.

It is really hard to convince the miners ,especially big mining farms as they have spent million and they wants the mining industry and the whole bitcoin coin platform to favor their chances rather than the other way round and with the incentives really high in the case of bitcoin ,it is really hard to come to an agreement like litecoin did. The drama will continue and i am not even sure when and how a solution will be reached.

It's the miners you need to convince.   I actually see progress because now 50% support for big blocks and looks like bip 100 making a comeback.

You really cannot pin point who is at fault in this case,yes it will be centralized when bitcoin unlimited rolls in because the major investors had a major say and who is to complain because they have spent millions in mining activities and they are simply safe guarding their cash cow business,it might not be best for bitcoin but it is best for their business.Almost everyone was behind their bandwagon for some time and now they started realizing after the bugs they had in their software which i think mainly damaged their reputation.

Don't you guys get tired of this constant battling back and forth? Its the same people bickering back and forth the same shit over and over and it gets us nowhere.

We need to come together and push for an agreement like Litecoin has for SegWit now and bigger blocks later when a certain threshold is reached with SegWit blocks.

Be it 50%, 75% full or whatever can be agreed upon.

The shilling needs to stop.

You guys need to stop double/ triple posting.

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What made someone to fork Core and create BU in 2015? back then there was no SW and as we can see in these 2 years Core managed to hold the entire network together.
I want the reason for BU in 2015 what was the reason? if answer is banks were trying to buy Core team then that's just another lie.

core ammended a few of them in 0.13 but didnt think to edit 0.12 with a patch.
core just release a new version but dont patch old versions. leaving older version vulnerable

Where did Core patch it then? or is it still vulnerable?

because core didnt advertise how to attack their own..

but did advertise how to attack others.

major difference

Emergent consensus has nothing to do with the standard block size limit of 1 MB. The former can and will lead to many chain organizations (or possibly even network splits).

I don't see >90% of the Core nodes being taken down within the same day. Therefore, this is just another example of the dishonesty of the franky1 troll.

There were 2 assert bugs (actually there were WAY more than that as seen in the article I linked, but only 2 were 'exploited'). The other bug was 6 lines below the xthin bug. Neither of them affected Core....

Show me the proof the issue existed in Core
Show me where Core patched the issue

there were many assert bugs..
hense why core were real quick to advertise ways to attack it. because they knew of the issues in 2016 because of the issues within core

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/43373/bitcoin-core-error-message-assertion-failed

google found thousands of results
"bitcoin core assertion failed"

lol try telling core how the 1mb was tested in 2012 when blocks could not surpass 500kb

if your saying EC is not tested.. then 1mb was not tested for 6 years

The assert bug was in "xthin", BU's block propagation system. That doesn't exist in Core.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/03/assert-in-hands-of-bad-coders.html

the assert bug was part of core v0.12 in 2016

have a nice day

That is yet another outright lie. The bug was introduced by the BTU team.

EC and the standard block size limit are two entirely different things. EC is untested, period.

Still wrong. What I was referring to is that BTU would destroy the network from within like a disease (in this case cancer).

segwit does fix/guarantee anything, the only thing you can expect it to do as a soft fork is create a tier network

I can never say this with 100% certainty but it does seem likely that Bitcoin was a project that was in semi-development for a while and then was ramped up after the 2008 collapse, or it was a concept which was rapidly developed following the collapse in 2008 and then released in 2009. There likely wasn't a ton of time to develop a ton of new systems like Segwit and they decided to release Bitcoin with the features it had at the time, offering an alternative to the regular system.
New technologies will always be something that are created, a single man only has so much creativity and time.

I actually wonder what he thinks about SegWit:

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Which is expected of something that's based on thin air and doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies (and that probably had destabilization as one of its objectives).

Did Bill Gates create Windows 7, 8, 10 straight away in the 1980s? Could he have done it then? - Nope. All software starts small and new ideas appear over time, new development over time, new technolgies over time. Over time we get better software.

Satoshi can't be expected, at the start to programme what BTC will be in 20 years time. He, like Bill gate, started small. Those who think about Visa, or 1 bn txs a day are getting ahead of themselves. It takes time. It may work, it may not.

Anyone can replace that with "Bitcoin Core/Blockstream/LN is an attempt to centralize bitcoin."

Visualise Bitcoin as a circle supported by codes and protocols etc. Inside the circle are Users, Full Noders, Miners. This MUST be decentralise.

Outside the circle are Bitcoin related services such as exchanges, retailers, etc. Also developers, doesn't matter if all in one "organisation" or many "organisations" or individual. These are centralise by nature. Nothing anyone can do about it. They exist outside the circle. Those centralisers can only propose changes. It is the Users, Full Noders, Miners, inside the circle (decentralise) that has the final say.

I guess you haven't read Satoshi very carefully.

You might enjoy this thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin-can-scale-larger-than-the-visa-network-1391350

your reading the reddit "gigabytes by midnight" old scripts..

dynamic concepts are not about visa by midnight. ..
but instead natural growth over time

Bitcoin Unlimited is an attempt to centralize bitcoin.

Its not what Satoshi would have wanted & its not what is best for crypto or those who use it.

People think that if bitcoin has larger blocks, btc will be able to achieve thousands of transactions per second like credit cards.

That's not the way things work. Btc was never built for that function & it will never achieve a higher transaction rate no matter how big blocks are.

LOL you need to go check
the crashes were due to a core bug.

also many nodes have limits of 1mb-8mb active right now.

much like core had the 1mb limit even when there was a 500kb issue that would have held things back at 500kb 2009-2013

EG are you saying that the cores 1mb limit was not active in 2009-2015 when blocks were only going upto 0.75mb

cancer=mutated cells, foreign cells that are rejected from the native body which need to be cut away from the main body to not cause harm..
sounds like segwit to me

It is always linked to a real identity when doing a deal (trading on an exchange, buying physical goods, ... ).  The problem with transparent ledgers is that this information propagates from transaction to transaction.  On an obfuscated ledger such as monero or ZEC, the knowledge that you bought coffee and got a change so the coffee shop owner knows who you are (the one buying coffee) and to whom belongs the change address, is not linked to how you use that change (say, for buying some pornography).  On a public ledger, that is traceable.

If you have evidence, yes. If not, then i will simply "bear it in mind." I don't reject what people say automatically unless what they said is 100% wrong.

That is news to me. Evidence please. If you have seen the code then please provide the link/codes whatever.

False. BU (EC) has been running for 0 hours on any live network. BU as the implementation of the current consensus is primarily Bitcoin Core with some faulty patches on top. That has been running for a while now (and crashing).

This makes no sense. If we were to go this deeply into analysis, we'd have to define each piece of the human body. You didn't understand my statement. It's the effect of cancer what I was referring to.

If I told you that he told me, would you believe me? It's safer to say I made a plausible assumption based on months of observation.

And you know this how? Because he told you or you are making an assumption.

you should check out blockstreams LN code

at code level bitcoin protocol measure people holdings in satoshi's. where there are 2.1 quadrillion units of measure.

LN wants 1000x more units of measure (millisats)

cap was 2,100,000,000,000,000
LN want 2,100,000,000,000,000,000

have a nice day

That can only happen if you sell your BTC. If no one sells their BTC cheaply then there is nothing cheap for Ver and Wu to buy.

Value is subjective. No one can say it will decrease the price 100%.

The scenarios can be played out like this. Example.
A - 95% of the miners support increasing 21m coins to 30m coins. 95% of the users reject it. Users keep their money in BTC and very little goes into AltBTC. Users fire up their mining equipment and the miners mine a worthless low value coin that very few will buy. Miners will realise the errors of their ways and stop mining AltBTC and support BTC.
B - 95% of the miners support increasing 21m coins to 30m coins. 95% of the users support it. BTC will now mine 30m coins. Crazy it may be but what can the 5% do? Dump their coins?
C - 95% of the miners reject 21m coins to 30m coins. 95% of the users support it. Users keep their money in BTC and very little goes into AltBTC. Users fire up their mining equipment and the miners mine a worthless low value coin that very little will buy. Miners will realise the errors of their ways and stop mining AltBTC and support BTC. One then realise the users do have power over their money and that what create value.

The idea that 95% of the users want to increase the coins from 21m to 30m won't happen because it will devalue their BTC, and users are not that stupid, so don't worry.

Now there is division over BU and Core. Both have made grievous errors. Both are proposing so many changes at once. This is a fundamental mistake.

Core - Segwit, LN
BU - dynamic block (EC), flextrans, sidechain.

Person -
A - Core
B - BU
C - segwit and sidechain
D - segwit and not LN
E - Flextrans and LN
F - Flextrans and sidechain
G - Flextrans and dynamic block but not sidechain
and so on. There too many combination of choices and thus many divisions. Therein lies the grievous errors.

I and many others (perhaps over 80%) support bigger block. Easy to raise 1mb to 2mb. Miners support 2mb in the Hong Kong agreement. Albeit with Segwit. Now that half the miners don't support segwit, common sense dictate that the only proposal on the table that will work is -

Z - raise blocksize to 2mb. See B above and it will becomes this -

B - 95% of the miners support increasing 1mb to 2mb. 95% of the users support it. BTC will now have 2mb limit. Everyone is now happy and the objectors will be happy when the value of BTC goes higher.

This could have be done last year or even 2 years ago. None of us would be here debating.

The moral of the story is that when dealing with $billions, one change at a time.

bu has been running for years
segwit 6 months

BU uses native keys (cells)
segwit wants to change the keys (mutated cells)

segwit changes the design of blocks and needs to cut off the cancer just so it wont be rejected by the native "body"

core have the body killing code

Cut the bullshit. Nobody has mentioned Core nor is there any kind of censorship.

If you fail to provide an academic link (this does not include BTU troll social channels), then you are a complete, and time-wasting troll. I have no intentions of wasting my time doing your work for you.

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The conclusion of this thread, which you fail to admit considering you're a paid, is that BTU is to the Bitcoin network what cancer is to the human body.

well you wont find it then the core censor cabin..
time for you to look beyond core and do some research.

prove you can do research without being spoonfed.

ill give you time and then maybe ill help you. but i hope you can actually do the search yourself without insults and without replying with empty comments.

start researching. show your research abilities and not your insult replying ability. if you can find it without being spoonfed then you will gain some rep.
P.S it does exist, its not a trick

My statement has nothing to do with Reddit.

Another irrelevant straw man attempt.

Where exactly can one find this SWHF proposal?

The reason for this exact usage of language is because he wants to avoid getting trolled and attacked by r/btc fanatics.

It means that he's leaning towards it being a bad thing, and chances are a guy like this knows what it is and has done his research, so he's going to have an opinion formed. If he said "I'm not sure if it's a good idea", that would be way more indicative of him being on the fence. I would want to hear how he said "I don't think [etc]" because tones mean a lot more than just text. If he's really unconfident in it, he can make it easily known.

“I don’t think [Bitcoin Unlimited] is a good idea,” Voegtlin said - he never said he as 100% sure. "I don't think" implies one isn't 100% sure but somewhat on the fence so to speak.

It was only a matter of time before advanced blockchain explorers and trackers will evolve to pinpoint exactly who is in control of specific address and who send money to whom.
AFAIK unless your gateway point is not compromised i.e. address is not linked to your real identity what does that change? This is what you will get when you deal with fully transparent ledger.

you got it the whole wrong way round
anything thats not core want consensus diverserse peer network of everyone on the same level playing field.. not an altcoin
core want a TIER network of control and then everything blindly following their dictation

look at core begging for them to make an altcoin to go get REKT, to BUgger off, to fork off..

its core code that is pushing up fee's and causing the drama. its core code with all the ban node rules and the PoW killing code.

atleast stop reading reddit and you will start to see passed the scripted narative.

Actually i am starting to think this whole block size debate is being made up artificially by Ver&WU to suppress the bitcoin prices and get cheap bitcoins from us.

Because a hard fork doesn't make sense in the first place, as you said, it will end up like another scam coin.

If their product was so good, and if they lost hope on bitcoin; nobody's stopping them to dump their coins away and start their own. They can't dump their coins because they love bitcoin so much <3  

They know nobody will give a fuck about their scam coin so they are spreading FUD to get cheap coins. There isn't any other explanation to these recent stuff going on.

the ethereum event was an intentional split..
those wanting a peer network which is what bu wants too. dont want an intentional split.

however if BU gets the threshold to activate consensually, .. core will not join the peer network of consensus majority.. and core will be the one with the banning of communications on their minority by initiating their own split to form their own altcoin

its already been begged and pleaded by the core group that other implementations should split away. and they all refused.. its core that are the ones that want the split..

but they want it to happen before consensus is reached so that they are not left with a small minority. this is why core have made so many threats and why implementations that are not core have just plodded along letting the community decide

Well well finally someone speaks something sensible, there have been so many of us saying that we do not need hard folk and keep Bitcoins as it is but so many of us were ridiculed that it was right and good for Bitcoins and this article once again proves we were right. Hopefully the hard folk shall never ever take place. And this shall help people to finally take a stand.

We all know BTU will result in an altcoin that vanishes overtime just like ETC did. It will be a way to make some free money while it lasts. Just look at the futures on bitfinex or whatever exchange did the BTC-C BTC-U tokens, BTC-U has been dumped already. Market will not trust amateurs with their money, and most big players have already rejected BU. Nobody is talking about anymore except the usual suspects.

For your thoughts to be confirmed they must match the right criteria:

 

I wouldn't say so.  My opinion that bitcoin's economic parameters (number of coins, emission scheme, and now also block size because the scarcity feeding the fee market) are immutable is empirically confirmed since 2013, and even since 2010, when the first attempts at changing it started, and especially since 2015 when the heated debate started.

I would actually think that all that is a good idea. You see, what attracted me to bitcoin when I learned about it, was its anarchist character.  Money that can be used in an uncensored way to *pay for things and services that states don't want you to, or steal heavily from* was to me, a great idea.  My problem is NOT with banks.  My problem is with the subjugation of banks to the law.  I'm against state and law, at least in the form it is in most "democratic" countries.  I want my economic freedom back, which is to be able to exchange value with an agreeing counterparty, without anyone obstructing, or putting his nose in.   Until not so long ago, normal banks made this possible.  It is only after 2001, that terrorism was used as an excuse by states to crack down on banks, and turn them into state agents, having to spy on their customers, and restricting what their customers can do with their money.  And I thought that bitcoin was going to do, what banks were stopped from doing.

But bitcoin turned into half a nightmare.  When I realized the traceability of bitcoin, and its privacy nightmare, it is far worse than fiat money.  So I now only consider anonymous crypto as something that makes sense.  Bitcoin was intended to be pseudonymous, but chain analysis has broken that privacy.

The other thing why bitcoin is half a night mare, is that its market cap is essentially sustained by greater-fool speculation, and hoarding, and that the "money on the internet" has only a very tiny part of its market cap coming from the demand to actually buy stuff on the internet ; most of it is speculative HODLing.

I set out to try to find out why.  So I studied the thing.  I'm now convinced that bitcoin is a very problematic system, and is an obstacle to progress for crypto-anarchy.  It became too big, it has attracted too much attention from finance, law enforcement and all that, while not even being a very much used currency and it has become a huge greater-fool bubble that has now a "community" of greedy speculators, instead of people that wanted an underground money hidden from state, taxes, and law enforcement.  Hell, to protect their gamblings, sorry, investors, they want bitcoin now to be "regulated".  I think I understood the "flaws" in bitcoin's design that rendered it useless and even counter productive for a crypto anarchist.  Of course, one can say that it was designed ON PURPOSE to become what it is, a rich-man's speculator tool pumping money from greater fools into their fortunes, and allowing them to conduct their sleazy business.  I don't know if that was the idea, and if we have been lied to from the start, or whether it is simply bad design.  My guess is the latter.

My hope, but also my expectation, is that its design flaws will sooner or later lead to its demise, to make room for better.  However, when I see the scammy stuff that is waiting in row (ETH, DASH, RIPPLE...) to overtake its role, I think crypto currencies have screwed up too much for this to become useful for underground economy in any near future, and that a lot of damage has been done to the possibilities of setting up such a system now.

Your opinion has been unconfirmed for so long, it has been dropped from the free speech pool.

Ah, OK, I didn't think of that.  But I like posting here, so in order for me to shut up, the amount needs to be significant
(and it is open to me doing a Sybil attack, and posting from a new account ).  Nope, after all, my free speech is (almost) priceless.

you need to look passed the reddit stories

there are more than 2 implementations..
look at bitcoin as a whole. not the reddit stories of narrow minded rhetoric.

then you will see that SWHF has been proposed as a single dynamic block (1 merkle) with features like segwit and dynamics and lowtxsigop count and other things ontop. all in one go. not the tier network your reddit rhetoric want

Another straw man argument. This is how you deflect the actual argument instead of admitting that you were lying about the differentiation between SWSF and SWHF. Classic shilling.

I'm now entirely convinced of my previous assessment of you. You show zero signs of reading any kind of research on blockchain consensus. Maybe start at Princeton.

Wait, so you're trying to imply that BU is essentially dead. Now we are going back to BIP100?

Big block support (BU + bip 100 + 8mblocks) is now at 56.9% for the last 144 blocks.

www.coin.dance

Chinese lunatics want it because it will provide them more money. SegWit will eliminate a ASICBoost, this is the only reason main Chinese pools live in self-delusion.

Op, said that Bitcoin Unlimited is no loger supported and people are facing away from it. So why do we see more than 40% support for BU?
As long as I am not mistaken it is the highest hash support BU received, ever.

I challenge every miner to put WHAT?BIP100 in their coinbase string.

yep censored

wow..hmm i guess the bip process is censored too much?

https://github.com/jgarzik/bip100/blob/master/bip-0100.mediawiki

What BIP100?

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips

i wonder what Thomas thinks of Bip100.

hard fork does not mean automatically making an altcoin

even going soft can result in an altcoin



learn high consensus(unity with no split , just minority nodes that cant sync(orphan drama))
learn controversial consensus(orphan drama with eventual with no split , just higher minority nodes that cant sync( higher orphan drama))
bilateral split. (intentionally having nodes not communicate to avoid consensus/orphaning mechanism (altcoin maker))

^ those scenarios can happen soft or hard

stop reading the reddit scripts
al you have seemed to have read is the narative of soft best case and hard worse case but not researched the whole picture or run all scenarios

I don't like bitcoin unlimited, it will decrease the price and make it become less valuable, and by making bitcoin to hardfork it will risk all of the investor to go away, this can lead to bitcoin domination to end and cause a lot of investor to lost their money, bitcoin should never being hardfork to maintain the investor trust level

I don''t like Bitcoin Unlimited In any form, Only BTC and other coin! May be!

ages ago i was going to jokingly put up a post where people pay me to shutup about my open opinions that i have.
(secretly donating funds to seans outpost cos i dont need handouts)

Of course I'm not paid for analysing the dynamics of crypto (*).  I'm open to discuss arguments with you (although you have forbidden me to post in any of your threads, and when you cannot have any arguments, you censor: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-lauda-censors-1879835 remember).

What people write in white papers, is not necessary a correct analysis of the dynamics of the system they set up.  Satoshi was, for instance, quite wrong in his public writings about bitcoin's dynamics.

You are right that most crypto currencies are highly centralized systems, at least on the protocol side: if only one group decides on the protocol (usually the original publishers of the white paper laying out the protocol, which are very often also the developers of a piece of software that implements that protocol), then by definition, the protocol is a centrally issued and steered thing.    It is only when nobody in the world is defining any protocol after it came out, and if there are many totally independent software implementations of said protocol, that one can pretend that the system is, on the protocol side, decentralized.  Bitcoin was first totally centralized in Satoshi's hands, and this centralization is still a lot the case in the hands of Core ; but it got lastly some modest counter wind from another part of the eco system, which are the miners.

As usual, in the battle between a centralized force (here core) and a distributed entity (the users and miners), the central entity wins, because it can play much more divide and conquer.  But what wasn't foreseen, was that another part of the ecosystem got sufficiently centralized, the miners, for them to defend their interest.  When core started to annoy them with LN and Segwit, these two "empires" fought their battle.  The funny thing is that this has, as a side effect, a better form of decentralisation, than decentralized users and miners on one side, and a powerful central control (core) on the other.  As such, bitcoin starts, ironically, to show some decentralized properties, of which immutability is the main sign.

In a truly decentralized system of non-colluding antagonists, the protocol is perfectly immutable on every economical aspect, because the slightest change to one of these aspects is in the disadvantage of sufficient of the players, that they will oppose it, and the antagonists are sufficiently non-colluding that they cannot propose anything coherent.

(*) ... but you give me an idea: if anyone wants actually to PAY me for me continuing to post, please send some funds to

LRcK7eiVzyTEG8s4scRKMvxdAm4kCpfUVu

(a LTC address, as BTC will soon be too expensive I guess ).

lol try reading the code and documentation
plus you are obsessed with the reddit bu vs.. debate. there are MANY dynamic block implementations.

i know your finally realising something i have said months ago. but things have moved on since.
but to address your issues with BU because you brought it up..

unlike it taking months to get core to update their issues when core moved from 0.12-0.13..
bu patched cores 0.12 issues in a quicker time. its just that segwit as a SF 2 merkle half gesture is a cesspit creating network so bu havnt just thrown in the 2 merkle segwit half baked code.



and thats a failure of using an opportunity to do a proper peer network upgrade..

maybe if you read code and documentation and the terms like hardfork consensus.. you would see that a peer network of a 1 merkle block where everyone is on the same level is possible due to everyone needing to upgrade

This is an outright lie and is far away from reality. Segwit without the base-to-weight ration is not the same proposal that we have today. Such a hard fork can't be called Segwit. The differences between SWSF and SWHF are as follows:
1) Activation (standard hard vs. soft fork).
2) Backwards compatibility (in the case of SWHF, people that do not update are cut off from the network).

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In other words, SWHF does not imply a 4 MB block size limit (as opposed to the SWSF 1 MB base && 4 MB weight). It retains the same 1-to-4 ratio that the soft fork variant has.

try reading code and documentation

in a segwit HF there wont be any "upstream filter" tier network.
the blocks will just be blocks that everyone recieves.
EG just a upto 4mb block.
not
a 1mb block inside a upto 4mb block that gets stripped to 1mb.

everyone will get the upto 4mb block.
segwit done as a hardfork where everyone is part of the same level playing field peer network.. non of this soft fork tier network crap

Basically, Bitcoin Unlimited is of the opinion that the size of the blocks should not be related to the consensus of the Bitcoin network. The money supply, transaction history and protection against double costs and fakes are what are important properties of stable money. The size of the same block is not that, according to Unlimited.

Everyone knows that. Even those Chinese lunatics know that BU will only destroy the whole system. But sadly, they still ignore it and try to activate it as soon as they can. They always want to control Bitcoin

This is a common misconpcetion and lie spread by BTU fanatics. SWSF vs. SWHF is a very trivial different and SWHF does not fix any kind of "soft fork kludges" (as they don't exist in this context).

The only ironic thing here is that the UASF implementation is already much more advanced than BU is. BU is based on outdated Bitcoin Core code (0.12.x).

Of course you're going to meet those. There are some genuine people that have actual reasons for their stance, then there are those that are paid by various agencies to shill this belief (see my next remark).

In other words, your idea is complete bullshit and has nothing to do with how actual cryptocurrencies work in practice (maybe you need to read a whitepaper or two). Then again, you're being paid for this kind of nonsense so it doesn't come as a surprise.

My idea is that a crypto currency's protocol should remain as it was the day that it got started - I'm even convinced that a sufficiently decentralized crypto currency CANNOT change its protocol.  If it can change, it means that there is a form of leadership, and hence, is not a decentralized system.  If it can change, it is not permissionless, as we have seen with ethereum, and there is a "board of central bank governors" that proposes and decides, can censor, can print extra money, can modify the rules to suit them.

You are right of course that a given protocol, if it turns out to contain problematic features, will make people go away from it, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.  Crypto currencies come and go, and each of them has a certain life time during which it has some importance in the market.  Bitcoin has the huge first mover advantage, which will take a long time before it erodes sufficiently away, but I wonder whether it will change. If it does, it means it is centralized.

I would like to agree with what the Electrum Developer Thomas Voegtlin said that bitcoin unlimited is not a good idea since if we really look at the hardfork it has many bugs and it not feasible for bitcoin at this moment. But later in time if bitcoin is ready for a hardfork then maybe that will be the time that bitcoin unlimited will come into the picture.

ok 2013
there was an issue with blocks getting over 500kb
are there now 2 bitcoins?? nope

A fork (Soft/hard) should happen no matter how long It takes, I never meet anyone who agrees that bitcoin should stay as it is right now. If bitcoin stays as it is then there will be a problem in the future and It's only going to make people stay away from it.

The point is however, that *undoing* a hard fork, is a soft fork, and undoing a soft fork, is a hard fork.

So while it may *seem* that a soft fork is "softer", in fact, going back is harder. 


Not really.  The community is divided between:

1) bitcoin as it is (immutability)

2) modifications, such as:
a) BU, XT, .... who undo the limit of 1 MB that Satoshi introduced as an anti-spam measure
b) segwit

Since old nodes are clueless about segwit and are filtered manipulated data, it is about as backward compatible as a Peel P50.

In this practical application of a hard fork it would.

I wouldn't really call it an "altcoin" but it's basically a different coin, in the same way that ETC and ETH are separate coins.  It was my understanding that in a hard fork without a very, very high consensus (which Bitcoin won't achieve, it's most likely that BU will have less than 80% miner support and possibly only slightly over 50%), a split would occur and that would cause uncertainty.

If you can explain to me in reasonable terms why that wouldn't be the case, I'm definitely listening.  But from anything that I know so far I don't see it happening, especially when hard forks aren't backwards compatible.

lol the only bug of BU was the one that was part of core 0.12 and only fixed in core 0.13.
yet BU fixed it before core devs publicly shouted out exactly how to attack nodes that didnt upgrade

but anyway dynamics and a 1merkle segwit (which MANY independent implementations) can run with is something that core really should have as their august 2017 backup plan

then atleast the community can be united.

Bitcoin Unlimited is a dead meme, it has failed. Only paid shills keep shilling it. Buggy Unlimited's Emergent Consensus is technical nonsense. We'll get segwit in Bitcoin one way or another, meanwhile Litecoin is about to go to mars as it eats Bitcoin's lunch demonstrating the efficiency and functionality of segwit and full working lightning networks. ATH is incoming, but a couple miners with interests (ASICBOOST) will not make it happen in BTC.

Hard forks allow for cleaner code fixes than soft fork kludges.

The ironic thing is, the UASF force currently have to use their own implementation of a bitcoin node:

https://github.com/UASF/bitcoin

The question should not be asked. If an hardfork proposition, once known from everyone does not catch many positive feelings toward it in a short timespan, it is a bad idea and should be avoided, whatever is its content.

Why is he so afraid of a hard fork?
I don`t think that a hard fork is such a disaster.It`s just like democracy.People vote with their money for the better option and move on.

change in the structure of power?
i guess he doesnt understand diverse decentralised peer network
lol

sorry but many independent implementations are ok with it. and if core pulled their thumb out of their behinds they too can run on the same level playing field with many other implementations

its what bitcoin is , a  diverse decentralised peer network.

however segwit is the creation of a TIER network (upstream filter nodes).
here if you cant read the guide maybe a picture from the guide will help

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secondly hardfork does not automatically = altcoin creation..
hardfork is an umbrella term just like soft fork.. where many possibilities belw each can occur.
just mentioning softs best case scenario and hards worse case scenario is not being informative, its creating a false narative.

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thirdly even 'going soft' not only could create altcoins. but if you run scenarios using soft segwit. it does not fulfil ANY promises. and the expectations are not much better, even if it reached 100% utility

take the capacity "promise"..
to get 2.1mb blocks requires everyone not only running segwit but also moving their funds to segwit keys. emphasis on the second part. and guess what that 2.1mb is.. yep 7tx/s..
we wont get 100% moving over to segwit keys so just like the expectation of 7tx/s in 2009-2017.. we still will not get 7tx/s if segwit activates.

nor will quadratics be 'fixed' due to spammers who love to quadratic spam will still quadratic spam after segwit is activated simply by not moving funds to segwit keys.

same goes for malleability. oh and malleability 'fix' which meant to fix the trust of unconfirmed tx's not getting messed around with. yet the "promise to fix" the unconfirmed tx messing with, became a broken promise because now we have RBF, CPFP, and CSV which all means you still cant trust unconfirms. along with ofcourse those that wont move to segwit keys because they prefer to contin malleating tx's

in short
its all empty temporary gestures wasting time upto 2019 for things the community will not really get massive utility of.

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lastly
if segwit not showing positive chance by august. and thus becomes UASF (real un buzzword translated to hardfork) we should use that oppertunity to do a proper 1 merkle segwit + dynamic blocks plus other features peer network consensus. not wast august 2017-late 2018 pushing the half baked soft and empty gesture that is the current 2 merkle segwit

Bitcoin unlimited = Hardfork
Hardfork is quite risky if there is so much debate between community like we have right now.

Community is divided between two distinct solution BU and Segwit, so hard fork may quickly lead to loads of attack on both chains which doesn't give good impression among bitcoin holders who don't know much about technological side of bitcoin and about all this forks.

It is not a good time to split the bitcoin network, so BU is not a good solution.

“I don’t think [Bitcoin Unlimited] is a good idea,” Voegtlin said during the interview. “It’s really a big change; it’s a change in the structure of power in Bitcoin. It’s a very risky hard fork.” He went on to suggest that since the recent AsicBoost scandal, “a lot of people have changed their mind on this” and no longer support Bitcoin Unlimited.

The interview can be found here: https://epicenter.tv/episode/179/
The article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/electrum-developer-thomas-voegtlin-bitcoin-unlimited-not-good-idea/