Topic: Segwit2x vs 1 MB (Read 1502 times)

In the long term, hash power follows the price. But what many people are not accounting for is this: Miners may be willing to mine at a loss in the short term as a long term investment. If post-fork prices reflect the futures market, this might be the case. The consensus is that miners will, more or less immediately switch back to the more profitable chain.

What happens if they don't do that? Do you think users have zero incentive to use the stronger chain, especially those who don't know what the debate is all about? I imagine that describes most users.

Clearly, i will be going with the dump. Although most of the time, i do not make choices if i can do both, I’m gonna make this one as an exception. Because anyone with common sense would really see that this coin would be nothing but a shitcoin before it even starts getting on its feet. It really Just something that is not worth my time and effort. Have more better things to do than go along with this shtty parade.

That would be way harder for them.
The 21 million limit is de facto set in stone. If there was a mining client that "overruled" that limit, no user would accept his/her blocks (you would have to actively install the "higher limit client"!). Exchanges and payment processors - the most important "economic" nodes - would never sign an agreement (like the NYA) that would destroy their business model from one day to another.
The same is valid for "awarding themselves Satoshi's coins".
Let's say now there is a ultra-malicious miner cartel of 90% (e.g. paid by the PBOC) that did such a "destructive" move and sets the coin limit to 42 million via a hard fork, then attacking the 21 million chain. The users actually do have a chance to escape: an own hard fork with a changed algorithm. The "nuclear option". So they aren't forced to accept the 42 million chain.

The 42 million chain would be doomed to fail.

would i? no, but it's not that simple. for one thing, bitmain (or whatever attacker) isn't going to announce to the world that they are 51%-attacking the legacy chain. they will act aloof and carefully hide where the attack is originating from.

for another, the narrative many people hear won't be, "bitmain is 51%-attacking the network." they could even selectively, or on a limited basis, accept some transactions into blocks, to prevent anyone from successfully charging that a 51% attack is occurring. they could even by-and-large accept only their own spam transactions into blocks, creating a narrative that it is the lack of hashpower -- not an attack -- that is causing this situation.

by the time it could be definitively proven that a malicious entity is orphaning honestly mined blocks, the legacy chain will have been virtually/completely unusable for days or even weeks. by this point, many legacy chain users and activists like luke dash jr would undoubtedly be moving forward with implementing a POW-changing hard fork.

now, surely among those users -- the activist small blocker/UASF/anti-miner community -- the narrative will be that the legacy chain was attacked. is that going to be the consensus, though? or will people believe that the legacy chain will have died by attrition, as jeff garzik keeps repeating it will? they will surely attempt to illustrate a situation where the community -- users, miners -- are collectively leaving the legacy chain, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop ("hashpower follows users/price") where it eventually dies.


i don't think that a lot of users understand the gravity of consensus rules. there seems to be a distinction being drawn between technical parameters like block size limit and monetary policy parameters like the 21 million coin supply.


all of this is unprecedented. it's possible that -- as the NYA signatories seem to believe -- that hash power and economic nodes are far more influential by sheer numbers than full node operators. and by that i mean this: full node operators opposed to the fork will ignore the segwit2x chain, but how much of the network do they represent? we can't ignore the economic activity that major services/exchanges/payment processors represent. the question then becomes, how much of those companies' userbases are going to boycott those services? how much of those companies' userbases even knows that this debate is even going on, or cares?

Would you stick around after your preferred chain was murdered by a few pricks and you were then forced on to a chain you want nothing to do with?

I do not. Neither do millions of other Bitcoin users.

And it's not just ideology, if they can do that then they can also award themselves Satoshi's coins, your coins, triple the 21 million limit, blacklist you and on and on.

They can wiggle their willies around all they like. They would quickly learn they won't have shit to lord over if they rock the boat to that extent.

Once that precedent has been set it cannot be unset. Bitcoin will have crossed from 'trustless' which is precarious anyway, to definitively untrustworthy. An untrustworthy BTC has no value.

You are only considering short-term profitability. This may be a much longer term game for entities like Bitmain. Splitting Core from B2X only strengthens Bitcoin Cash and their ability to exploit AsicBoost, for example.

Same logic goes for NYA companies. Their business models might sustainable and long term profitable if precedent is set that miners can increase the block size limit (and thus lower on-chain fees).


Technically, no. A 51% attack can only occur within the protocol. Technically, Segwit2x is irrelevant to the legacy chain and is simply ignored by legacy chain nodes. What is happening is not a 51% attack, but rather an "attack-through-starvation" so to speak, where the forking miners make attaining transaction confirmations untimely and fees uncomfortably high. Academics would refer to this, I believe, as "economic coercion." Surely, it's an attack, but it should be distinguished from an actual 51% attack.

this is precisely correct. the initial problem for users is that difficulty will take considerable time to adjust on the legacy chain. based on the difficulty at the fork block, it would take 10x the hashpower to achieve normal 10-minute block time, so confirmations will take at least 10x as long (likely much longer due to bad fee estimation --> network congestion).

what this also means is that honest miners on the legacy chain are much less equipped to fend off a 51% attack (or rather a 33% selfish mining attack). jihan wu has apparently claimed that bitmain controls a majority of the hash rate. that means that bitmain alone could kill the legacy chain without even drawing all its hash power away from the segwit2x chain or BCH. all they need to do is carry out a selfish mining attack for long enough for legacy chain miners to shut down due to attrition. (the entire time, legacy chain miners will attain zero block rewards)

now, i'm not sure whether bitmain would actually engage in this. but people shouldn't act like everyone involved is a benevolent, honest actor. bitmain is incentivized to kill the legacy chain -- they've been making it clear for years now. and so are all the companies signed onto the NYA. two chains is not the ideal outcome for anyone.

It seems to me that increasing the size of the block will not positively affect the coin. To store such a coin, you need a lot of resources. It seems to me that now it is unnecessary. The shortest block size is less than 1 megabyte

I will concede that I may not know enough about the actual technicals or even the hypothetical incentives; however, hashing power in bitcoin has also gone up 10x in the past year or so, so 1/10th of that is where bitcoin was at a bit over a year ago.

Regarding directing mining towards malicious intentions or profitable intentions, I just cannot see a large portion directly focusing their mining on malicious intentions - sure there are some that will, but those kinds of attacks, even 51% attacks will not be profitable because the recognition of the network and the value is more than just the mining power.. like I already suggested.... segwit2x itself by definition is already a 51% attack - and if it achieves 90% or so following from the miners, then it is a 90% attack, and bye go your merry way with your hashing power, but I doubt that such divergence is going to be long lived because even if migration of 90% of bitcoin's hashing goes to another coin, there is likely going to remain a whole hell of a lot more incentive to stay on the main chain, because I doubt that many economic players are easily going to play around with such renegade divergences... even if some of them have said that they would.... the segwit2x plan still seems to not have the necessary technical competence to inspire confidence.. at least at this point.....

The attack of a 51% attack is clear, but I don't think they will have enough hashrate. f2pool has already said that they will not be signaling for segwit2x. And then you have the ones saying that will mine both, even ViaBTC recently said that they will mine both if it's profitable.

Im not worried, the "intention" doesn't matter. And there's still time for more and more services to keep dropping from the agreement.

Remember that Unlimited had 70% hashrate at some point. We'll see what happens this time. But if BTC can be taken over by fiat bribed actors then it's over, so we need to get over this and win. If we win this time, the hardforkers will give up for a long time until their next attempt (because they will never stop trying)

That depends on the transaction types. 4MB will be almost impossible to reach - that would mean that nobody would use "normal" transactions (1 address to 1 or 2 other addresses) but everyone using P2SH-type transactions like multisig.

The best guess I read was 2,2 MB, based on the kinds of transactions that are currently used (a mix of "normal" P2PKH, P2SH and some other more marginal types). This is, however, only reachable if everyone uses Segwit-style addresses.

@JayJuanGee: I think that Qoheleth is right here. A double spend/51% attack from a malicious SHA256-miner/pool to a Bitcoin (Core) network with less than 10% of its current power will definitively be possible. They would simply switch back to the Core chain until they have 51% and attack it, and non-mining nodes won't be able to stop them. But I consider it unlikely that this will happen, because it would be extremely risky (risk of spectacular crash/loss of value of the rewards AND the double-spent coins), only if the attacker really has deep pockets and his goals are only destructive (to kill Core) I consider it realistic.

Something seems wrong with your math.  Let's just assume that 90% of the mining power does switch to mining segwit2x coin, then the next question becomes what will be the extent to which other economic nodes will follow them, and maybe it is an empirical problem that has to be witnessed (and experienced in order to be believed).  

Let's say bitcoin has 10% of the mining and segwit2x has 90% of the mining, then bitocin will operate with 10% of it's former mining power, but that does not mean that the 90% are controlling what bitcoin does (as in a 51% attack), then 10% of miners would then mine bitcoin and get whatever rewards and fees - and if segwit2x is able to sustain 90% (which I really doubt that they are going to get), then there becomes two coins, and segwit2x would have more hashing power under such a scenario, if it were to play out in such a hypothetical manner that you are describing.  

I personally believe that bitcoin could survive with 10% of its current mining power, anyhow, and surely if it is continuing to get spamming attacks and all of that, then safegaurds will need to be taken regarding that, but it would not necessarily be the death of bitcoin to have a competitor with more mining power (which again really seems doubtful to play out and sustain 90% or more because it is likely that a considerable amount of economic (and networking) value is going to remain with the original bitcoin rather than the new bitcoin in which they miners supposedly are going to migrate over to... Profitable for miners?  Perhaps, but still seemingly doubtful in such a hypothetical conjecture.

I get you. To a large extent I agree, which is why I think "Segwit2x becomes another BCH" - i.e., a semi-irrelevant satellite - is one of the two likely outcomes. But let me put forward a counterpoint.

What makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place? I'd argue that the most base, most meaningful factor is that transactions are atomic and irreversible.

Okay, what makes them atomic and irreversible? It's that, in order to reverse a transaction, someone would have to have more computing power than the rest of the network put together.

Now, I don't like that miners have taken the law into their own hands on this topic. Miner incentives are not really aligned properly vis block size questions. That's part of why, when the Hong Kong Consensus called for 2MB blocks (called for them! planned to implement them!) it gated their rollout behind "broad acceptance" by the ecosystem.

But the problem is, if 90% of the hashpower really does move to Segwit2x, staying on the 1MB+ blockchain now puts my atomicity and irreversibility at risk, because there now exist many, many pools with the hashpower to unilaterally 51% attack my preferred ledger. I'm not talking about Jihan Wu here; an operation the size of Slush or BTCC, with sufficient ideological motivation, would have enough power on their own to render the 1MB+ blockchain literally unusable.

Now, if that happens, would some of the other NYA signatories switch back to mining 1MB+ to outvote that asshole? Hopefully! That's what's happened when ideological splits have happened on other coins. But now we have to worry about it, when we didn't before. Isn't that a reason for businesses to switch to Segwit2x regardless of their ideological take on how it was rolled out?

That's what makes this fork different from the others, and why I feel like there's risk here where there wasn't in past splits.

By supporting segwit2x, you will not only lose money and look like an idiot afterwards, but you will be on the wrong side story, again. As we have seen with bitcoin xt, Cash, unlimited, and whatever else, hardforks never win, and the more hardfork attempts, the weaker they become and the stronger that the real bitcoin becomes, it's like a negative asymptotic curve, it will tend to 0, so you always win by holding real BTC and dumping forks (unless a fork has somehow 100% consensus)

bitcoin cash lacked the backing of the ecosystem. no major companies backed it, no existing bitcoin wallets were compatible with it, and even with majority hash rate, SPV wallets would have ignored its chain because of changes to the sighashing algorithm.

this is not the case with segwit2x, so it's a bit more tricky to predict. this time, major services/wallets are lined up to support the fork -- and where bitmain decides to point its hashing power could make a difference. people keep talking about miners like they are such a diverse group. they're not.

You are correct.  Nearly the whole big blocker framework is nonsensical and misleading, and many folks who have been following these various big blocker arguments and iterations have come to realize that they are largely framing their ultimate take over and/or bitcoin sabotage desires as if they were technical problems (technical problems that don't really exist, except through largely exaggerated claims of their supposed existence)

I'm hoping for this fork to be short-lived, TBH.

The way I see it, either Segwit2x doesn't attract the hashpower we think, lands with a whimper, and becomes another BitcoinCash... or the 1MB(+witness) chain gets abandoned by miners, services follow, and eventually the bitcoin.org client adopts the size bump out of practical necessity.

So I'll wait to see which it is. No rush. If I'm wrong, then both sides of the fork will have value, which means I can reassess at that point.

>No, 1 MB(ignore Segwit2x)

Isn't Segwit blocks already 2mb, with a possibility of going 'til 4mb, and S2X 8mb?

Poll changed.

i think some of the big blockers are actually quite tech savvy. there is a lot of overlap with ethereum/dapp developers, too. but there is a huge difference between those who have a technical grasp of blockchain consensus and those who are merely tech savvy.

there are very few developers in the world who are capable of producing consensus-critical software as reliable as what bitcoin core produces, and this group is only shrinking. one can be tech savvy and still have a "move fast and break things" mentality. it's just not appropriate for bitcoin development.