Topic: Post your SegWit questions here - open discussion - big week for Bitcoin! - page 3. (Read 84845 times)

Segwit2x is nothing short of a coup attempt by businesses & miners in the Bitcoin space to oust the core developers of the Bitcoin code and force their control in the direction of Bitcoin technical development.

That is it, in a nutshell. This takeover attempt lead by Barry Silbert’s New York Agreement is veiled (albeit somewhat thinly in my mind) by the Segwit & big block debate to take attention away from the true intention of the miners & businesses. The ambition of Bitcoin miners & businesses will always inherently lean toward centralized control as they are unwilling to sacrifice efficiency for network security. This intention is in stark contrast to the aspirations of the average Bitcoin users who desire security and decentralization above all else. While there exists some debate between users regarding block size I believe even those who champion a push for larger blocks would outright condemn the ensuring totalitarian control over the network.

We must realize as a community that the Segwit2x code is not the argument, whether you desire big or small blocks, Segwit or no Segwit it is not relevant. The point remains the method by which the centralized mining cartels & businesses are attempting to force this change through the protocol and what is likely to happen in the future should they succeed. Should Segwit2x client change be successful;

A) It will be proven without a doubt that the Bitcoin network with all its hash power security and global scale CAN BE gamed. Any protocol changes that the miners / businesses want or are PAID / COERCED to want can be made, full stop. If they want Bitcoin to be inflationary rather than deflationary or to have 42 million minable coins rather than 21 million its just a matter of 1’s and 0’s at this point.

B) Power of development for the Bitcoin project will be taken out of the hands of the Core development team. The same team that has kept the Bitcoin network secure and stable with near 100% uptime for the past 8+ years. It is anyone’s guess who will stay on to develop the Segwit2x client.

C) Bitcoin’s status as a decentralized currency will be stripped. Bitcoins future will be entirely in the hands of centralized business’s and mining bodies. I am sure they will form some type of administrative group to discuss THEIR needs. The users will not be represented. (Sound familiar?).

D) There is no guarantee that the Bitcoin project will even remain open source. Once enough hash power and economic support lend themselves to the Segwit2x client the new miner controlled development team can easily flip the switch to closed source is they so desired.

The miners and businesses operating on the Bitcoin blockchain are entirely incentivized to centralize the networks development & operation as much as is possible. Centralized control will always be more efficient than decentralized consensus and thus adds to the bottom lines of businesses and miners alike. The users MUST NOT allow these bodies to take control of the network. Miners and business’s exist to serve the users & the network, NOT the other way around.

I suppose it is in the nature of human beings to desire power and control over others. Why this is exactly I can’t say, but I doubt anyone would argue the point. An attack of this type was bound to occur sooner or later in the Bitcoin space, I had no doubts of this. However I am taken back a bit by the lack of common understanding of exactly what is taking place here. For years a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network was in the forefront of every users mind and yet in the midst of a hostile takeover attempt all I see is complacency. Many posts on Reddit and Twitter are content to see that Segwit will be pushed through “in some form” but take no account to the method by which it occurs. They have been so aptly sold on the benefits of Segwit that they pay little attention to men pulling the strings behind the cloth. We would be far better off to have Bitcoin as it stands today without Segregated Witness then to allow manipulation of the protocol in this manner.

The only true power we as users have is to educate one another on the issues, whether they lie in the technical, economical or game theory realms as we move forward. At this point it seems clear that decentralized systems such as Bitcoin will always be under attack by centralized authorities wishing to take more control. If the Bitcoin project is to succeed the user base will need to be dynamic in their defense & understanding.

And bitfinex has made a statement on it https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/223 

Exchanges are just a throwback to our broken traditional finance sector.  Bitcoin was designed to work as a trustless peer-to-peer transaction between two participants, cutting out the middlemen in the banks.  But instead we somehow recreated a role for middlemen, along with a central point of failure in terms of security.  Reducing the need for centralised exchanges at protocol level can only ever be positive.  I've been wanting Atomic Swaps to be an actual thing for ages for this very reason.



If you don't want to take his word on it, some guy on Reddit pointed it out about 2 months ago.  Same as the bech32 addresses being discussed on a mailing list here.  BCH seems to cherry-pick the bits they like, although that isn't necessarily a bad thing, reinventing the wheel and such.  It's not the same as actually having SegWit, obviously, but they are both integral components of it.

Honestly whoever wins depends on only single thing: Who keeps the (BTC) handle on the exchanges? That is the only thing that matters. People don't care about what chain has what. Whichever maintains the main "BTC" name will dominate the market as that is what all existing exchanges and services utilize, that is what the traders are using first and foremost and is what people will encounter. Fracturing of bitcoin only shows weakness which will hurt the coin in it's entirety as it devolves in just petty infighting with none of them actually accomplishing much in acceptance which is what is important to keep the market from ending up as a dot-com bubble.

Atomic swaps is one of the cooler ideas I've seen floated lately. I'm still not sold on Segwit at all, Swapping currencies is best NOT implemented in the coin layer - it's clearly an exchange-level function (you ever use Shapeshift?). Despite its security issues, I hear Coinomi implements such swaps within a wallet, Down the line, people could be using alts without even knowing it!

As for BCH implementing a "Franken-Segwit", how would Maxwell know such a thing, and why would the BCH devs change their minds about their staunch opposition to Segwit? This opposition was one of the primary reasons they launched BCH!    Honestly those statements sound like the typical type of trolling that Maxwell does...

I'm not going to listen to the whole video again, but Maxwell recently stated that BCH was implementing their own version of Segwit, but just called it a different name:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSRoEeqYtJA

Segwit opens the possibility for more options that will be required as cryptocurrencies are adopted. Beyond just lightning, there's also atomic swaps. Like you mention, there are altcoins that people can use, but most people aren't going to want to buy all the alts everytime they want to transact with the right one, so instead they'll just atomic swap for what they need. I'm not going to say much more about it because I'm really not an expert, but from what those who are have been saying and the updates to several of the alts, Segwit is going to play a pivotal role with further developments to crypto.

4MB is only the theoretical block capacity with Segwit, assuming everyone is using Segwit transactions (which last I checked is not possible from any GUI). Right now less than 7% of BTC transactions use Segwit (source: http://segwit.5gbfree.com/countsegwit.html), so right now the BTC blocksize capacity is only slightly more than 1MB. The spammers are leaving it alone for now, likely only because they didn't want to tank the markets.




Maybe I overstated - Kore was killing ME for 3 years with their obstinate trolling. I want BTC to succeed and 2x drama to end without too much pain, I really don't care which side prevails as long as the markets and confidence survive.

It's not that I love BCH, it's that I really don't like Segwit. It's an ugly 6000 line hack that created tons of technical debt, for little tangible gain. I don't trust Blockstream or DCG to do what's best for the ecosystem - their incentives are aligned with pushing LN and crippling Bitcoin. LN is centralized and will be immediately regulated on the off chance that it is successful. Since it currently doesn't work, I doubt it ever will reach the mainstream. Why not just use an altcoin instead of LN, as several billions of dollars are doing every day?

Your question makes no sense. 

The punchline is that segwit already happened.. its a done deal.  Therefore you would need 95% to go against it to change it rather than a lack of 95% for it.

Do you recall what happened in July 2017?  There was first the threat of the BIP148 user activated softfork; however, a BIP91 compromise caused the signaling of segwit and thereafter the 95% threshold of signaling that locked it in by August 10 or something like that.  Once segwit was locked in then it was done, so at that point, you would have needed 95% to go against it to reverse it or to change it back...


Regarding your assertion of a slow blockchain, sounds like you are talking about fiction rather than fact, or maybe you are just supposing that segwit is not locked in, when it is?

Anyhow, the blockchain has been great in the past several months, transactions fast and fees low.. and possibly spam attacks have not been as heavy because some of that previously spam directed hash power has been aimed at mining BCash instead of attacking bitcoin?


So even though you still might hear some bitcoin naysayers and bitcoin saboteurs talking about high fees and slow transactions, they are generally making shit up in order to spout their antibitcoin and/or alt coin pumping rhetoric.

I have a question. Since segwit requires 95% of miners to upgrade. What if 20% from these are Bitcoin core enemies doesnt want to upgrade to delay the segwit upgrading of Bitcoin core? Are we going to stuck from very slow blockchain forever? Sorry If my question doesnt have any sense

Segwit gave BTC a peak 4x scaling capacity, that's why people are hesitant to embrace 2x which would be 8x capacity and presents technical challenges. So no, BCH only has twice the capacity of BTC now that Segwit is active. If you think BCH can handle 8x, then 16x, then 100x capacity, you're going to figure out there's more to scaling than just increasing block size. A few MBs may not seem like a lot in today's world, but when it comes to validating blocks and forming consensus throughout the entire network, which is what blockchain is, it's a lot!

Not sure why you don't think they'd use Lightning to send instant transactions. Why would they want to wait for their transaction to be verified when it can be done instantly?

As for Core killing BTC, that's probably an overstatement. BTC is hardly dead. If anything kills it at this point, it will be politics. The 2x fork in November may do just that. There's lots of other bright coins out there, and I've been part of the reason they've been rising. If BTC fails, I will just find another coin to use, and it won't be BCH.

You're more than welcome to use BCH if you want, but realize you'll face scaling problems of your own if your blocks ever fill up. From the looks of it, blocks are being mined about 30% faster on BCH, sometimes it's been a block a minute. This will present big problems down the road if the blockreward dies off too quickly without enough transaction fees, they'll be little reason to mine it for next to nothing.

I haven't sold my BCH yet, but I probably will after the November hard fork of BTC. I just don't see why you love it so much. Why is it so much better?

What does "scale to global acceptance" mean?   Scaling is one thing, and global acceptance is another.  Blockstream's wonderful work killing Bitcoin caused the tech world to accept and embrace other cryptos. There is no "one coin to rule them all". If you put together the top 10 cryptos (excluding premines and tokens), their networks and blockchains can easily accommodate billions in daily volume. Even the most foaming-at-the-mouth Kore fanboi must admit that BCH simply has 8x the capacity of BTC. It's simple math.

Your average joe is not going to care what crypto they use, as long as the value hold steady or keeps going up.  And I can tell you now that they won't be using Lightning...

Funny you should mention ETH's scaling - it's pretty horrible, but at least Vitalik is not artificially limiting it!

So how are you going to scale to global acceptance? If more and more people started using BCH, and all transactions were on the main chain, pretty soon you wouldn't have 8 MB blocks, but 8 GB blocks every 10 minutes. A block chain growing faster than the streaming capacity of almost everyone's internet connection. Please, BCH is a shitcoin, it can not scale. Lightning network is the only alternative. Try looking at ETH's blockchain growth rate and you'll see why Vitalik and team are trying so hard to solve their scaling problems for it to survive.

I live in NY and use Coinbase, Bittrex and BitPay.  Having jumped through all of the regulatory hoops to prove my identity, it is unlikely that I will switch to another set of companies.  And many companies do not do business with NY residents, as I have found out (no, I am not going to move to another state).  So I will use whatever software is required so that I can continue to work with bitcoins.

Blockstream is a company that is building services on top of Bitcoin. And they've been the thorn in the side of sane scaling for Bitcoin for THREE YEARS now. I can't believe this arguing is still ongoing. It's really becoming rather pathetic watching people copy/paste the same arguments over and over.

Personally, I still hold BTC, but now choose to invest my time and money into Bitcoin Cash, as I believe it is superior technology that is unencumbered by the endless negativity, technical debt, and uncertainty in the BTC scene. Almost every day I hear positive news about Bitcoin Cash, such as "new exchange added", "new wallet launched", "new vendor accepting", and "tipping on the rise". It reminds of the good old BTC days here...

I have posted previously speculation that the endgame of blockstream was to sell services related to confidential transactions AND confidential assets to banks to help with middle/back office functions of securities trading (blockstream is working on both confidential transactions and confidential assets projects). The amount of money to potentially be made for settlement services of securities trading well exceeds the market cap of bitcoin, even in its current bubble levels.

A lot of the features implemented into Bitcoin are not necessarily actively desired by the user base and/or economy, and are implemented in a very specific way so that there is excessive technical debt and broad community consensus is not obtained prior to implementing certain features. I would opine that many of the devs working on Bitcoin currently are probably overqualified. Nevertheless, major bitcoin related companies could fairly easily fund the development of Bitcoin as blockstream does currently.

I agree (though I would say economy rather than companies to be more specific). However it is clear that after the hard fork the existing Bitcoin token will still have people wanting to trade it, miners wanting to mine it, and developers wanting to develop on it. Even when a majority of sha256 hashpower is mining another token the original token can stay secure by either changing the POW, allowing merge mining or some messy difficulty adjustment algorithm if thats what people want.



I don't think the likes of coinbase employ developers knowledgeable in maintaining a distributed consensus system. Maintaining a project like Bitcoin is vastly different to a normal software project. The best c++ developer in the world is useless at maintaining Bitcoin if he does not have a deep understanding in a vast array of other skills needed, and the people who have those skills are likely able to earn much more money working outside the Bitcoinsphere in less stressful and hostile environments.

Just look at the background of many of the people who have worked on Bitcoin. Mike Hearn was one of the most known senior Google engineers prior to his involvement in Bitcoin (I would occasionally read his blog for SEO tips, it was very popular), and also worked for a GCHQ contractor as a SIGINT operative (according to his google+ profile) before he went to on work on Bitcoin. Greg Maxwell worked for Juniper networks and worked on the BGP protocol, a decentralized protocol used by ISP's to exchange routing information for IP addresses, a critical part of the internet itself. Adam Back has been working on e-cash systems for decades, invented Bitcoin's POW implementation (as we have all heard a million times by now) and worked for David Chaum's company DigiCash back in the 90's. Finding people with the level of skill some of these people have who would most likely have to be willing to work for less money in a high stress environment would be difficult, it's not impossible, just not something that could easily be done.

The companies that have reneged on the NYA conduct very little business.


Coinbase and Bitpay (and similar) have a 'sticky' userbase that for the most part is apathetic towards which scaling solutions are implemented provided the cost of using Bitcoin is lower than the cost of using traditional fiat-based payment systems, and most importantly, these companies have significant user trust that is not easily replaceable. These companies also have elaborate customer service, regulatory compliance (among other) systems in place that takes significant time, expertise and investment to build up.


You cannot fork the Coinbase code, lower the fees a little bit and expect to do any meaningful amounts of business. The NYA on the other hand, literally forks the Bitcoin code, and there are plenty of qualified devs (even those that are not currently involved in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency) that can potentially work on Bitcoin in the future.

Not really.

This would be true, if your preposition that bitcoin companies give Bitcoin it's utility (or value) was true, but it's not (and is certainly hotly debatable, so presenting that as a fait accomplis is especially laughable)

Additionally, the signatories of the NYA are a small proportion of actual Bitcoin companies in any case. And the number of renegers to the NYA has been picking up, the situation is more that Coinbase and Bitpay are far more easily replaceable than the most eminent programmers working in cryptography & distribute systems, come on now


It seems an awful lot like the Bitcoin companies that are pushing the Segwit2x fork are starting a propaganda & misinformation campaign, what do you think Quickseller? Kind of highlights the weakness of their position if they feel they need to do such a thing.

Why waste words when NYA Bitcoin companies' "opinions ultimately determine if any HF will be successful or not"? Maybe because their opinions count for nothing, and the users' (who are the target of the words) opinions are the actual determiner of the success of the hard fork?

Bitcoin's future should not be determined solely by companies. It should be determined by everyone who uses Bitcoin, not just the big companies. If big companies are able to dictate Bitcoin's future, then it is not decentralized and Bitcoin has failed.

First of all, please stop spreading FUD. The majority of Core developers do not work for Blockstream. Other companies and developers can step in and start contributing to Bitcoin Core at any time that they want. Nothing and no one is stopping them. If they wanted to contribute to Bitcoin Core and actually develop Bitcoin itself, they should have been doing that a long time ago instead of just shouting around on social media complaining about Bitcoin Core. They have had the ability to do something and yet have failed to do anything except harass those who are actually doing something to try to make Bitcoin better.

To be fair, it is the bitcoin related companies that ultimately give Bitcoin utility (value), and whose opinions ultimately determine if any HF will be successful or not.

It should also be noted that it is the bitcoin related companies that have the most (really all) skin in the game in seeing that Bitcoin is ultimately successful.

I would also point out that if the core devs (that work for Blockstream) stop their development work on Bitcoin, then others will step in. The bitcoin related companies already actively employ many devs who could easily take over.