Topic: The Barry Silbert segwit2x agreement with >80% miner support. - page 61. (Read 120014 times)

Probably. But seeing what has happened now, the right move was to treat it like a regular "upgrade" and leave the scaling debate after the soft fork. If Segwit were activated, I believe the debate today would be if we are scaling off chain or on chain. A little of both would be good if you ask me.

Yes, here I agree - and in this case I think you would be right with your assumption that at least a very large part of the services would stay available to the users of the "original" chain.


I think I have overcomplicated things with the UASF/"Barrycoin" scenario. But my scenario with "splitting services" would also be adaptable to a classic scenario with one hard-forking party where the hard-forking chain has the backing of large parts of "the economy". Think of the UASF. I could imagine a scenario where their supporters could get more than 50% of the economy and a substantial portion of the miners to support a chain that eventually becomes incompatible with the "old chain".

The old chain would become then the minority chain. In a case of a 60%/40% split it would continue to be usable, though - but several services would cease to exist for the old chain because they support the changes the upgrade introduces (e.g. Segwit). Some could offer their services for both chains, but I think that would be a minority.


I think a smart "forking group" would announce their plans well in advance to try to get adoption by the economy and miners. BU made this exactly and failed, but another group may have better luck (see Ethereum).




That would only be true in your case where a fork is a minority option not announced well in advance and without substantial community support. Cryptocurrencies are social communities where some kind of "valuable token" is accepted. If the community splits in two parts that are roughly equally important (50/50 to 70/30, for example) then you do have the confusion which chain is the "original one" or the "most supported one". And then you would have all the usability hassles I'm talking about.

There will be no chain split, instead it will remain binary. 

Well, that's a triple split then !  There is still the unmodified chain, with the protocol of today.  I was thinking of the more classical scenario when there's the original chain going on without any modification, and a new chain, which forks off with a new protocol.  Then it is pretty clear that the original chain is, well, the original one.  In the ethereum split, ETC is the original chain.  (the battle for the NAME is an entirely different issue)

Of course, if, at the moment of split, the original chain simply stops, and two NEW chains emerge, both with a different protocol from the original one, yes, then of course you get a confusion.  But that can only happen if the system is *entirely* centralized, where almost all entities in the system have colluded into one camp or another one.

I was thinking of the more "decentralized" approach when there are no "agreements in meeting rooms" at any point, but that suddenly, an entity proposes a fork as individual initiative, the rest of the system not even knowing about this plan until it is announced.   Then of course, the "rest of the system" cannot collude to make a different protocol modification exactly on the same date !


OK, in the "double split" I agree with you.  My hypothesis was that the original chain wasn't even aware of the fork until it happened of course.


It wouldn't be any different than coinmarketcap.  A fork is just a new crypto currency, with the funny property that if you were holding coins on the original chain, you also happen to hold coins on the new one, coins which you may care about, or not.  You just get a holding on a new chain if you care to download the wallet.  You might just as well not. 
This is no different than if one would tell you that you can download, say, a litecoin wallet, and if you put your bitcoin keyfile in there, you also happen to be the proud (or not proud) owner of a certain stash of litecoin.
If you want to stick to your original coins, and not care about your holdings on a new chain, well, that's OK too.


I don't see what it changes.  If tomorrow, I decide to launch, say, a fork of litecoin, without even most litecoin users knowing, what would that even matter ?  Ok, if most users of litecoin LIKE my fork and dump their old litecoin for the one on my chain, then litecoin's market cap will fall severely and mine will rise.  But hey, if those same litecoin users suddenly like bitcoin, and sell all their litecoin to buy bitcoin, the same would happen.  So for the ignorant litecoin user that doesn't know of my fork, I don't see what changes.  He doesn't even need to know about my fork (ok, he will have coins he will ignore, too bad).  Yes, there's a volatility risk, but that always exists.

Well, it depends what you call a store of value, but no, bitcoin was NOT originally meant to be (at least officially) to be a store of value (like rare paintings), but a means of payment, something that fluidizes economic interaction, a currency.  A currency's most important property is that it has a kind of reliable value, and is not a speculative asset: you are not taking risks you didn't want to take when you fluidize economic interaction.

Now, if you also see a store of value as something which keeps its value in the long term, the idea is more or less the same: that what you put in as value, is also more or less what you will get out.  In the long term, stability is even less easy to obtain than in the short term, but that's nevertheless what you want: something that has an almost *guaranteed* way of getting out later what you put in.  

In as much as you would like to see a *rise*, you accept volatility and hence also a *fall*, which makes it deviate from a store of value, and turns it into a more risky speculative asset ; but in the long term, some volatility is almost always unavoidable.  However, as with a currency, the less volatility, the better, also for a store of value.

A few classical examples of stores of value are gold, real estate and broad index values on the stock market.    Something that goes up by a factor of 10 or goes down by a factor of 6 in a few years time, I wouldn't call that a reliable store of value.   However, it is a fantastic speculative asset.  And yes, it may become, maybe, a long term store of value like rare paintings.   Or not.  Nobody knows.  But as of now, you can hardly call it a reliable store of value, and even less a reliable currency.  But it is a fantastic speculative asset with rarely seen volatility - which is exactly what makes it a bad currency or store of value.


Indeed.  You mentioned exactly what makes bitcoin impossible as a currency.  In bitcoin and in most crypto, one regulates the debasement, and one doesn't regulate the value.   If the difficulty of bitcoin were following a fixed, slightly rising curve to offset technological improvement and induce SLIGHT (and controlled) deflation, then it would stabilize its value.  But bitcoin has an inelastic offer, which makes it highly volatile.


This is indeed why I think they are a good idea, but I also think they are logically unavoidable.  Why WOULDN'T someone make a hard fork if he has an idea, and let the market decide, instead of wanting consensus ?  As you say, it doesn't cost much of an effort to propose a fork.  If it can be done, I don't see how one can expect it never to be done.


Yes, but every pyramid game only goes up until it goes down.  I think that most people buy bitcoin because they expect a rise.  That's the definition of a greater fool game, that lasts as long as there are greater fools.  But on a finite earth, the number of greater fools is limited, so what will happen when the last greater fool has bought the most expensive bitcoin and is expecting a rise which will not come ?  It is economically impossible to have assets that outperform spectacularly the stock market for a long time in a systematic way.   These crazy expectations wouldn't be there if one knew that bitcoin's value were capped and stabilized, and its use would indeed only be "currency" and eventually, though still riskier "store of value", because one would have taken out the irrational speculation.

I think here lies our misunderstanding - in my chain split scenario (the most likely if BIP148 would compete with "Barrycoin") there would be no agreement which one is the original chain. Both the BIP148 client and the "Barrycoin" client have code in it that will eventually become incompatible to unupgraded non-Segwit clients.


If there is no agreement which chain is the "original" one, and there is a new client A (for chain A) and a new client B (for Chain B),  then there will be services that will upgrade to client A and others to client B. It is an active decision in both cases, but it's not too different from a regular upgrade of the client. It isn't important if one of the chains is "hard-forking" or only "soft-forking", both are forking.



My fear is that a "regularly splitting" Bitcoin will become usable only for people with a technically advanced understanding of the ecosystem. Now, with all the volatility, Bitcoin is still usable as a saving/speculation vehicle for common people (a sort of "poor man's stock"). The user has to follow one price feed and can take decisions based on it. Having to follow two feeds is already far too complex for most people.

Also in non-speculative use cases like remittances, then in a "regularly forking" scenario both parties must pay attention to the danger of a chain split all the time. That would mean, de facto, that it couldn't be used for this purpose in an independent/decentralized way by common people but only by specialized companies that hide the hassle for you. That is also a centralization risk.

Most likely because Core devs believed the opposite to be true: if they didn't pitch it as a scaling solution, no one would give a shit or want to bother with it.

I called it! Simon Dixon said "If Segwit was not pitched as a scaling solution, we would have had it ages ago."

The question now is why did Core pitch it as a scaling solution?

Here is an interesting talk by Simon Dixon on the BitcoinMeister youtube channel. He does a good job of highlighting what is most important in this scaling debate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNGzhWODF2s&t=3761

I like this article; not literally and with everything in it, but it has a point: BIP148 is a fork. And it's a minority fork. And, a fork done wrong.

The protocol needs onward movement. Yet it's stuck on doing so. Boiling point is coming closer; and many sides don't play nice...

Still an interesting time to see where this all heads. But I also find it a bit creepy, this uncertainty. Instead of expanding my mining capabilities on the Bitcoin, I'm now expanding them on the Litecoin until the dust/uncertainty settles. Following with interest 

dinofelis I appreciate your candor in admitting that you wish bitcoin to fail in its current implementation as you feel it is an obstacle to to "freedom". Some of us do not share your enthusiasm for bitcoins downfall.

I have found that people often put insufficient thought into what freedom actually entails and what is necessary in the long run to sustain it.
Below are two posts that highlight my thoughts both on freedom and on your thesis of machines overtaking humans.

The Nature of Freedom
Faith and Future

My position is that bitcoin is a freedom currency.

That said I will now cease taking this thread off on tangents, however interesting, and allow it to return to its original and important topic.

How is bitcoin not a good store of value?

If bitcoin was supposed to be a regular currency, there wouldn't be a limited supply, but an infinite inflation of like 2% or something, it wouldn't have halvings every 4 year but every 10+ years, it wouldn't be so hard to change.

Hardforks a non issue because you don't lose your money and there will always be a loser chain and the winner chain continues appreciating in value.

BTC has only gone up long term, has never been hacked, you can carry it around and cross any borders.

There's no better store of value in 2017.

Most probably true.  However, one needs to distinguish personal preferences, and probable system outcomes.  One's idea of what are the probable system outcomes should be as independent as possible as one's desires of what those outcomes ideally should be.  So even if we diverge on our *desires*, we might agree on what most probably will happen, because that is independent of our desires (assuming that both of us have zero power to influence the outcome, which I take is true).

I think, whether a desired outcome or not, we can foresee that:
- bitcoin will be a hierarchical power system where an oligarchy of deciders will decide upon the rules in their advantage (usual human systems) ; or will remain sufficiently decentralized to keep with the original protocol (immutability will hold).
- in the long run, it will be unavoidable that many forks of bitcoin will arise ; what is less clear is how many of them will be a market success ; unless bitcoin's demise is earlier than we think and nobody is interested any more in forking it.


I'm not even "desiring" that, but I'm fundamentally convinced that at a certain point, machines will overtake humans: it seems like the natural evolution of things.   My idea was that crypto could play a role in that, because the difficulty has always been: how could we LET them take over ; but if we are not aware of it, then that's an explanation of course.

But yes, I would have liked to have a freedom currency (even if it were ultimately used to the demise of humanity which is in any case unavoidable at a certain point), what bitcoin *pretended* to be, and of which I'm now convinced that not only it will never be that, but it will even be a huge obstacle for a freedom currency to arise.   However, apart from that, bitcoin *is* a dynamical system that will do SOMETHING (but that's not "become a freedom currency"), and it is interesting to observe the dynamics of how it is acting, independent of any "desire".

@dinofelis we have fundamentally divergent views.

I am fairly certain that if we delved into it we would find we disagree on pretty much everything from the nature of money to the value of transparency and even the nature of decentralization itself.

Given your stated positions above it seems logical for you to desire bitcoin to fracture and fail in its present state and be replaced by some hardfork both to destroy the value of current implementation and to clear the way for a totally opaque system enabling anonymous funding of the "deep state". My vision of the future is entirely different and I have laid it out in the CoinCube highlights below. I do not want to drag this thread off topic with a philosophical debate.

I think I now understand your position. Thanks for sharing.

I don't understand that argument.  After all, the original chain is still functioning.  How would services "disappear" from the original chain ?  You can entirely pretend, as a holder of the original token, that the new fork doesn't exist - apart from the fact that there's now more competition in the market of course.  But in what way would a service that was working on the original chain, cease to exist because someone is making a new chain somewhere ?  Of course, it could be that the service provider makes up his mind to CHANGE his service and not offer it any more to the original chain - but that's an active decision on his part.  He could make the same decision without the fork: giving up on the service all together, moving his service to litecoin, or to ethereum or whatever.  That's healthy competition in the market, but it requires an active decision on the part of the service provider to give up on the service on the original chain. 


That is exactly one of the problems of "collectibles" which aren't collectibles, because, exactly, they can be copied over.  If a chain had a value-regulation system, then after the storm is over, the value would go back to whatever it was supposed to be regulated to.

As I pointed out in my answer to coincube, the forking business hasn't really taken off yet, but is a phenomenon to be expected in crypto space.  After all, it is way easier to give yourself an existing ecosystem than wanting to build one from scratch.  There's no reason why in the long term, cryptos will not split regularly.

Decentralization doesn't mean "an equal voice".  It means "nobody has a voice, so there's no need to try to shout".  


Forking doesn't alter anything to the fundamental speculative nature of "store of value".  Store of value is always a risky bet on the future, in fact on a future belief system.  You hope that the asset that is supposed to store your value will be appreciated in the future.  With monetary assets, that's always a risky business, because they are "hollow" (no utility).  A good store of value is most of the time linked to economic utility, in the form of shares of a value-producing company, real estate, or things like that.  The only exception seems to be gold.  

I don't think crypto can be a good long term store of value, exactly because it is hollow, and can be forked as much as you'd like.  Bitcoin was not meant to be a store of value, it was meant to be a currency (but is ill designed for that).  The collectible-design and the huge initial seigniorage have turned bitcoin into a highly speculative asset, which makes it a bad currency, and also a bad store of value, but a great betting token, which is what it became.

There will only be one way to stop forking off bitcoin: by having it legally forbidden to fork, and by declaring bitcoin a fiat currency, of which the protocol is to be determined by some or other international body of politicians (including more printing of coins, or not, etc...).  

It is strange that you consider that immutability is not part of the aimed-for dynamics of crypto, but that "not finding an agreement and being separatists" is considered a bad idea.  It is much more probable that one finds disagreements and splitting-off rather than total consensus, unless there's a powerful way to enforce this consensus.  


Well, this is a living ecosystem in which many different ways can be explored.   Apart from the "new genesis block virgin chain" and the standard "hard fork", there are many intermediate possibilities, which haven't been explored yet.  

The problem with a "virgin new coin" is that you have to build a whole new eco system.  The problem with a standard hard fork is that you give a lot of new coins to people that may actually be hostile to this coin, and are going to dump it to oblivion.  You could do intermediate things, such as a hard fork that requires burning the coins on the other chain if you want to transact (all of it, or just part of it).  There are myriads of ways to make chains evolve, cross over, interact, that do NOT require any form of consensus.


As I said, there are many other potential ways that do not require any form of consensus, and that interact with the bitcoin ecosystem.  Standard hard forks are one such way, but there are plenty of other potential ways.


That's in any case the case, simply because that potential exists.  If "immutability" is not part of the system, then crypto has not much to offer apart from gambling, or indeed, currency usage, but only as quick payment between obtaining the coins and exchanging them back to fiat or whatever has more guaranteed value.

After all, new forks are nothing else but individual initiatives in the same way that "putting competing cars on the market" are also individual initiatives that don't need the agreement of all the existing car constructors ; forking off is nothing else but sending owners of a Ford a letter that they now also own a Toyota, and an invitation to sell their Ford to buy a second Toyota.  Who is Ford to stop Toyota from doing this ?

The ecosystem of splitting and mixing different chains has not yet been started to be explored. It is much more difficult with PoW coins of course, because the masters of the game are the mining pools, which are few in number ; but with PoS coins, you can split as much as you want, because you don't need PoW for cryptographic security.
 

This is because you don't really want bitcoin to be ideal money but as a speculative vehicle to become rich.  Which is indeed what bitcoin's initial design is made for, but not what it was announced to be.  If bitcoin is to be a currency, it cannot be an investment vehicle and even less a speculative asset.

There are ways to make such crypto.  Maybe one day, I'll try to make one.  But I think it will not be very successful, because by now, bitcoin has made the crypto scene into a highly speculative "get rich quickly" game, and the idea of having a freedom means of payment without any possibility to make much profit with it, is now essentially dead.  In other words, my idea is that bitcoin has very successfully succeeded in killing exactly that what it pretended to be.


Then, decentralization has no meaning.  After all, we can all have a transparent central server, and look at how politicians decide how it should work.  A simple law that obliges all banks to render all people's accounts public would have exactly the same effect and we don't need any crypto.

A transparent, hierarchical future is shear horror.  My only interest in crypto was to have a growing, anonymous, underground economy that can bribe the transparent economy and politics to death without ever revealing anything about its inner workings.  This would then be the way in which the machines could take over society without any of us ever knowing how it could happen.
If you can have a large underground anonymous economy, that can buy homicide, that can buy all deciders (economical, political, judges, military...) etc... to make them part of a system they are not aware off, you can finally make a real "deep state" nobody knows about, which could in the end be a network of machines without any human in control, to subjugate humanity and make unknown machines the new dominant species on earth.  That's what I saw as the future of crypto.

This is brilliant!  I especially like the descriptive text that refers to the emergent consensus factor.  "chicken-little cry babies"  are just the right words, my stomach aches from laughter.

Jihan Wu is backing this agreement. Roger Ver is still backing the BU horse.

A small aside: Bitclub Network has moved back to signalling segwit.

I have the same thoughts here and the UASF will start on August 1. I believe the price will be very volatile and with a tendency to go down. I will buy back if everything has calmed down.