[AgentME]

As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it's a pretty good article.

Some more tidbits of information from my perspective:

>The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted.

No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA.

>But there is another school of thought, which is that Bitcoin is (or should be) a currency rather than a commodity, primarily a medium of exchange rather than a store of value. These are the folks who want you to be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoins.

I don't think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can't get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered. The (backward-compatible) Segwit capacity upgrade just happened, and it takes time for people to update their software to make the newer more-efficient transactions. (... If the consensus was that Bitcoin really was urgently hurting for transaction capacity, you'd expect people to be updating to Segwit transactions faster than they are now.) The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly. The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier.

>The 2X advocates have refused, citing the NYA, and secure (at least apparently) in their belief that enough people will update their code that there will be no doubt that 2X is the One True Chain.

Let's be clear about the word "update": it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to. Many have said that if Bitcoin "fails" after the fork, they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)

[mrb]

A block size increase is in fact very urgently needed. 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit, because segwit's adoption is too low (7%). Adoption isn't happening faster not because it's unneeded, but because of inertia among wallet developers. Consequently, full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...) All this user loss and tx market loss has been happening over the last year, so we urgently need a block size increase, since we can't magically accelerate segwit's adoption rate.

I think you fail to envision how the dynamics will play out if Segwit2x wins. Core will simply merge the ~1k lines of code that make up the segwit2x features, and mostly everyone will be back to business running Bitcoin Core instead of BTC1, since the two code bases would be equivalent. That's it. No big war. No mass resignation of Core devs. No ceding the control of Bitcoin to "another group". Most Segwit2x supporters want a smooth "reintegration" scenario like that to take place. We don't want to "fire Core" or such nonsense you might read on r/Bitcoin.

Things would be a lot simpler if Core simply agreed to double the block size. That's all we want. A one-time block size increase, to give the blockchain some breathing room while we all continue to work on off-chain scaling (NimbleWimble, LN...) that we all already agree are the proper long-term solutions.

[beaner]

> 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit

Hasn't been true since July: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

> full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...)

What's the evidence for this? All my friends own btc and alts... but none of them transact in it. They own them only for investment purposes. I don't think anybody is using alts for their higher throughput.

[mrb]

«Hasn't been true»

Yes it's true. I said WEIGHT not SIZE. A distinction few understand. Check the kWU column at https://blockchain.info If a full node has built a 4Mweight/1MB block, it is full, because non-segwit txs have wasted the 4M weight quota and prevented the block from growing over 1MB. If segwit adoption stays low, blocks WON'T be able to grow much beyond 1MB.

In fact the problem is that the rate of adoption of segwit is too low compared to the rate of increased txs that Bitcoin needs to be able to support. Therefore blocks are going to continue to stay at or near the ~4M weight quota.

[mrb]

As to evidence for users moving from Bitcoin to alts because of full blocks:

The tx rate of ETH, LTC, and other alts started sharply increasing in March/April 2017, which is exactly when Bitcoin blocks reached capacity (~250k tx/day)

[xorcist]

> block size increase is in fact very urgently needed [...] segwit's adoption is too low (7%)

7% in two months. What kind of adoption had you expected? Everyone won't switch over night, that's the whole problem behind why flag dates in distributed systems are hard, and why many people adocate backwards compatible changes whenever possible.

> if Core simply agreed to double the block size

Core is the name of the Bitcoin software. Perhaps you mean the Bitcoin community? The functionality needed to roughly double the block size was released last year and finally took effect in August. If that's too slow for your use case, then you are probably on the edge of where Bitcoin is useful anyway. It's hard to imagine any sort non-contentious hard fork planned and executed in less time than that, without endangering other people's money.

[DennisP]

Ethereum has pulled off several hard forks, which they ran within weeks of finalizing the software. There's no reason Bitcoin couldn't do the same, especially for non-contentious forks.

[xorcist]

Absolutely, and Bitcoin sort of had too. That knowledge isn't very helpful for managing changes today unfortunately. Today people actually buy stuff for Bitcoin and it's not very helpful to ask all economic activity to cease until a fork has settled down.

None of this is very relevant to the uptake of segwit transactions however, unless as a what-if scenario had segwit been done as a hard fork instead. That was the original intent of the proposal, if I remember correctly, and there was a lot of discussion at the mailing list exactly how this should best be deployed. Looking back at it, it is quite clear it could have been deployed quicker had another mechanism been chosen.

[DennisP]

There's no need for economic activity to cease; hard forks can be very smooth. I agree that segwit should have been a hard fork.

[tfha]

We could double the block size. Then the capacity would raise from about 10 million users to about 20 million users. I'm sure that would solve all of Bitcoin's scaling issues for a long time.

[mrb]

You missed: «while we all continue to work on off-chain scaling (NimbleWimble, LN...) that we all already agree are the proper long-term solutions.»

[solotronics]

the only reason the blocks have bene full is from malicious actors filling the blocks with nonsense transactions ( miners pumping fees, and seditious big blockers trying to dissolve core )

[mrb]

No. It's a myth that keeps being repeated. Check the "Moby Dick" spam report: attacks stopped in Jan 2017. Since then tx growth is purely legitimate. Or use common sense: consider that 5000 BTC are paid in tx fees per month... no one pays $20 MILLION a month just to be able to say "hey look blocks are full".

[kbaker]

Just for some balance, the Hong Kong Agreement (which is absent from the article) is really important in this timeline - in Feb 2016, an agreement was reached with miners and signed by a few Core devs (however, possibly under duress?) to work on Segwit _and_ a safe hard fork.

The NYA happening with a few CEOs "behind closed doors", was pretty much a result of the year and a half of no progress on the safe hard fork part. Also remember the miners aren't really a fan of cheap transactions, which eats into their profits, and does fundamentally alter their ROI.

Segwit2X was originally sold as a compromise. Activate SegWit for the future since it requires software updates as you noted for the additional transaction formats, and schedule a 2X HF to help the network grow immediately.

> The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment

I agree sadly, but unfortunately it was the same story on the reverse side. Look at the ridicule and scorn Mike Hearn and Gavin got for their big block proposals in 2015.

[tfha]

I believe the core devs agreed to make a proposal, and then the proposal got rejected by the other devs.

[sanxiyn]

Is the proposal publicly available somewhere?

[kbaker]

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

[sanxiyn]

That's the Hong Kong agreement, which I already know about. I was asking for the proposal tfha mentioned.

[awemany]

> No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA.

They were invited but declined: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74ow7f/erik_voorhees_o...

> I don't think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can't get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered.

Meanwhile, no one has yet provided a believable scenario how miners can get paid in the long term that isn't high transaction volume at low cost.

> The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly.

This debate is ongoing since almost four years. I wouldn't call that rushed.

> The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier.

See above, regarding invitations.

> Let's be clear about the word "update": it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to.

And many others see 2x as the first real sign of the incentive system actually working.

[makomk]

Also, one of the problems with the NYA is that the creation of Bitcoin Cash - which is essentially a hardfork of Bitcoin that increases the block size and removes Segwit - left questions over whether some of the pro-hardfork side of the agreement actually intended to uphold it. In particular, it lead to speculation that they might just use the inevitable disruption to Bitcoin to encourage the adoption of the Bitcoin Cash fork, which they had backed and which was closer to what they wanted.

[awemany]

Another interpretation is that Bitcoin Cash is the necessary credible threat to get the rest of the folks onboard 2x.

[tlrobinson]

> they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)

So just merge (or reimplement) segwit2x's consensus changes back into Core and continue as if nothing happened?