Topic: List of common fallacies of the blocksize war (Read 347 times)

* please be civil or get banhammered. *

Here is a thread listing the fallacies I see advanced just about every day here. Feel free to contribute or comment.
 
1. "Chinese Miner Monopoly" - Mining pools are "centralized", so mining is controlled by a few despots ("Jihad Wu", etc.)

This concept is very commonly invoked, but lacks credibility on closer scrutiny. Mining pools are adminstered by a small group of people, but the mining hashpower is contributed by hundreds or even thousands of people. If the individual miner in a pool doesn't like the policy of the pool, they can switch pools anytime. For example, if a miner wishes to support Segwit, they can switch to one of several pools that supports Segwit, at any time. Talking about pools as a single entity is silly. Implying that miners will take over the consensus mechanism makes even less sense - miners don't enforce consensus.

2. "A hard fork will result in two coins, Bitcoin and BTU"

If it happens, a bitcoin hard fork with a majority of hashpower will result in Bitcoin Unlimited becoming bitcoin. In this scenario, Bitcoin core would exist only as long as people continue to support the minority chain, and would likely need to be renamed "Small Bitcoin" or "Core Bitcoin". The economic incentive to maintain a minority chain diminishes rapidly and likely this small-coin would die quickly. Sorry guys but it's true, and everyone needs to face up to this. Many coins hard fork all of the time, without difficulty. I can name 3 altcoins off the top of my head that have hard forked several times. Nobody supports the old chains.  (FYI I am not an Unlimited supporter.)

3. "Only way to scale bitcoin is sidechains" - Segwit/LN is the way forward

Many many people are researching this topic, and the overwhelming conclusion OUTSIDE OF THIS FORUM is that the small-block FUD has been debunked and the bitcoin blocksize can be increased anytime, provided that people agree (a big IF, I concur). Blockstream has an economic incentive to force people onto LN, and their fear-based rhetoric has worn thin. Quadratic hashing is solved by higher fees. Lightning is still a pie in the sky and Bitcoin steams forward despite the artificial limits imposed on it. Bitcoin has outgrown 1MB blocks and there are no more excuses not to fix it. Every day bigger block solutions gain more proponents, and Core loses more support due to their hard-line reality denial.


4. "Changing the proof-of-work algorithm may be necessary to implement Segwit"

This is almost laughable. Changing the POW means creating a new coin. That's how the majority of altcoins were created, after all! Almost nobody would run this code. And miners would be completely shut out, an entire new mining infrastructure would need to be built. So this simply makes no sense.


More soon...