Topic: Why Bitcoin Core Developers won't compromise - page 7. (Read 11823 times)

It has nothing to do with belief, it has to do with what is occurring now.
The basis for the current issue is not scaling, it is related to the hardfork
mechanism itself. You ignored what I stated, which is that there is no
compromise between two opposing forces. One must give way to the other,
like all things in life. You disagree with that.

What is delusional is thinking that there can be a middle ground between a
hard or soft fork. In almost all cases, it will need to fall under one or the other.
If not, where is this answer? Where is the middle fork? Currently, it does not
exist and thus why this debate still exists and goes in circles.

The debate is not about "no more hardforks forever", nor did I ever say such,
the issue is whether our technological level has reached the point where we can
do it now without sacrificing current security. Obviously, 10 years from now, a 2-4
MB blocksize hardfork is extremely doable and should preserve the current security
(the only issue then is possible intentional chain split as a malicious attack). The
debate is whether we should do a hardfork now, when technological advancement
has slowed or some think, stopped.

If SegWit was a hardfork, I would equally oppose it today as I do any simple
2MB hardfork. Core Devs developed SegWit in a softfork-able way for this very
purpose, to preserve the verifying nodes who do not wish to upgrade. If they had to
do it in a hardfork way, I am not sure they would have proposed it. When it was
provided as a softfork, they thought the community and miners would be thrilled.
Instead, with some major miners and some in the community, it is seen as bad since
it is not by the hardfork mechanism alone.

This shows that the issue is not scaling, but something else entirely. But interestingly,
according to recent development work, it is alleged that softforks can now be designed
to perform everything that hardforks can do, without the node loss. So we may have
learned that the hardfork/softfork mechanism is a result of our current lack of
understanding of Bitcoin and that only softforks are actually necessary throughout it's
lifespan. Hardforks in that scenario, are only used for serious emergencies where we
must accept security loss to prevent massive immediate failure.

My only point in my comment was that "compromises" may be a misunderstanding
of Bitcoin and how it was intended to function. Satoshi did not compromise and
didn't intended to create a system that needs to have compromises. There will
always be a losing party in this type of system due to the blockchain system itself.
Finding a middle path, between the hard and soft fork, if possible, would have
already occurred. What is occurring now is a slow negotiation that the community
needs to go through till they inevitably learn that it is futile and they have been
confused.

When this is all said and done, someone will give in or perform a contentious
hardfork. The term "compromise", is like Santa Claus, its what we tell the children
to keep them busy. Something will occur eventually, but a "compromise" is unlikely.

Anyone who believes that is clearly in denial.  Sooner or later there will be a necessary change that can't be achieved via soft fork.  Hardforks can't be avoided forever, so everyone needs to stop soiling themselves at the mere thought of one.  Also, hardforks don't preclude optimisations and second layers, so you can cease that decidedly underhanded insinuation right there.  Are you seriously saying you would have opposed SegWit if it had been proposed as a hardfork?

In the event of a contentious hard fork, I suspect the narrative and rhetoric on these boards would automatically be that the miners forking away were the cause of the split, but history will judge that it takes two parties to have an argument.  Those too belligerent to be reasoned with, who had already closed their mind to anything that wasn't a softfork, would be deemed equally culpable. 

That's not going to happen anytime soon, they have no intention of doing something like that as long as they have a huge gain from the situation as it is now and I think we're all aware of that.

There can be no compromise in this debate since it is about the hardfork
mechanism itself, not scaling. The scaling debate is only the tool currently
being used to push for a hardfork. In theory, if scaling was the only issue,
there are many different answers that already exist without using a hardfork.

Big Blockers want to use a hardfork, Small Blockers want to use optimizations/
second layers/softforks. So, what is the compromise between those two sides?

There is no compromise for that, only capitulation to one or the other.
By offering a combination of both, it defeats the main cause of the other
position. It ignores the true meaning behind this impasse. That is why this
debate will continue till capitulation or contentious hardfork.

People who are requesting compromises, IMO, are not aware of what is
actually occurring or how Bitcoin functions. Compromise does not exists within
this current Bitcoin debate.

IMO, asking for "compromises" is the most dumbed-down answer that could
ever be provided by anyone. It is the easy answer, no thought involved.
Instead those people need to figure out what the middle ground between a
hardfork and a softfork is, and then you will find your "compromise". Until
then, they should stop requesting nonsense. IMO the future is capitulation
or contentious hardfork. There is no other worthy possibility.

Everyone keeps using the word "compromise", but no one is actually budging on their stance.  Most of the people fixated on increasing the blocksize still want an increase of at least 200% and most of the people fixated on not touching the 'base' blocksize still want 0% increase until an unspecified time in the future.  

It seems obvious when you say it, but apparently it has to be spelled out in no uncertain terms:  An actual compromise would require both camps to soften their stance a little.  Is anyone prepared to do that?  Stop drawing lines in the sand over what you won't accept and start talking about what you will accept.  And for what must be the dozenth time, the blocksize doesn't have to be a whole number and nor does it have to be static.  

Well when the price drops and less people use it because it is expensive they will need to compromise. They will eventually. Miners will eventually. Other coins are taking off and people will start to switch.

I am going to sell some digital goods here and if i make someone pay me in btc its gonna cost them an extra dollar fee for no reason.

You misunderstood me. That's precisely what LN will do - take fees away from the miners thus reducing security in the future.


The real world.

Segwit is not a "little change."
Raising the blocksize to 2mb now, then 4mb by the end of the year is what i call "little change" that can be observed, debated on and possibly reversed if it becomes a disaster. However it will be successfully sufficient to take the risk vs. the outcome of possible increase in spam. In the meantime, Capacity goes up, possible small increase in scaling. Higher scaling can be researched into until a "bright spark" comes up with a better idea.

Nothing more than opinions one way or the other.

You don't want bitcoin then since that was the plan from day 1. Or maybe you haven't read all the emails/posts etc from back then. Why would any miner support the network once the reward gets close to zero without fees to make up for that?

I don't know what world you live in, but everything we develop/code and every little change that's made is a risk and the outcome one "thinks" will happen is made up of a bunch of assumptions and as much testing and scientific proof one can do. Despite that, there is never any guarantee.

Compromise on security of the network, future mining fees to secure the network, technical debt by adopting segwit in its current form - no thanks. Compromising when $30bn dollars invested in Bitcoin is plain idiotic. One either gets it right or not. If a mistake is made can it be reversed? If no then no compromise can be made.

Visibly those subtleties are so subtle, that they can never be rationally argued, and can never contradict a logical gedanken experiment of the opposite.  Subtle is the Lord, probably, but is the Lord actually ?

Contrary to what some may think here, I have nothing against Core.   After all, in a trustless, distributed system, everybody can do what he wants, and Core has the right, just as well as anyone else, to try to set the system to their hand or religion - that's the whole idea, that nobody is to be trusted, and anybody is allowed to do just anything, the system will cope or will fail.

What I wanted to argue was that bitcoin WAS a centralized system with a centralized authority, Core, which did make it possible in the past to apply (modest) changes.  However, what Core simply did, was overplay their hand, and as such, they lost their centralized moral power over the system.  And now, the system got decentralized and hence became immutable.  This is not eternal.  It can sufficiently centralize again to find again a central authority, that will dictate change.  But for the moment, Core lost that position of central trusted authority.    A truly decentralized system is immutable.   So if it changes its protocol, it is of course centralized with a central, trusted authority.  Litecoin is.  Most alt coins are, and bitcoin was centralized until Core overplayed its hand, and the mining pools are not centralized enough as of today, to be able to have a quick decision under the leadership of one single boss (or if they are, that boss has decided to stick with the old bitcoin protocol - both are of course indistinguishable).

Just a few things to add here - the Core dev team went through a series of coups and power plays, and many good devs (including Satoshi's closest confidant, Gavin) were forced off the team, with dirty tricks from a nasty new breed of devs. Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik were also important losses from the team. Many of the remaining dev team members are employees of a privately held corporation, Blockstream, which has demonstrated their intent to make bitcoin a settlement-layer solution for their patented Lightning network.

It's called compromise and the lesser of two evils. The hard reality is that when it comes to this sort of thing, there are no black and white perfect solutions. It's all just compromises and levels of risk. So you can choose to not make a choice and wait for some other solution. But it won't be perfect and would require compromises anyway.

That's a flawed conclusion. If both are not to your liking then both must be rejected. As i have. Thus both must start again, unless new developers want to make a better proposal. Anyone here, you and me, can do that. But does anyone ever care to listen to any proposals outside the developers inner circle?

Segwit is the compromose and best way foreward. Ask why Bitmain  and his paid off cronies want to strangle bitcoin use and development.

#UASF

FTFY..

Nice summary.

This is one of the funny things in bitcoin: decentralization.  No boss, no hierarchy, no pilot in the plane.  Bitcoin was designed to guarantee (up to a level) that nobody could easily "cheat" ; that is, that nobody in the system could decide, upon his own, to change things, and *not respect the rules*.  Of course, in the beginning, this was not really true: when Satoshi was still the boss, he changed the rules several times.  However, these were "technical" rules.  His self-appointed heirs, the Core dev team, was in fact the only team taking over the development of the code implementing Satoshi's system when he disappeared.  So they have been the "boss" quite a while, and they too, did change quite a lot of technical details.  But none of these affected people (most of them weren't used in fact).  So people let them play and change rules for a while.

There was a ticking bomb that Satoshi himself had put into the bitcoin rules, and which people, back then, warned him about: the block size limit.  Satoshi publicly considered that this limit could easily be removed or changed if ever it was considered reasonable, but people pointed out to him that this was risky: after all, small blocks will make for high fees, and miners will like high fees.  As they are the ones that actually implement the protocol, they might, in fact, seriously hesitate to change it.

At a certain point, Core proposed some quite radical changes to bitcoin.  It goes under the name of Segwit.  It are a lot of technical improvements, a quite radical change of how the block chain is built, and in fact, also a preparation of a totally new way of transacting: the "Lightning Network".   The Lightning Network is an idea that could in principle allow one to use bitcoin transactions without writing them on the chain - only when you are scammed or your partners disappear, you could always "come back" to settle on the chain.  As such, Core considered that increasing the block chain was not going to motivate people on the LN, so they thought that it was a good idea to keep bitcoin's block chain small, and somehow force people off chain.  And they went on telling everywhere how supposedly dangerous it was to go beyond 1 MB blocks.

In the mean time, people were looking also to just do what Satoshi suggested, namely increasing the block size, so that more transactions could go on, but Core resisted, most probably thinking that if they gave in to increase the block size, the utility of their Lightning Network would remain theoretical, and people would always ask for more and more space on the block chain.  By doing so, some "resistance" appeared, that didn't consider Core's central control over bitcoin's rules as "natural".  

This is how Core lost its position as central decider on bitcoin's protocol, so now there is not really a central authority any more.

Once this central authority is gone from bitcoin, it being a decentralized system without "boss" that decides, and its design being such that if you deviate from the rules, you are essentially rejected by the system, nobody can actually really change anything any more, without risking to be rejected and losing a lot of value.  Bitcoin's system is entirely focussed on "no deviation from majority possible", and the majority is de facto the old rule system.  The first one that tries something else, and is not immediately certain of being followed by 70% of the others, will most probably lose all efforts in doing so: bitcoin was made that way.  If there was a central boss that decided for everybody, that would be quite easy.  But right now, with no very clear majority for ONE specific solution, it seems to be locked in to its current protocol.  And IF there is a central boss, then it isn't decentralized any more, which is its main selling point.

As such, it is difficult to see how bitcoin can still change what so ever to its rules.

To use an analogy, some people want to stay at 1MB blocks due to bandwidth and hard-drive.  If it takes a long time to download the blockchain, then there will be fewer nodes (the story goes).  However, I remember when I paid $350 for a 1.2MP camera.  It even came with a 512MB memory stick.  I, also, had a cell phone and would dial in to Napster at night (theoretically of course) so I could get 8 songs by morning. Now ... I can stream HD, my camera has a higher resolution camera and I carry around 64GB attached to my key-chain.  Locking in at 1MB does not make sense, just as keeping cameras at 1.2MP did not make sense.

It's the process of mining that keeps the network safe.  It consumes energy and the miners are rewarded for protecting the network with 12.5BTC per 10 minutes.  This is divided and among all those who provided hash power towards solving the equation, unless solo mining.

I am so confused as to why the scaling problem isn't sorted. This might put off a lot of non techno lay people entering the Bitcoin space because they are used to dealing with cash, fast in and fast out. Bitcoin has huge value but all the DEVS and Miners need to get out of their own little spaces and really think about the common good for everyone to be able to easily adopt and use Bitcoin for everyday use.