The Final Days of the Bitcoin Foundation?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
At least to me, it sounds much more in line with the original conception of Bitcoin than a central foundation managing its direction.
The whole point of Bitcoin is that you cannot actually measure "majority", because of problems including censorship and sybil attacks. You can measure hashrate and PoW difficulty, which provides sybil resistance (at least, it can put a minimum cost on sybil attacks), but the Bitcoin protocol uses PoW as a dynamic membership multiparty signature which seems to add the requirement of resource requirement minimization otherwise you get fewer and fewer members in the membership set... Otherwise only high-resource (highly-coercible large-scale) entities can participate in the dynamic membership.
In the Bitcoin consensus protocol this is restricted to picking transaction ordering and some other details, but I am hoping to stress to you how the same problems apply even outside of transaction ordering and consensus over Bitcoin transaction history, even if PoW doesn't solve those other consensus problems.
The same problems (sybil attacks, etc.) apply to measuring "majority" and explain why "number of users" is not being used by Bitcoin Core developers to pick what each Bitcoin Core developer personally wish to work on. (Well, they tend to have their own individual reasons, some that are overlapping with this one, but I want to keep my explanation succinct.)
Bitcoin Core developers seem to have little desire to work on hard-fork (in)compatibility changes, although they might be okay with technically-meritorious-uncontroversial hard-forks. This is largely based on a belief of the importance of backwards-compatibility, resource requirement minimization (such as Bitcoin Core node bandwidth requirements), network effects especially in the context of financial asset adoption, decentralization, etc. Also this belief seems to be reinforced by how they don't actually control the Bitcoin network anyway, nor its rules, just one of the clients and their releases which users are free to voluntarily use (or choose not to use). Thankfully there are some alternative methods for increasing scalability which are getting deployed on testnet (or a new testnet?) today or tomorrow or something: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq
Bitcoin users that disagree with Bitcoin consensus protocol rules should consider not using Bitcoin. There are many people at the moment who are not interested in what Bitcoin offers, and that's okay. Indeed some users were misled into believing Bitcoin had extremely high levels of anonymity, only to later find out that Bitcoin had a blockchain and a largely pseudonymous design.... While many Bitcoin developers wish this wasn't the case, users would be advised to stop using something that doesn't actually fit their requirements...... But "secretly" most Bitcoiners suspect that Bitcoin really does meet reasonable standards or requirements :-) so this is why many don't advocate disgruntled Bitcoin users to leave.
Some suspect that the Bitcoin industry could be coerced (such as by government) or influenced (such as by social media sentiment) to participate in a hard-fork, to specifically choose to become incompatible with the existing widely-deployed Bitcoin consensus protocol rules. Social media sentiment syncing is way cheaper than reading the Bitcoin source code, and anybody can use Bitcoin even without agreeing with the concepts behind the protocol or whatever. Anyway, a hard-fork split is not the end of Bitcoin, because even if Bitcoin-original ends up on a minority hashrate side, hashrate attacks (from the other sides of the hard-fork) can be mitigated by migrating to a different PoW function. Perhaps "adoption" will be reduced as a result (indeed perhaps for all sides of the hard-fork, esp. given wallet/merchant difficulties), but the opportunity for low-difficulty PoW mining will be overwhelmingly appealing to an extremely broad audience, plus the ability to sell UTXOs against exchanges participating on the other side of the hard-fork to fund development of -original, possibility of shaking out maladoption, and what I suspect will be an increasing unwillingness to accept payments from others using the social-media-sentiment hard-forked currency because of the difficulty of judging the technical reliability/stability/value of a currency operated by social-media-sentiment-influenced participants willing to increase incompatibility on the money they are about to pay you with.
Majority is not how Bitcoin works, not for transaction ordering, and not for what Bitcoin Core developers want to work on.
> At least to me, it sounds much more in line with the original conception of Bitcoin than a central foundation managing its direction.
Well, you're not wrong :-).
[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (See section 5. Network)
It's amazing how well Bitcoin works as a system despite the very high percentage of crooks involved. That's a significant technical achievement.
Is that really quantifiable as such? Based on my limited experiences with cryptocurrencies, the vast majority of its usage is lawful, but people buying hitmen and crack with bitcoin makes for a better story than people buying pizzas and web hosting, so that's what's in the articles that get written.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1pxiy3/peter_vesse...
Just think for a minute how amazing Bitcoin is, that it can not only survive but continue to grow despite the huge number of dipshits and saboteurs so intimately associated with it.
That really stuck with me. :) Because of course none of those things happen with ordinary currencies.
It may still be workable, but I think Bitcoin has challenges other communities mostly don't.
In 2015, Wordpress dropped support for it because there were too few transactions to warrant it.
Bruce Fenton and others have done huge amounts of work to repair the foundation and I commend them for their efforts.
However I cannot support an organization which continues to support bad actors, to quote myself:
>As a lifetime Foundation member (and a technical contributor to Bitcoin) I think it's within my rights to ask [that Gavin Andresen be removed as chief scientist]
>Consider how frustrating misunderstandings like the below are to me:
>“...[Gavin Andresen is] still bitcoin’s official chief scientist, according to the Bitcoin Foundation, the not-for-profit that oversees the project...”
>http://www.wired.com/2015/08/bitcoin-schism-shows-genius-ope...
No all he did was sell them his reputation.
Edit: This is being down voted and I'm honestly not sure why.
He quite literally sold the foundation his reputation.
He received salary of approximately $200k in 2013 from the foundation.
More background on this: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/gavin-andresen-i-might-...
Gavin was not one of the devs who let themselves be bought off by Blockstream and in his frustration over all the other core devs irrationality he has been promoting solutions outside of core.
They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.
In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.
This is because all Blockstream's products are built on Sidechains: https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf Rather than change bitcoin itself, a sidechain lets you create an alternative set of rules for bitcoin, that re-uses the actual bitcoins from the main chain, so that users can put their bitcoins on either set of rules. Sidechains let users move coins between chains with different rulesets. Thus, Sidechains are useful only if it is difficult to add desired features to Bitcoin itself. All Blockstream products (like Liquid above) are implemented as Sidechains.
Thus, Blockstream's products will have no purpose unless Bitcoin is limited, and difficult to change, creating a need for a Sidechain.
Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.
At last October's Bitcoin Dev Workshop in San Francisco (ironically run by the Bitcoin Foundation), Blockstream CTO and Bitcoin Core Dev Greg Maxwell, who invented most of the Sidechains tech, said on stage (video recording is online somewhere) he was bummed that so few people use Sidechains, and that his biggest surprise was how much work it takes to get applications in the ecosystem (like wallets, blockchain.info, etc.) to support a Sidechain. He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.
He asked about Bitcoin transaction middlemanship, not alternative ledger consensus systems. It should not be surprising that alternative ledgers exist that provide some features that Bitcoin doesn't.
> They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.
LN transactions are just zero-conf Bitcoin transactions with some extra opcodes and defined behavior around the semantics of when certain transactions can be verified. see http://lightning.network/
> In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.
Bitcoin is more useful if it's difficult to be "improved", period. Auto-update mechanisms take away voluntary participation and this is too dangerous for a financial system that is attempting to be decentralized (who's gonna "authorize" the updates, eh?). So yes maybe Blockstream has an incentive to assist with maintaining the current Bitcoin decentralization mechanisms... so what?
> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.
jtimon? sipa? dude you know these people, wtf.
> He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
No, he doesn't need a good reason for people to switch. He needs a reason for people to use sidechains, thankfully he and everyone has many. This isn't about switching -_-.
> If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
That's like saying "if positive changes are made to bitcoin.git, there's no reason to use sidechains"... That's not a reasonable argument.
> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.
They are opposed to hard-forks for many reasons, but perhaps most important here is because they aren't in control of Bitcoin network hard-forks. And they are unwilling to campaign to add those particular hard-forks into Bitcoin Core. It's wrong to claim that Blockstream is making it hard to improve Bitcoin when it's naturally hard to do so by design in the first place.
First, you're confusing me for my brother. It's a common mistake. He is Jonathan Toomim, and I'm Michael. Together, we are... the Toomim Bros!!! https://toom.im
Now, you've written seven different statements here, but they aren't connected to a main point. Could you put your thoughts together? Are you trying to address whether Blockstream are middlemen?
I feel sort of cheated because you two use very similar HN usernames. You are not as bad as the Rayhawk brothers, though, which I am convinced are all the same person.
As points of reference, Visa processes 2,000 transactions per second and PayPal does over 100. Those are averages, not max capacity numbers.
There is currently a 1 MB limit on the size of a block. A typical individual Bitcoin transaction is around 500 bytes in size. So if a block is produced every 10 minutes and the size of a block is limited to 1 MB that limits the transaction throughput of the Bitcoin network. When the rate of transactions being broadcast by users outstrips the available space in the blocks being mined then there is a backlog and not all the transactions will be mined in a timely fashion.
Which transactions get in a block are determined by the miners so the net effect of there not being enough room is that miners pick the transactions with the highest fees to include first. Over time as the Bitcoin network gets very large this will artificially drive up transaction fees to very high levels. The fact that the block size limit is 1MB was a quick hack in the early days to prevent spam and was always meant to be lifted once Bitcoin gained popularity.
Back to Blockstream. Blockstream is developing a technology generally referred to as "sidechains". It would allow users to perform transactions on private blockchains that are pegged to the Bitcoin blockchain. A sidechain can be thought of as a alt-coin backed by Bitcoin (similar to how paper money might be backed by gold, or the full faith and credit of a powerful government). Transactions on a sidechain wouldn't need to be processed by Bitcoin proper so the sidechain wouldn't be limited by any block size limit in Bitcoin.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sidechains and the idea is even kind of cool. The problem is that Blockstream and those acting on it's behalf oppose any increase in blocksize. This will have the net effect of driving up Bitcoin transaction costs to artificially high levels making it unattractive to use for every day transactions and would relegate Bitcoin to a settlement layer where high value transactions between major financial players take place and nothing else. Blockstream is hoping this would drive people who still wanted to use Bitcoin to sidechains where there wouldn't be a back log. These sidechains could in turn be controlled by a company or bank for their specific purpose. ie: you can transact on the Visa sidechain powered by Blockstream.
Raising the block size doesn't preclude Blockstream from implementing sidechains but keeping the block size small as Bitcoin grows very large will make Blockstream's sidechain scheme absolutely necessary. If the block size were allowed to grow it isn't clear if the value proposition of sidechains would be as strong.
.... because Bitcoin Core developers find that most block size increase proposals seem to be incompatible with Bitcoin resource requirement minimization. Absent the existence of Blockstream I suspect the currently-non-Blockstream developers would still prefer to focus on their own understanding of Bitcoin, rather than popular sentiment on Bitcoin block size limits. Anyway, Bitcoin Core developers have done just that and have organized a FAQ regarding some fascinating proposals and implementations they are working on for how to increase capacity: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq
> and would relegate Bitcoin to a settlement layer
Ehhh settlement layer is sorta unfair. Existing "settlement layers" are things like Target2 RTGS, which turns out to be a typical centralized payment processor under the hood. oops.
> where high value transactions between major financial players take place and nothing else.
Transaction fees offer prioritization for inclusion, true. I don't think it's reasonable to blame Blockstream for an absence of a solution to this problem :-).
> Raising the block size doesn't preclude Blockstream from implementing sidechains but keeping the block size small as Bitcoin grows very large will make Blockstream's sidechain scheme absolutely necessary.
Nah any form of sidechain would work, not just Blockstream's implementations. Also, from an experimentation standpoint, sidechains are necessary regardless the value of the block size limit.
> If the block size were allowed to grow it isn't clear if the value proposition of sidechains would be as strong.
It would be just as strong, read the sidechains whitepaper: https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf (basically they are valuable as an experimentation tool, even if they are not being used by businesses; indeed, Blockstream could experiment using sidechains prior to gathering consensus for deployment of features on the Bitcoin blockchain, which is itself quite valuable to Blockstream).
What are you talking about, there are no such requirements and current requirements are nowhere close to being beyond the reach of a typical user.
"Transaction fees offer prioritization for inclusion, true. I don't think it's reasonable to blame Blockstream for an absence of a solution to this problem"
The alternative to a hard limit on block size is to have no limit and let miners set their own soft limits for fees and block size so they compete on efficiency. Artificially restricting the supply of transaction space is not something that was in the original vision for Bitcoin. Satoshi himself said a number of times that the 1MB block limit was a _temporary_ measure that should be lifted in the future.
"Bitcoin resource requirement minimization" does not mean "this is an existing requirement in the protocol". Resource minimization, indeed even resource maximization, is not expressible in the Bitcoin consensus protocol as a rule. Instead I was talking about the idea that Bitcoin resource requirements can be minimized. By minimizing the resource requirements, you make Bitcoin more cheap and easily accessible, and you can accrue benefits of tech development to process and handle the existing Bitcoin system on ever-cheapening computer hardware.
> and current requirements are nowhere close to being beyond the reach of a typical user
I guess that depends on what you consider a typical user. A lot of those "typical users" are complaining about the mere possibility of $20 Bitcoin transaction fees in the future, so it sounds like a $20/year node cost might not be compatible with the "typical Bitcoin user". In general to encourage adoption we should not cut off users from their nodes participating in the Bitcoin network.
> The alternative to a hard limit on block size is to have no limit
You mean the "transaction fee market without a block size as long as selfish mining doesn't exist" paper? That particular paper's assumptions have been dispute for a while now, a bunch of his points were refuted... indeed he even agreed to update his paper, although he hasn't done this yet, and instead backtracked, and meanwhile hasn't provided new arguments against the refutations. See http://pastebin.com/jFgkk8M3
> Satoshi himself said a number of times that the 1MB block limit was a _temporary_ measure that should be lifted in the future.
Argument from authority. Also, I think the Bitcoin developers have learned more about Bitcoin since Satoshi's disappearance, which can be used to inform ourselves and evaluate whether we think Satoshi was wrong about the effects of lifting the block size limit upwards.
They are working with the reality of bitcoin, trying to make it more. Nothing prevents other people from also being able to extend bitcoin. Even if blockstream became dominant in this respect, the system is 100% trustless.
Bitcoin is only one piece of the necessary crypto-currency infrastructure. 2-way pegging is a _good_ way of extending it.
It would be like if Microsoft employed 90% of the Linux kernel devs and wouldn't let any changes into the kernel that allowed systems with over 8 gigs of memory or something like that.
sure, you might be able to do more transactions with an increased block size, but I personally feel the negatives are not worth it. Regardless, having the ability to do things off the main bitcoin chain is a good thing.
Even more so "cripple Bitcoin" it the wrong way of phrasing something that
a) currently how things are
b) intensely disputed in the community
The Bitcoin Core developers are incapable of coercing other users into not applying non-Bitcoin-compatible 8 GB block size limit rules. Also they don't want to apply that patch themselves, anyway, since they believe it is incompatible with what they understand to their best knowledge to be the goals and properties of Bitcoin. (Thankfully their goals also include lots of adoption, and they seem to have some proposals for how to achieve this even in the absence of 8 GB block sizes.)
Linux is not a decentralized distributed consensus rule system, so unfortunately I don't think the comparison is useful.