Bitcoin is awesome. This forum is terrific. Despite all the spam, shit-postings and other stuff, the sheer depth of information and bitcoin related avenues available here are unmatched. Every person who gets serious about bitcoin comes here for once. This is a kind of rite of passage.
Lately, bitcoin has been seeing constant attacks and lot of questions because of problems of its own and those created by others. There's the scaling and fee issue. There's Roger Ver and his supporters droning on about "Bcash is the real bitcoin", celebratory posts on r/btc about bitcoin.org changing its website, troll and spam posts at the forum about "LN is a bank" etc. etc. There's scammers and spammers in ICOs, ANN threads giving the forum and crypto a bad name.
I have been to both Reddits r/btc and r/bitcoin but this forum was my main gateway to the narrative. I found myself leaning more and more towards SegWit and LN as the solutions and causes to back rather than a simple block size increase.I would like to share the reasons I feel I leaned towards this:
1.) A block size increase would be a slide down a path to losing independent, user-run full nodes.
2.) Bitcoin has shown resilience in terms of security for almost 8 years now and I don't see how anybody could attempt a contentious hard-
fork without implementing and widely testing the other major scaling proposals.
3.) Independent, user-run full nodes are important, no matter how pragmatic Bcash shills want to sound when they say that full nodes
are not needed and Satoshi never intended them to.
(Though, Here in this message, Satoshi says that most
users will be SPV nodes and only miners will run full nodes. I doubt he had accounted for ASIC based specialized mining. It was supposed
to be 1CPU = 1vote right, Not 1 Antminer = 1 Vote)
4.) Engineers/DIY people/Hacker culture thrive in complexity. I find SegWit and LN attempts to address scaling way more elegant than a
hard-forking block size increase. This also ensures that the innovations in the field have a long term impact in terms of taking technology
farther.
5. A solution like SegWit infact increases block size too but puts the onus to use those benefits on the community of users, by adopting it.Use Segwit! Here's how to
do it for an Electrum wallet.
6. I don't like the idea that only miners should run full-nodes while users remain on SPV wallets. That leaves the power to validate
tranactions and form consensus rules in the hands of miners only. As users, we are then supposed to trust miners to act in their self-
interest which will be aligned with the public's interest, just as in a capitalist society, theoretically. They'll know whats good for you.
7.) Maybe I have had some confirmation bias because I've seen most members at BCT supporting the SegWit narrative.
This last point not withstanding, I still feel I have formed an independent viewpoint that SegWit, LN and such improvements are a better alternative than a simplistic block size increase.
Which of the above reasons resonate with you or you agree with them (or not)? Please share.
P.S.: Must say these fellas had some role in helping me get to that opinion:
Gotta Thank Jihan Wu and Roger Ver
Lately, bitcoin has been seeing constant attacks and lot of questions because of problems of its own and those created by others. There's the scaling and fee issue. There's Roger Ver and his supporters droning on about "Bcash is the real bitcoin", celebratory posts on r/btc about bitcoin.org changing its website, troll and spam posts at the forum about "LN is a bank" etc. etc. There's scammers and spammers in ICOs, ANN threads giving the forum and crypto a bad name.
I have been to both Reddits r/btc and r/bitcoin but this forum was my main gateway to the narrative. I found myself leaning more and more towards SegWit and LN as the solutions and causes to back rather than a simple block size increase.I would like to share the reasons I feel I leaned towards this:
1.) A block size increase would be a slide down a path to losing independent, user-run full nodes.
2.) Bitcoin has shown resilience in terms of security for almost 8 years now and I don't see how anybody could attempt a contentious hard-
fork without implementing and widely testing the other major scaling proposals.
3.) Independent, user-run full nodes are important, no matter how pragmatic Bcash shills want to sound when they say that full nodes
are not needed and Satoshi never intended them to.
(Though, Here in this message, Satoshi says that most
users will be SPV nodes and only miners will run full nodes. I doubt he had accounted for ASIC based specialized mining. It was supposed
to be 1CPU = 1vote right, Not 1 Antminer = 1 Vote)
4.) Engineers/DIY people/Hacker culture thrive in complexity. I find SegWit and LN attempts to address scaling way more elegant than a
hard-forking block size increase. This also ensures that the innovations in the field have a long term impact in terms of taking technology
farther.
5. A solution like SegWit infact increases block size too but puts the onus to use those benefits on the community of users, by adopting it.Use Segwit! Here's how to
do it for an Electrum wallet.
6. I don't like the idea that only miners should run full-nodes while users remain on SPV wallets. That leaves the power to validate
tranactions and form consensus rules in the hands of miners only. As users, we are then supposed to trust miners to act in their self-
interest which will be aligned with the public's interest, just as in a capitalist society, theoretically. They'll know whats good for you.
7.) Maybe I have had some confirmation bias because I've seen most members at BCT supporting the SegWit narrative.
This last point not withstanding, I still feel I have formed an independent viewpoint that SegWit, LN and such improvements are a better alternative than a simplistic block size increase.
Which of the above reasons resonate with you or you agree with them (or not)? Please share.
P.S.: Must say these fellas had some role in helping me get to that opinion:
Gotta Thank Jihan Wu and Roger Ver
EDIT 1: ON HOW BCT CAN SUPPORT LN/SEGWIT.
The thought-train that prompted me to share these reasons started after I saw a post complaining about the high fees for a Copper member upgrade.
There has been a lot of talk about increased fees and everybody agrees that SegWit adoption and LN are possible solutions to this. Now LN is still in testing phase but SegWit can still give some positive effect if we start using the addresses more often.
As an example, We can start by changing the donation address for BCT to one of the backward compatible SegWit addresses with prefix '3'.
Secondly, My understanding with LN is that it'll need people to open up channels with well-connected nodes. There are so many people doing business here at BCT that are the natural choices to be some of these nodes. For example, The respectable campaign managers, Trusted Escrows and old members. If possible, we could have a separate thread for coordinating LN adoption among these members.
Some of these are just ideas. I will try to do my bit to help them take some form and put updates here.