There are folks in crypto who both consider most of the industry to be a scam while at the same time are working to fix it because there's something good here. We get hated on by almost everyone - both those in crypto for criticizing (BTC is a ponzi, ETH cannot scale, etc.) and those outside for being a part of it. It's easy to get bitter about this, but recently I spoke to a financial advisor who runs an investment fund that only invests in businesses that share certain values. He felt exactly the same about the financial industry and he's doing fine. If you resonate with this comment, realize you don't need to please everyone.
So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users will hear about such a protocol war on news outlets, not by watching their node. Then they can choose which fork to buy, sell, and use.
Funny how this is now the only activity for this: buy and sell forks in a vacuum.
Because in actual real world scenarios users definitely don't chose that. Just go into a shop and watch people not chosing anything, but, you know, just paying.
Even granting that, it's still not user nodes that matter. We've seen from history (BCH/BSV/BCHA) that applications and exchanges decide which fork gets the ticker.
It was the other way around. Several exchanges publicly went all-in on various Bitcoin forks, only to turn around on them when all users and economic activity stayed with "regular" Bitcoin.
Many prominent people predicted the mainline Bitcoin chain dead when so many important exchanges and custodians promised to change the consensus rules. In retrospect it may sound like empty threats, it doesn't make much business sense to go up against economic activity, but at the time it was considered a real threat.
> So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes.
BSV obviates the idea completely.
Any mistake the miners make, is forever.
Without this, miners could increase the money supply by indefinitely postponing the block reward.
> "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules"
> If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it.
No one is going to mine on a chain that produces worthless coins users don't accept. Users forced miners to activate Segwit in 2017, and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
Honestly, you don't know this. Users != nodes. A single individual could have spun up tons of nodes to vote for Segwit. Given the stakes and how manipulated social media was at the time, I consider this what likely happened. This is also what proof of work solves.
and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
Everyone knows the game by now. Whoever keeps the ticker keeps the hashpower. We saw this with BCH/BSV and also BCH/BCHA. Because most users don't follow these details. It doesn't mean users won.
Almost all IP traffic goes through an Internet backbone router which can process 100Gbps+. It's no problem. I suggest people think of Bitcoin miners like this in the future. These would be big operations, yes, but they are economically incentivized to honesty, and there will be plenty of competition. Once you use your imagination, or try to build a node yourself, you'll see the only real bottleneck in Bitcoin's architecture is the updating of the UTXO set, and this can be made extremely fast - eventually in hardware. All other transaction and block validation and propagation can be parallelized or removed as a bottleneck. Users share transactions p2p and settle them onchain, and apps and services create sub-networks of transactions they care about. It all works. But to do that people need to drop the assumption that home users need to run a node - it's a broken idea that holds Bitcoin back. The original design of Bitcoin was remarkable in its ability to scale, which was written about by Satoshi and ignored, and this is being demonstrated again in Bitcoin SV. On the other hand, almost every other cryptocurrency has deviated from that simple design. Ethereum for example requires a global state database and cannot parallelize this way.
No. In this design users don't trust miners. Users trust Bitcoin. This is important. Banks can censor. Banks can go down. Banks can be forced to confiscate your money by a single court. But if one miner were to act up, other miners around the globe could keep them in check, and apps and users could switch around as desired. It's an incentivized complete system that you can't reduce this way.
The reason UTXOs parallelize better is because when you look at a transaction on a UTXO-based blockchain like Bitcoin, you can deterministically and often immediately know from it exactly how the state of the system will change, and which states will change. A Bitcoin transaction for example completely describes which outputs will be spent, which new outputs will be created, and the new amounts in those outputs. This is a really nice property. It makes validating and analyzing transactions parallelizable by design. The system still has to protect against double-spends globally, but this part is light in comparison and can be very fast.
In contrast to Bitcoin, basically every other smart contract blockchain is account-based, not UTXO-based, and has shared global state. This does not parallelize naturally at all. I like to think its similar to using cash vs transferring money using Venmo. Giving someone cash parallelize naturally, like UTXOs, whereas Venmo requires a database lock.
In account-based systems, it’s impossible to tell how a transaction will change the system's state without executing it. The order that transactions are executed is crucial too, which is why people say Ethereum is single-threaded. Attempts to parallelize account-based systems fall into different categories. Ethereum 2.0's plan is to basically create separate VMs with separate state, called shards or rollups. This can work sometimes, but it makes interactivity between shards (think applications) much more difficult, and interactivity to me is a major reason for using blockchain. Another approach is to embed information into transactions to make them parallelize more like UTXO-based transactions, which is what Solana does. But they parallelize only at the smart contract level, not at the asset level as UTXOs can.
Whereas UTXO-based designs get parallelizability by design, creating a programming model for smart contracts and tokens has to-date been harder on these systems, and frankly there aren't even that many people trying. I've been working on this problem for a while and believe I've found a breakthrough. Check out https://run.network if it interests you.
It's worse. How do people think this will work? You will keep your money in institutions. Transfers will be settled in databases. There will be management fees, insurance requirements, dispute costs, censorship, and surveillance. Read the 1st page of whitepaper folks. High fees bring about the same trusted third-parties that Bitcoin was built to avoid.
Bitcoin.com has the Satoshi Archive (https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/) with all his emails and forum posts. Satoshi wanted big blocks, and so BTC largely ignores him or says "We are all satoshi", but there is a ton of wisdom if you go back and read. This was put together by Derek Magill, who is also a good person to follow on Twitter.
Warning, bitcoin.com is non-authoritative on bitcoin. They went a little mad a few years ago with the big block agenda. They do not speak for bitcoin, and want to push their big block bcash fork.
Satoshi proposed 1MB blocks in 2010 as an anti-spam mechanism. He was not against raising it, but it had to be done sensibly. RV and Bitcoin.com forced a non-sensible fork and fell off a cliff.
Roger Ver had nothing to do with the BCH fork. In fact, he was many months late in showing any public support for it. He was dead silent until it started to look like the core devs were going to reneg on their agreement to support 2mb blocks in exchange for passing Segwit. And as expected, they did reneg on that, immediately after they got what they wanted.
BCH is not Roger Ver. BCH is all of the old school Bitcoiners who still believe Bitcoin can scale like Satoshi intended. And they're a hell of a lot less toxic to interact with.
I think the us vs them mentality is what is toxic, and I see that on both sides of the Bitcoin scaling discussion.
BCH may not be Roger Ver, but the main reason I don't currently hold BCH is because of Roger Ver. If he wasn't in the picture I would be much more apt to hold BCH. He comes across as very reactive. What's wrong with calling BCH bcash? Does he really need to blow up anytime someone calls it that?
I beg to disagree. No oldschool bitcoiner I know (including myself) takes bcash seriously. I would request that you to name any technical public figure that supports bcash. All that is left in this community is new suckers, and antibitcoin non-technical folks. Segwit DID change in blocksize weighting, with a fee incentive model to use segwit. These false antiblockstream tropes should have died out in 2018, but bcashers keep bringing them up, as they lack the technical nuance to understand how the system works.
There will be another weighting change with taproot, which further scales the network by preventing the need to broadcast tx's containing the full script output. This in turn introduces additional privacy in indistinguishably of script outputs.
Its not too late to preserve your money. Ignore the fork noise, and keep stacking (real) sats.
Congratulations, you made me come out of retirement purely to disagree with you. No chain more richly deserves death than BTC and BCH is one of the best chains in existence. I'm prepared to sign this message with a Bitcoin key from 2011 if you doubt the fact I've been active that long.
It's the unfortunate and poorly informed post 2017 split BTC adherents who have no idea what's going on. I watched the entire thing unfold first hand and the BCH camp simply has it correct. The fact that the market is largely completely ignorant of this is one of the most glaring indications of just how irrational it presently is.
Until BTC dies, the entire cryptosphere is little more than a joke. Witness the tone very technically proficient but not "in the cult" people like George Hotz have when they're discussing the block size debate; there's no doubt whatsoever that core is utterly wrong, to the point that any suggestion to the contrary is nothing more than a joke. Deep
link to the exact part in a recent interview he addresses this https://youtu.be/_L3gNaAVjQ4?t=2635
I would like to support BCH but everyone I talk to who supports Bitcoin Cash comes across as so divisive on this matter. BTC obviously has an important place in the crypto ecosystem. To discount the price growth of BTC and its importance in the overall awareness of crypto to the public seems short sighted. Price does matter. All of these coins can exist.
They sound divisive on the matter because for over a decade now they've fruitlessly tried to explain the abject idiocy of backing a takeover attempt by a party whose business model is directly focused around constraining on chain capacity to a uselessly low rate, the lower the better, and the uselessly low rate this attack has managed to constrain it to is barely higher than the throughput of a fax machine. Let that sink in; it's 2021 and gigabit internet in developing countries is not that big a deal for context. Fax machines haven't been "fast" since I was a kid and my hair is white now.
The situation is utterly absurd, and watching it unfold first hand over the last decade has been completely maddening. It is zero wonder at all that everybody subjected to that spectacle is not in good humour about having watched it transpire and the only way people can be surprised by that state is a lack of familiarity with the facts of the matter.
What about the arguments that I've heard that Bitcoin Cash / big blocks allow miners to make more money, and that could be why this whole discussion started in the first place?
I understand the argument that Blockstream has some bias, but it seems like there may be bias on the BCH side as well. If that's not the case, could you explain that in more detail?
Is that actually an argument against something though? If change x allowed devs on the apple store to make more money, why would that be an inherent reason to oppose it, for example? All the arguments that I've heard focused around that angle of attack fail to address this issue; there's nothing wrong with miners making money, and in fact it's the design of the system that they should make money, that's how security is paid for. Even the originator of the BTC permanently limited to 1mb meme admits this and constantly uses it to push his own position by claiming that an artificially constrained chain is necessary in order for a "fee market" to develop so that security is directly compensated by usage, whilst ignoring that the original design was indeed to have it directly compensated by usage, but in volume rather than artificial scarcity provoking a "fee market".
In terms of bias on the BCH side, you could argue that because of conditions after the split they've had to take some hits and make rough decisions in a rocky landscape, but even those I think you'd be hard pressed to really disagree with in light of what the options were at the time. When it comes to pre-fork though no; it's simply unequivocally the case that they were right all along. They were outright censored on the main forums from making the very simple points of both technical and historical fact in support of the position that the goal was always to scale on chain and the math works just fine for it, and even having actually executed that and pushed the BCH network to 256mb blocks on scalenet already, the cultists over on BTC just ignore this and pretend like their position has any more merit than it ever did, constructing progressively more idiotic justifications as time goes by and it becomes clear that their narrative of it being impossible to grow a chain faster than a fax machine is exactly what everybody who knew what the underlying numbers were knew it to be to begin with.
Thank you for providing more details. I actually was in support of Bitcoin Cash around the time of the fork, but after some time, something about Bitcoin Cash and r/btc seemed off to me. Bitcoin Core and r/bitcoin seemed to be the more reasonable folks. Roger Ver's attitude in interviews did not help. If anything, his behavior made me think twice about holding Bitcoin Cash at all. I can see that some people feel this same thing about the Bitcoin Core devs though. Craig Scott Wright and the Bitcoin SV split also didn't inspire confidence in the Bitcoin Cash community for me. Anyway, at this point I'm trying to gather more information to see if it's worth buying back into Bitcoin Cash, so I appreciate this.
Mike Hearn, Gavin Andreson, Roger Ver, and countless names I interact with on a regular basis support big blocks and were involved since the beginning. Folks, this what BTC does. Eventually the lies runs out.
"Non-authoritative" ... this is why BTC people just suck to talk to.
Everyone DYOR. It is indisputable that Satoshi wanted big blocks. Here are a couple quotes:
The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.
At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.
I hear ya. The view is that by references to a large network, split bt SPV and miner nodes, the miner nodes can run expanding blocks and the Rec users just hold block headers, more or less. That implies bigger blocks can occur, will occur at scale, and the miner can roll with it, users are still able to verify, and SN saw nothing wrong with that. Similar evidence as yours exists elsewhere.
I tend to think it’s too easy to cherry-pick SN quotes to make compelling logical cases on SN implying large or small blocks. I don’t think he ever gave a really strong statement on it, in the style the discussion now needs to close it out. As such, he’s not a great source.
I can pick something like this: /the more smaller farms resort to generating bitcoins, the higher the bar gets to overpower the network, making larger farms also too small to overpower it so that they may as well generate bitcoins too./
SN is arguing here, it seems, that the security model holds by enough small farmers, who he equates earlier to recreational users, being able to mine too.
That quote, and your quote, feel fairly at odds with each other! Miners can worry about the block size, they’ll be the super computers with TBs to spare v we need small users to participate in mining too as a key part of the security model, small users won’t have TBd to spare. If we can leave out how this steers into asics, do you note that contrast.
There's no problem - the word farm is being used differently in different contexts. In the quote you posted, farm is in reference to hashpower. You can have many smaller miners (zombie farms, in your quote) that know nothing about the transactions they are mining. That is how mining pools work today. All that is required is one big central node that can validate the transactions and build the block, which is what my quote was referencing with farm.
I don’t think mining pools were what SN had in mind with that quote, although the solution you note fits smaller miners contributing hashpower, and not needing to store a big block.
Sure, but the network consensus does speak for bitcoin, and it overwhelmingly rejects bcash, bsv and the many other 'false profits'. Count the nodes. Count the hashrate. Count the accumulated work in the chain. Bcash offers simple (broken) solutions to hard problems. Pushing it over BTC is just technical ignorance.
If I send you a stolen iPod in the mail, do I forever taint your home address? Are you forced to accept it? No, of course not. You can return it to the police, throw it out, or return it to the sender. If you keep it and use it, then it becomes your problem. The same is true for Bitcoin. You can refuse any transaction output. You are not your address.
Edit: This post is being downvoted by people who don't want it to be true. Sorry folks, it is. Bitcoin is UTXO-based, and every output sent to your address is a unique piece of mail. If you don't like that, use an account-based system where it all gets mixed together.
CGI scripts sound like a very simple idea when described here, but I avoided learning about them at the time because the name was so arcane. Is there a good reason why these weren’t simply called “executable pages”, or “response programs”, etc.?
Because Perl scripts were only one application of CGI, which was intended to be a generic interface between the web and any sort of backend. The thing that became Oracle Web Application Server for example started life as a direct interface between a web server and an Oracle database called WOW for Web-Oracle-Web. There were others. Pretty soon the “application server” took over that role as a thing in its own right, and instead of a Perl script directly invoked by the web server you would have a JSP or something.
I'm reminded of a question Peter Thiel asks founders: What is one thing you believe that nearly everybody else disagrees with you on? Having a good answer means you might be onto something big. Everyone building on BSV has a pretty good answer right now.
BSV is the pure capitalist, maximalist version of the BitCoin experiment. If they're correct and it works, things are going to get very interesting soon.
