Many early Bitcoiners support Bitcoin Cash today which is closer to the original design of Bitcoin and does not have these issues you mentioned. Bitcoin was always meant to scale on-chain, and BTC's fees are entirely self-imposed by the Core developers who refuse to increase the block size. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) increased the block size, and now fees on BCH are a fraction of a penny. Speed of payments too is not an issue on BCH, and 0-conf instant transactions are acceptable for many types of purchases. The main argument against BCH is that home users won't be able to run their own full nodes, but these nodes do nothing useful and do not deserve subsidization. This was actually demonstrated in the Bitcoin bug CVE-2018-17144 (discovered by Bitcoin Cash developers, mind you) where 80% of the network (ie. home users) didn't upgrade their full node with the patch and the network remained secure. Armstrong has suggested he supports BCH's scaling path in several places.
Because it's not a good argument. The fees are low because usage is low, but as soon as usage rises, the fees will rise again too. That's a broken system. Also, fees on BTC today are still not negligible. Average is 30-50 cents USD, which is unacceptable still for many parts of the world. BCH fees are 0.2 cents.
This is where that whole "blocksize debate" turns out to have been worth discussing.
A sudden increase in demand for BTC will send the fees through the roof because of it's tiny 1mb blocksize. The same increase in demand will result in ~ 1/32 the increase in fees. This is due to BCH's 32mb block size.
If the original design of Bitcoin is important to you, why not study the orginal design and motivation in depth? Most of the early development work is still out there for everyone to see.
You will find that questions about scaling was, and still is, the first thing that comes to mind for most people who hear about a plantary scale distributed ledger, and that payment channels was first suggested by Satoshi himself, if such provenance is considered important now.
The problem with the "directions on how to increase the blocksize" is that they're not compatible with what Bitcoin is. It's a system that nobody has the authority to change. The only people who can change it are the people running the software. If enough of them migrate to new rules, they may be able to move the economy with them. But given there's a tremendous risk that they could fail to bring the economy with them (proven by Bitcoin Cash), then few are going to take that risk.
So the question isn't whether we should or shouldn't change a block size. It's how the hell do we change the block size? Can you change the blocksize? Please enlighten me on how you intend to change the blocksize in everyone else's client? Bitcoin has become too large for even developers of the primary client to forcefully change, and they're certainly not going to risk their own reputation by attempting to change it against the will of users.
So how do you even get the consensus of users of the system to agree to whatever blocksize increase you intend to have? Attempts at civil discussion were shut on both sides. There were some not willing to compromise on the existing blocksize, or even asking for smaller sizes, while others were not willing to accept anything but complete removal of the limit. The correct action was taken to do nothing, since it was too controversial to force one opinion on everyone, and would've set a terrible precedent that a few developers have the authority to specify the rules on behalf of everyone.
Bitcoiners have settled on the fact that nobody is in charge. Bitcoin Cashers are still arguing about who's going to be in power.
> Please enlighten me on how you intend to change the blocksize in everyone else's client?
By convincing them to do so, in the same way that every other change to bitcoin is made? Or, alternatively, implement my changes via a soft fork, get half the hash power, and start orphaning people. Segwit, for example, was a major change to the bitcoin protocol, deployed via exactly this same strategy.
> The correct action was taken to do nothing, since it was too controversial to force one opinion on everyone
Segwit was very controversial as well. Don't for a second pretend like it wasn't. Lots of people disagree with it. Perhaps not a majority, but a large amount did. And yet segwit was activated and exist today. It was literally a soft fork blocksize increase that was forced on people who disagreed.
And before someone brings up the whole "soft fork, vs hardfork", I'd like to point out that segwit itself was a soft fork blocksize increase. Blocksize increases do not require hardforks. some methods of increasing the blocksize do, but there are many ways to do the same thing that segwit did, and increase the blocksize via a softfork.
So if you really want to be technical, the way that I would increase the blocksize a second time, is to create a second softfork blocksize increase, convince 51% of the hashpower to include the change, and then orphan all blocks that don't use the new changes.
At this point it doesn't matter if some people refuse to install the software. Soft forks are backward compatible, and all past nodes would follow, unless they specifically decide to hard fork away to stop the soft fork.
If you want proof that a blocksize increase can be done with a soft fork, go google "Extension blocks". It was a soft fork blocksize increase, created by Joseph Poon, the Lighting Network inventor. If you do believe that I am credible on the topic of soft fork blocksize increases, then surely you should believe that the inventor of the lightning network is credible.
No, I meant Joseph Poon. He created the most infamous version of the extension blocks proposal for the bitcoin protocol.
Although I guess I should have said "one of the people who created this proposal", as there were multiple authors. chjj also deserves much of the credit. I only referenced Joseph specifically, because of the lightning network thing, which core supporters seem to like a lot.
> Bitcoiners have settled on the fact that nobody is in charge. Bitcoin Cashers are still arguing about who's going to be in power.
Bitcoiners are silenced as soon as they start asking questions. Bitcoin Cashers have carried on with the original experiment and are currently trying to figure out governance.
Bitcoin does not need governance. That's your problem.
It has a better model, which is every user is autonomous and has the volition to choose the software they wish to run to interact with the economy they wish to participate in.
Governance inherently means you want some people to tell other people how to behave.
Then go ahead and fork your block size to 50kB. You're autonomous and you have the volition to choose the software you wish to interact with the economy you wish to participate in, and you just clearly and repeatedly said smaller blocks are better, so hard fork away from the temporarily imposed limit that Satoshi clearly said could be removed at a block height 400k+ blocks ago, because it was never a temporary limit at all, according to you, it's an individual limit that you're free to choose to set to whatever you believe it ought to be.
But of course, that's a lie, such a change would not be liquid with the rest of the economy, and you'd have forked yourself off into irrelevance, just as the fools who tried to set the 1mb temporary limit to permanent have done themselves. That they're too stupid to figure out they're on the wrong side is of zero consequence to the fact that they are.
> Bitcoin does not need governance. That's your problem.
Is that you Theymos?
> ...and has the volition to choose the software they wish to run to interact with the economy they wish to participate in.
How many software choices do BTC users have? I know the answer to this. It's one. You've got one choice to choose from.
> Governance inherently means you want some people to tell other people how to behave.
Governance means if people are willing to talk to each other (and listen), they'll find they have common ground and can make progress and move forward together.
> How many software choices do BTC users have? I know the answer to this. It's one. You've got one choice to choose from
What? There's a bunch of BTC clients. Bitcoin Core is the defacto reference client due to its lineage and presence on bitcoin.org/bitoincore.org, and the fact that the developers work on it in tandem with the BIP process. (There's a process!)
> Governance means if people are willing to talk to each other (and listen), they'll find they have common ground and can make progress and move forward together.
You can't listen to everyone and you ultimately end up having "leaders" to present ideas. Populism does not work. Ideas based on merit will get support by people who put principles above ego.
There were many attempts to get common ground in the block size debate. The ones who attempted to find the middle-ground (ie, Pieter Wuille and Adam Back) had their ideas shot down by big blockers like Mike Hearn, who brought his ego into the equation and tried to make it about "I was here first," and did not want to follow the BIP process. He openly states on the Bitcoin mailing list that he thinks developers should decide the system on behalf of all the users. Other maintainers made it clear that backward incompatible changes don't happen to the rules without broad consensus (of which there was none).
> The ones who attempted to find the middle-ground (ie, Pieter Wuille and Adam Back) had their ideas shot down by big blockers ...
Here's what Adam Back thought about the block size back before Blockstream's agenda took hold of Bitcoin's development. https://i.redd.it/9enseqrfp1v01.png
> Other maintainers made it clear that backward incompatible changes don't happen to the rules without broad consensus (of which there was none).
And this is the fundamental problem. The community had no idea how many people actually wanted blocks bigger than 1mb because everyone who voiced it was kicked out and labeled a scammer. The "bigger block" group was and continues to be massive. The 1mb group continues to be a minority.
I have studied the early discussions, and on-chain scaling was always intended to be primary. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to rewrite history. Payment channels are certainly useful for some cases (high volume, low amounts) but they also come with a host of UX issues and technical complexity that make them unsuitable for primary user payments.
TBH, it doesn't matter what the original intention was if it doesn't work. 2nd layer works. Maybe so do bigger blocks, for now, but certainly at the cost of decentralization. I'm sure you can post some theory or statistics that will say otherwise. But it seems pretty clear conceptually that if you make something take up more space, fewer nodes will have the resources to operate it.
The Bitcoin whitepaper had a title of "peer to peer electronic cash", but what it actually described was a system for financial sovereignty. If you want a payment network, use paypal. Why wouldn't you use Paypal? Because it's not decentralized - that's the first reason. And you realize by asking and answering that question that decentralization is the first and most important feature of the system, because it enables everything else. Payments is second.
Layer 2 is a system that preserves the financial sovereignty of Bitcoin. Bigger blocks are a populist movement which disregard science as a result of a conspiracy theory that Blockstream is out to destroy everything. And it ignores so many things - like the other hundreds of core developers; the original intention and literature of the cypherpunks; the actual beauty of layer 2 itself and the amazing speed and privacy benefits it's bringing.
Nobody care's about "what satoshi intended" in terms of on-chain vs. off-chain. "Satoshi's vision" was a decentralized system, and it can happen either way. More likely with layer 2 than without.
>>TBH, it doesn't matter what the original intention was if it doesn't work. 2nd layer works.
It's by no means established that Bitcoin's 2nd layer technologies can work as a full substitute for on-chain transactions.
It certainly has major shortcomings, and consequently being used very little, right now..
>>Bigger blocks are a populist movement which disregard science
There is absolutely no scientific evidence that big blocks don't work.
What's unscientific is claiming that the LN can act as a substitute for on-chain transactions when it's an unproven experimental technology.
>>Nobody care's about "what satoshi intended" in terms of on-chain vs. off-chain. "
It's not about "what satoshi intended". It's about the original scaling that plan Satoshi published. Bitcoin's original adopters were told that Bitcoin would be able to match Visa's throughput by scaling on-chain.
That was the experiment they signed up for.
Changing that plan without getting consensus from the community, and through restricting debate on /r/bitcoin, is extremely disingenuous and elitist.
> It certainly has major shortcomings, and consequently being used very little, right now
Its use is low because it is still in the testing phase and there are purposefully few mainnet clients.
> There is absolutely no scientific evidence that big blocks don't work.
I'm not claiming they won't, only that they by necessity sacrifice some level of decentralization, because they require more resources.
> What's unscientific is claiming that the LN can act as a substitute for on-chain transactions when it's an unproven experimental technology.
What I mean to say is that I think the approach that Core is taking to scaling is a more scientific route. I think lots of people support bigger blocks because it seems obvious and makes sense at first glance, but so do a lot of things that aren't good. The core approach is a classical computer science acknowledgement of scarce resources and the creative implementation of technology to get around them.
> It's about the original scaling that plan Satoshi published. Bitcoin's original adopters were told that Bitcoin would be able to match Visa's throughput by scaling on-chain.
I don't know why this is particularly significant. If you think it can do that, go do it. But if the same feature set is essentially maintained (or even improved, in the case of Lightning), then I don't know why we'd stick to what Satoshi originally published. What's the actual reason we should?
> That was the experiment they signed up for.
I mean I consider myself to be a relatively early adopter and that's not what I signed up for. I signed up for a decentralized system of financial sovereignty. Payments is a part of that, but if the system isn't decentralized, it doesn't matter. So I appreciate the core emphasis on that part, and from my perspective layer 2 has many enhancements and is a great upgrade. I don't know why I'd cling to on-chain scaling specifically. It's like adamantly supporting combustion engines in the new age of renewables and electric motors.
>>Its use is low because it is still in the testing phase and there are purposefully few mainnet clients.
There is no proof that it will ever be widely useful/adopted.
>>I'm not claiming they won't, only that they by necessity sacrifice some level of decentralization, because they require more resources.
There is no scientific evidence that it sacrifices too much decentralization to maintain Bitcoin's censorship resistance.
You're making a false appeal to science to give Core's scaling plan intellectual integrity that it doesn't have.
>>I think lots of people support bigger blocks because it seems obvious and makes sense at first glance, but so do a lot of things that aren't good.
Your speculation about why people support on-chain scaling, and your unproven opinion that on-chain scaling is not a good plan, is not evidence that Core's roadmap is more scientific than the original one.
>>I mean I consider myself to be a relatively early adopter and that's not what I signed up for.
Up until 2013, all published plans for Bitcoin scaling, including those written by Bitcoin's lead/original developer, Satoshi, stated it would scale on-chain through large blocks, and implied that the decentralization sacrifice needed to do that was a reasonable trade-off.
The earliest adopters therefore signed up for that roadmap. Any change to that roadmap required consensus, which it never got.
I appreciate some of the points you've brought up. I also appreciate that you took the time to articulate your thoughts in a civil manner.
My biggest issue with all of this comes down to one word. You keep using the word "decentralized" to describe what BTC is and what BCH has lost. I've seen this word used for a long time now by the BTC camp but none of them can better define it (or are willing to attempt it).
Here are some of the things that I think make a coin decentralized.
1. Distribution of mining. Neither BTC nor BCH have decentralized distribution of mining. The big pools are massive and they can (and do) switch between the two coins.
2. Communication channels. With the small exception of things like Memo.cash for BCH, both BTC and BCH have both built their community on censor-able platforms like Twitter and Reddit.
3. Full node mining clients. BTC has one and it's called Bitcoin Core. Attempts to create more (Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin unlimited, Segwit 2x) were labeled as scams by the r/bitcoin mods and all talk about them was silenced. Meanwhile BCH welcomed them. We now have 6+ full node clients that miners/users can choose from (ABC, Unlimited, Flowee, Bcash, BCHD, Satoshis Vision, and more). Our community encourages them because it makes for a healthy ecosystem.
TLDR: Both coins are pretty damn centralized but if you do compare them you'll find that for the things that matter, BCH is way more decentralized. It's more decentralized while have 32x the transaction capacity and sub-penny fees for the foreseeable future.
There's nothing wrong with layer 2 as long as they aren't try to pass it off as a scaling solution. If it isn't on-chain, it's not Bitcoin.
> Maybe so do bigger blocks, for now, but certainly at the cost of decentralization
You seem to think that BTC, a coin with a single client implementation controlled by a handful of devs, some of which are employed by a company who's value proposition is in direct conflict with Bitcoin's success, is decentralized. It is not. It couldn't be further from it.
There is a reason Bitcoin Cash is still around and surrounded by drama in the same ways Bitcoin used to be. It's because everyone who was fighting to make Bitcoin "magic internet money" got tired of being censored and forked off in an attempt to fire those few core devs getting in the way of progress. I would recommend you start by reading about the censorship. The censorship is the only reason Bitcoin Cash exists today.
Bitcoin cash isn't censored. It has its own subreddit (and the rest of the internet) where discussion can be had about it.
Equating "censored in r/bitcoin" with censorship in general sort of proves that it's mostly about politics; you want to be uncensored _in a specific private community_. If BCH can stand on its own merit (and hopefully it can!) then you don't need that. Those who think it does need that aren't trying to make BCH successful, they want to control Bitcoin. And so it makes sense that people with those motives should not be allowed.
Layer 2 is a scaling solution, I don't see why it wouldn't be.
You're right that there is nothing anti-free-speech about censoring a private forum like /r/bitcoin, but the purging of big-block voices from the subreddit was unethical nonetheless.
Countless long-time Bitcoiners who helped popularize /r/bitcoin, and more generally, Bitcoin, suddenly saw their posts advocating for a hard fork deleted, and eventually saw their own accounts banned.
When this purge happened, pro-fork posts were overwhelmingly popular, and absent the intervention of the moderators to restrict advocacy of Gavin's hard fork efforts, the hard fork would have gone through with majority support.
The closing of debate on /r/bitcoin was a betrayal of everyone who entrusted its mods to oversee one of the community's most important communication channels.
>>Layer 2 is a scaling solution, I don't see why it wouldn't be.
He provided his rationale: transactions on L2 aren't Bitcoin transactions. Perhaps respond to his rationale instead being obtuse.
> the purging of big-block voices from the subreddit was unethical
I don't know why. It clearly became a distraction at some point, and so the mods took a side and enforced it. I don't think that's unethical. A specific private sub is under no moral obligation to allow every opinion to be heard. It's intentionally a curated space.
> When this purge happened, pro-fork posts were overwhelmingly popular
Sort of, but this is also kind of what I mean by "populist" movement, and why I don't feel bad about this "purge".
Real development of bitcoin happens on the mailing lists and on github. Everyone is free to contribute and that never changed.
r/bitcoin is just a place for people with opinions, mostly people who don't contribute, to air their mostly uneducated points of view.
If the split had support, it would have happened economically. There's no reason that r/bitcoin specifically would be the bottleneck to such a change. There is so much real estate on the internet, ideas truly have no restriction. If the voices on r/bitcoin at the time represented real node votes, the nodes would have switched. I don't see how being blocked on r/bitcoin would have prevented that.
> and absent the intervention of the moderators to restrict advocacy of Gavin's hard fork efforts, the hard fork would have gone through with majority support.
I just don't buy it. There are too many other outlets.
> The closing of debate on /r/bitcoin was a betrayal of everyone who entrusted its mods to oversee one of the community's most important communication channels.
r/bitcoin was never one of the community's most important communication channels. I'm sorry, but it's _reddit_. As stated above, important communication channels include but are not limited to slack groups, IRC, mailing lists, github, twitter, etc. r/bitcoin was never "important," it was (and still is) the pop magazine of crypto, like everything else on reddit.
I would go so far to say that the outcry over reddit specifically, instead of over all those other resources, sort of reveals the type of person who is hyping the big-blocker narrative. If it were a lot of developers or contributors, the important channels would have seen a surge of such support, too.
But it was mostly armchair economists who don't hang out in the actual development streams. They think reddit is where everything happens.
> transactions on L2 aren't Bitcoin transactions
Yes they are. They're just deferred, aggregated transactions over payment channels which are essentially compressed and broadcast at channel closure.
>>I don't know why. It clearly became a distraction at some point, and so the mods took a side and enforced it. I don't think that's unethical.
It was a legitimate perspective about a core issue facing Bitcoin: how to scale, and the vast majority of the subreddit's users were supportive of that perspective, given pro-large-block posts were consistently on the front page of /r/bitcoin with numerous highly upvoted comments made under it.
To label it as a "distraction", because it's not the perspective you hold, and delete all voices holding that perspective on those grounds, is highly disingenuous.
Your attempt to rationalize eliminating an entire perspective from /r/bitcoin through comment deletion and account bannings is typical of the totally unethical behaviour behind the Core coup.
> Maybe so do bigger blocks, for now, but certainly at the cost of decentralization.
Wrong, BCH is more decentralised than BTC, they have entirely different consensus mechanisms, and BTC's consensus mechanism is nothing more than the opinions of six people in a political council, by contrast BCH consensus mechanism is the net total global hashing power invested within it at any given time. That same entity serves no such purpose on BTC.
And as the recent BCH stress test shows, there's no maybe about it, they work just fine even with the crippled software designed to force through the BTC agenda, and it will work as it was projected to work back in 2008 by Satoshi when the cruft to force that agenda through is removed.
> But it seems pretty clear conceptually that if you make something take up more space, fewer nodes will have the resources to operate it.
The alternative doesn't work at all without massively centralised scaling hubs, in light of that, it's frankly ridiculous to fearmonger about nodes that lack the economic incentive to remain running, when the system was designed from the start to allow users to just be users via the SPV mechanism.
> The Bitcoin whitepaper had a title of "peer to peer electronic cash", but what it actually described was a system for financial sovereignty.
If something cannot be used as a medium of exchange, it is not an effective store of value for financial sovereignty and anyone claiming otherwise is simply fooling themselves. BCH is flatly better at this than BTC.
> If you want a payment network, use paypal. Why wouldn't you use Paypal? Because it's not decentralized
Neither is BTC, both the consensus mechanism and the scaling mechanism are massively centralised. By contrast at least Paypal reliably works.
> Bigger blocks are a populist movement which disregard science as a result of a conspiracy theory
This is a flat out lie, larger blocks was the way the system was always designed to scale and the layer 2 hijacking was a later forced poison pill from Greg Maxwell, whose business model relies on the architecture he forced through. https://i.imgur.com/k77HfH8.jpg
> BCH is all politics.
Exactly the opposite of the truth, BTC is nothing but politics.
This is FUD. Blockstream does not own Bitcoin Core and does not even sponsor a majority of the developers.
Their "influence" has actually dropped since the departure of Maxwell as CTO
