[nivexous]

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.

[beaner]

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.

BCH is all politics.

[CryptoPunk]

>>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.

[beaner]

> 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.

[CryptoPunk]

>>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.

[uncletammy]

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.

[uncletammy]

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.

[beaner]

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.

[CryptoPunk]

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.

[beaner]

> 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.

[CryptoPunk]

>>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.

[etherael]

> TBH, it doesn't matter what the original intention was if it doesn't work.

It does work. https://i.imgur.com/II62IJV.jpg

> 2nd layer works.

No, it doesn't. https://i.imgur.com/K0hrkbR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rYQzn8I.jpg

> 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.