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ac29 2356 days ago

Why is an additional layer of complexity an improvement? Why not make bitcoin blocks 10x larger and 10x more frequent?

The argument that "only large entities will be able to keep up with that" doesn't really hold - thats the status quo already.

Why add TCP to IP or HTTP to TCP?

It's sound engineering. Like in other systems by composing layers you can achieve the advantages of each component while addressing their costs, without creating insurmountable complexity... "have your cake and eat it too".

Particularly, the central Bitcoin system is a global broadcast medium-- necessarily for its security. Global broadcast is inherently somewhat limited in its scalability (though less than some assume). Other layers effectively add "transaction switching" to Bitcoin, radically improving scalablity and performance with their own costs which are good trade-offs for their applications.

As far as the status quo of traditional finance... If you're happy with the status quo! Use it!

(I'm going to assume you don't mean the status quo of Bitcoin--because 28kb/sec isn't something only large entities can keep up with, it adds up over time-- but even cumulatively its managable)

You could recreate the status quo of centralized finance with Bitcoin, but it wouldn't be obviously better: at least systems like visa and paypal are purpose build to do what they do. Bitcoin takes on a lot of costs and tradeoffs to achieve decenteralization.

Bitcoin was created to be money that existed above and outside of the vulgarities of immediate human politics, just like how strong encryption made it effectively impossible for some sysadmin to just read your files based on some excuse.

I think having that option in the world is extraordinarily valuable.

[1]: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/the-fee-market-myth-b9d189e45...

It's laughably bad engineering to try to solve the scaling issue of the base layer by adding another layer on top. It's like you'd try to solve a throughput problem of IP by layering TCP or HTTP on top.

But this is the logic of one of the main devs who championed the "fee market" idea of Bitcoin[0], that high fees are required for Bitcoin to function. And who in 2017 celebrated when fees were around $50.[1]

[0]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...

__s 2356 days ago

2nd layer avoids bloating the ledger. Once limits of 2nd layer are being explored, you can make adjustments to 1st layer with information about how that'll improve 2nd layer throughput. This is like arguing that we shouldn't have in-memory caches, we should just have faster disks

Fees prevent spam

Once limits of 1st layer are explored (the Bitcoin developers have never even bothered to research where the limits are) you can augment it with 2nd layer solutions. Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other.

Even the Lightning Network whitepaper states it needs much larger blocks, and for it to work well you need to be able to settle quickly and cheaply on-chain, which is not the case with full blocks.

( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196138.msg2044717#ms... )

The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience.

The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.

Contrary to the claims of the article the term "fee market" was introduced and promoted by Jeff Garzik-- rather than people opposing him as the article claims. (Fee market is kind of a bad term, the correct term would be blockspace market, but it actually made sense in the original usage which was about wallets paying 'fees at market rates').

> The answer is lies in the free market. Move transaction fees away from hardcoded limits, and towards something more dynamic, with economic feedback between merchants, users and miners. ... Also introduced is an anti-spam rule that avoids relaying transactions whose value is below that of the transaction fee required to send it. This rule self-adjusts over time, as the "tx fee required to send" changes over time. In a dynamic fee market, it might change a lot.

> 2010-11-19 20:55:42 <jgarzik> eventually we'll all be paying TX fees, sooner or later. and competition to get -some- fee (at lower prices) versus no fee kicks in.

> 2011-02-28 04:13:57 <jgarzik> amiller: it's inevitable that fees will be required. nobody should be assuming bitcoin transactions are / will always be free.

> 2011-03-01 20:32:21 <jgarzik> fees are inevitable

> 2011-03-10 22:14:34 <jgarzik> I think TX fees are a great feedback system; a healthy attribute of bitcoin.

> 2011-11-07 22:43:12 <gavinandresen> Lolcust: yes, but I worry because transaction fees are broken right now-- clients and miners really need more flexibility to let fees go where the market decides, instead of us guessing what the right fees are.

> 2012-10-11 17:01:27 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I think storage and network will be cheap enough that any non-zero fees will be interesting to miners

> 2013-03-16 00:47:40 <gavinandresen> So: I have no idea what the right answer for fees is. We need to create a market between miners and users, and let the fees go where they belong.

> 2013-03-17 21:12:04 <jgarzik> TD: Satoshi obviously wanted fees to support the system long term. If there is no scarcity, there are no fees.

And people being willing to pay substantive fees to use Bitcoin is absolutely something to celebrate, Bitcoin's long term security is completely dependent on fee income. Getting a non-trivial part of the rewards from fees is a basic validation of the concept.

> 2013-03-17 21:12:44 <jgarzik> TD: The current situation, where block subsidy dominates other incentives, clouds thinking on block size

> 2013-08-12 17:59:33 <jgarzik> auctions make me want replace-by-fee :)

> 2014-05-12 15:13:22 <gavinandresen> hearn: fee cap, meaning what? Fees need to be a market, and rise or fall based on supply and demand for block space

> 2014-08-15 12:37:53 <jgarzik> Merge this useful change, and next will come the call to remove block size limit altogether, which will throw a nuclear bomb onto any nascent fee market.

> 2014-08-15 12:38:37 <jgarzik> All the VCs and execs want an infinite block size limit. It's a sad fixation.

> The article you're linking is an extremely dishonest anonymous hit piece that distorts history to manipulate the audience.

That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.

> The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.

Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees. I'd say even better as people will stop using Bitcoin or move to other cryptocurrencies when fees grow.

Saying that the "fee market" (or "blockspace market" if you want) is supported by the white paper extremely dishonest. The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees. Zero fee transactions were on the other hand accepted from day one.

shilch 2356 days ago

TCP wasn't build on IP because it wasn't scalable. It was build on it because it was. But that aside, calling Lightning on BTC a second-layer is a bit misleading: Lightning data is not encapsulated in BTC data, more like the other way around; so Lightning is more like layer 0 and BTC layer 1 in that model. (That's also not entirely correct either but much closer)

https://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/history-of-ip-address...

im3w1l 2356 days ago

> At the start, TCP handled both datagram transmission and routing, but as the protocol expanded, other researchers started to recommend that these two functions be split into layers.

> One of these researchers, Jonathan Postel of the University of California’s Information Sciences Institute and an editor for the Request of[sic] Comments (RFCs) which is a document series capturing the development of the Internet.

> Postel has stated:

> “We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering”

> Basically, the monolithic design of TCP would soon become inflexible and unable to scale efficiently. Therefore TCP was split into two protocols, TCP & the Internet Protocol (IP).

shilch 2356 days ago

I'm not all too familiar with the history of IP and TCP but my point still stands. Protocols aren't build because the underlying protocol doesn't scale in term of throughput, it's for the opposite reason that they scale very well. I could also have used HTTP and TCP.

Scaling with second layers instead of on-chain is NOT "sound engineering"

The Engineering discipline relies on empirical studies. With constantly full blocks, you have no way to measure transaction demand.

Fees are only a weak indicator of transaction demand because of substitute goods.

marcinjachymiak 2356 days ago

A great empirical study you should pursue is initial blockchain download time with (full) 2000 MB blocks and low-grade consumer hardware.

freeAgent 2356 days ago

People have already done this and it is quite fast! https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ek0614/current_node_im...

Flowee the Hub (Bitcoin Cash full node implementation) can sync the equivalent of 4GB blocks using just a cheap quad-core VPS.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/26/mvb.html

intabli 2355 days ago

It’s not sound engineering whatsoever, it actually is horrible engineering especially when the base layer is congested - Engineers and developers who are far more proficient than you have already chimed in on this, including Vitalik the creator of Ethereum, who also firmly supports the path to scale Bitcoin Cash is taking:

This is hackernews dude, you don't control this one.

cyphertruck 2356 days ago

That’s not the status quo at all. You can buy a raspberry pi 4, a 1TB SSD, and have a perfectly functional bitcoin node, and lightning node and BTCPAY server all in one for close to $200.

Secondly, Lightning isn’t “additional complexity” fir bitcoin— it’s taking complexity and putting it where it belongs— at the platform layer.

TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger. Same with bitcoin. And the application layer should be kept separate from the transport layer.

On-chain scaling does not prevent that. In fact, it reduces complexity by removing the Lighting requirement.

Tangent: I would not recommend running lightning on such hardware. State is local to the node, unlike with on-chain scaling. That implies you need server-grade (read: redundant) hardware.

> TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger.

Technically larger MTUs can increase performance somewhat by reducing per-packet overheads... but the effect marginal and not that enormous with good nics and drivers.

But still, probably not the best example. :)

etherael 2356 days ago

Right, because no nic vendor was ever retarded enough to purposely cripple their product by restricting throughput to thousandths of actual potential theoretical physical capacity at the driver level like you and your toxic coterie did. In fact nobody has ever been this stupid in the entire industry period that I can think of except that coterie.

Good thing for you it's in the interests of extremely rich and powerful people to see that your sabotage is well supported, and good thing for the rest of the world you have a containment chain where your stupidity is restricted from bleeding over to the rest of them, and every single other chain appears to be completely mercifully free of your idiotic philosophy.

scotty79 2356 days ago

I don't get your argument. Block size is limited so fees can go up to pay the miners so they have incentive to mine.

If fees are a barrier to you, you can make your transfer of value using any other traded cryptocurrency (or lightning whatever it is).

Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).

mikekchar 2356 days ago

I can answer part of that question. You can't make it much more frequent because the amount of time for the difficulty has to be balanced against propagation time for blocks or else you will have lots of forks. Probably you can make it work, but there are a fair number of assumptions in the Bitcoin protocol about this and it would probably be better to start a new coin if you want to do that. The 10 minute update was chosen specifically to avoid common network partition events.

As for block size, it's been ages since I looked into this stuff at all (and I've only ever watched out of the corner of my eye), but my impression is that the block size is currently limited for relatively arbitrary reasons. I don't think there is actually a lot of resistance to increasing the size sometime. It's just that the developers want to limit the size now to guide development in certain ways.

And really, as far as I'm concerned that's totally fair. If you don't like it, fork the coin. Or start a new one. Or stick with Bitcash. The developers are in control because that's the whole point -- to guide development in the way that they think will work best. Not everybody is going to agree. So what?

I think the only reason people get upset is because of the ludicrous amount of potential money on the line. And again: if you are controlling that ludicrous amount of potential money, you are able to vote with your feet -- to the extent that you can convince other people with ludicrous amounts of potential money to follow suit. If all that insane speculation and fraud were to vacate Bitcoin, the developers could happily code away and there would be nobody left to complain.

Let's face it. If we believe that there are billions of dollars tied up in BTC, the owners of that coin could easily afford to hire programmers to fork the protocol. They don't do it because the politics of doing so is essentially impossible. Most people want to stick with the dev group. Again, I'm left with saying, so what?

https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf

DennisP 2356 days ago

> You can't make it much more frequent because the amount of time for the difficulty has to be balanced against propagation time for blocks or else you will have lots of forks.

The same problem also limits block size, since large blocks take longer to propagate.

But that's why Ethereum went with GHOST, which was originally proposed for Bitcoin. Instead of choosing the block with the most hashpower behind it, you choose the block with the most hashpower in the entire tree after it, so that forks contribute to a block's security. The original paper calculated that this allowed both faster blocks and higher throughput, and it's the reason Ethereum has 15-second blocks.

Here are a couple papers:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/545.pdf

Ethereum abandoned ghost because of its amplification of selfish mining. Inclusion of 'uncles' does not increase block selection weight there.

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/38121/why-did-e...

DennisP 2356 days ago

Looks like you're right. I found this stackoverflow answer:

...which says Ethereum actually uses a version of the "Inclusive Protocol," which according to its paper has similar advantages:

https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~yoni_sompo/pubs/15/inclusive_ful...

statoshi 2356 days ago

Indeed; the market has clearly chosen to prefer optimizing for low cost of full system validation (running a full node) over lost cost of transacting (cheap block space.)

It's not. Don't believe the comparisons to other technology. Lightning is an IOU system that does not scale with users.

FreeTrade 2356 days ago

Lightning requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact.

Lightning was not ready when Bitcoin capacity was crippled by the aforementioned tiny cabal of developers in favor of Lightning.

Lightning remains unready, forever 18 months away from the promised usable technology.

DennisP 2356 days ago

Lightning also requires funds recipients to monitor their channels continuously, to make sure they're not closed early with obsolete balances. At least you can pay someone to do that for you.

Lightning is basically digital third-party checks.

There's a myriad of reasons people don't buy things with third-party checks.

alwillis 2356 days ago

Lightning remains unready, forever 18 months away from the promised usable technology.

This is provably false. Lightning is huge and growing:

* more than $6 billion USD in liquidity

* nearly 11,000 nodes

* tens of thousands of transactions daily

* a growing ecosystem (https://www.lopp.net/lightning-information.html)

You can see the real-time stats at https://1ml.com/

mrb 2355 days ago

Grossly incorrect stats you gave here...

There is only $6 million in capacity, not $6 billion.

Daily transactions are more likely in the few hundreds per day, not tens of thousands. Although this can't be determined with accuracy.

cedivad 2356 days ago

*billion => million.

bufferoverflow 2356 days ago

Lightning doesn't address that, it's been broken for years and it's permanently "18 months till it's ready".

Plus the design itself is flawed. You have to be online to receive money. No cold storage. Routing at scale isn't solved.

Hardly, because building LN on the 1MB base layer is like building a pyramid upside down, it's unstable and creates more problems than it was meant to solve.

Lightning was supposed to make tx fees low right? Well it technically has, but it also introduced the following problems that Bitcoin never had:

- LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.

- If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.

- In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. Well when Bitcoin fees hit $3 a few months ago, 60% of the Lightning network capacity was locked up in miner fees lol... defeating the purpose of microtransactions and the LN network

- In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. In addition to stealing your LN private keys, a bad user can attempt to steal your funds when you're offline. Which is why LN requires a 3rd party service called Watchtowers to watch over your funds. Way more complicated than Bitcoin

- The unsolvable routing problem. A good chunk of LN transactions will fail simply because the routing is weighted and chanes constantly. Compare that to Bitcoin's gossip network which doesn't require any weighted routing. FYI weighted routing is currently a mathematically unsolved problem.

- LN is centralizing around LNbig.com At one point LNBig.com had over 70% of the entire LN network capacity. LN will continue to centralize around these big hubs, because they can offer cheap connections and low fees than a regular peer can. Welcome to Bank of America LN Hub TM.

- With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.

- Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved. Like the race condition when a big hub closes and hundreds of users all attempt to race to transmit their transaction to miners.

- In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion... And Blockstream blocked a minor 2MB increase. So good luck.

So congrats to Lightning, for "solving" 1 problem and creating 12 new ones.

There's many more, but these are the ones easily digestable by users without going into the deeper technical problems with LN. There's a reason Lightning is always 18 months away from completion....for 5.5 years now. While Bitcoin Cash just works.

adiabat 2356 days ago

> - Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin [citation needed] The initial presentation of the paper was titled "SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Scaling Bitcoin to Billions of Transactions Per Day". If we didn't mean it to help scaling, what was it meant to be? [note: am one of the authors]

https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin-meetup/2015-02...

kanzure 2356 days ago

Here's a transcript of that talk:

once_inc 2356 days ago

> LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.

Correct, but this is clearly stated in its whitepaper and is one of the tradeoffs to get massively more txs and privacy.

> If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.

Correct, but you can also move those funds to other channels you have already opened. Also, loop-in and loop-out are coming. Also, receiving multiple bitcoin transactions on a single UTXO is a privacy hit for all involved.

> In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. (...)

You need to if you don't plan to aggregate your settlement and opening txs, or aggregate those transactions with others. All if that tech is still coming.

> In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. (...)

This is your first statement rewritten. I will not address it again.

> The unsolvable routing problem. (...)

And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.

> LN is centralizing around LNbig.com (...)

Like bitcoin was centralizing around Satoshi's mining farm in the first year of Bitcoin? LN is at infancy stage, and has a hard cap on what amount of BTC you can open a channel with.

> With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.

Besides the fact that bitcoin will still be there, all of these points are explained as part of the network. I don't understand why you are harping about these sorts of issues when the whitepaper or easily found literature about LN clearly state these issues. Also; don't forget that LN doesn't have to be the only second layer on Bitcoin. I can imagine banks building a second layer walled garden with the feature of settling onchain. Heck, this could be made in less than a year, and would basically give every user in the world the option to buy bitcoin. They would however need to have the right volume of BTC available, so it would be utterly devastating to those vested in fiat (which is why they aren't doing it yet).

> Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publicly stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved.

Drya is, to my knowledge still very positive on LN, don't know about Poon though.

> In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion (...)

With the then current code, and the then current block size. Block size has increased with Segwit. Taproot will further increase capacity. Channel factories are a thing thought of after publishing the white paper, etc.

> While Bitcoin Cash just works.

Bitcoin Cash works. I agree. It's miners will keep raising the block size and spammers will keep filling those blocks to make the ghost towm seem inhabited. Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online. After that, it will centralize to a small set of players that will be able to change the consensus rules to their wish. Is that the decentralized peer-to-peer money you wanted? This attack vector is a considerably more important threat than reduced adoption will ever be.

> And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.

Oh that's funny. While you're right that payments failing for not finding a route is a big problem, it's not even the real problem with routing.

The problem is for LN to function at scale, it have to centralize around a few big hubs. Because otherwise routing is impossible, and transactions will fail.

Decentralized routing is an intractable problem, and LN have to choose between centralization and scaling.

DagAgren 2356 days ago

> And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem

Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.

alwillis 2356 days ago

Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.

Definitely not true.

As I previously mentioned in this thread, lightning has over $6 billion USD in liquidity, nearly 11,000 nodes and tens of thousands of transactions every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980404

DagAgren 2355 days ago

Those stats are either false, or are actually evidence that the network is tiny. Tens of thousands of transactions per day means it's not even doing a single transaction per second, which is miniscule.

https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...

phillipsjk 2354 days ago

According to a recent study, the privacy properties of the lighting Network are weak.

The problem with lightning privacy is that to get good privacy you need more than about 2 hops. The problem is that every hop locks up money equal to the amount transferred: increasing the cost of the transaction.

The study also finds that the LN is currently subsidized, and based on the capital costs alone, fees should be comparable to on-chain (BTC) transactions. BCH transactions are currently subsidized as well, but not to the same extent (I estimate 3cents/kB would pay for processing and storage).

dolebas 2356 days ago

> Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online.

Why do you assume BTC/LN will improve scalability properties but not BCH? On-chain capacity can be optimized over time without increasing the average cost for running a node.

Funny.... you seem to be exaggerating by a factor of 100,000x...

And, that is before all the issues. Oh well... When Lightning comes to an end later this year, you will have a new boondoggle thing I guess?

statoshi 2356 days ago

Ha! Another empty prediction that we'll happily call you out on once it expires. Remember when you predicted that Bitcoin would completely cease to exist by the end of 2019? https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1211707215620530176

> And, that is before all the issues. Oh well... When Lightning comes to an end later this year, you will have a new boondoggle thing I guess?

Everyone was holding their breath for your prior fraudulent manipulation ( https://i.redd.it/lktxhvvvmny31.jpg, https://i.redd.it/02oagc805u441.png ) has long since died from asphyxiation. I think you might need a new approach.

matheusmoreira 2356 days ago

For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second:

https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...

> Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.

The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.

staplers 2356 days ago

The creator actually suggested that it could scale fine if they increased the block size and mentioned future miner farms in 2010.

However, it would make sense that exchanges and credit-card-like institutions would want to keep bitcoin unscalable for the foreseeable future and stall scalable development.

( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... )

In one of his last messages in 2010 before going publically inactive, Bitcoin's creator wrote:

> Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.

Hal Finney, one of the main developers of PGP and Bitcoin's first user wrote in 2010:

> I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as... well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.

( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... )

That sort of view was well known and understood by others in early 2011 when (now former) Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen had recently started he wrote of the future:

> I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks (I have no idea what their transaction clearing/processing networks look like or how they work).

( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3118.msg44789#msg447... )

Or, look at other discussions early in Bitcoin's life-- and instead of quoting myself from back then, I'll show that these views were broadly understood:

> 2010-12-09 02:14:28 <gavinandresen> jgarzik: that seems like a bad idea; I have a niggling feeling in the back of my head that the optimal bitcoin-like system would have even smaller blocks/transactions than current bitcoin....

( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2010-12-09.html#... )

> 2011-07-15 03:32:13 <moa7> actually the more it shakes out the more bitcoin is looking like a settlement clearing system like interbank market e.g.

> 2011-07-15 03:41:46 <jgarzik> moa7: RE "settlement clearing system" <<-- EXACTLY

> 2011-07-15 03:42:22 <jgarzik> moa7: it is presumed by many that a future bitcoin (if successful) will involve a secondary layer that can handle higher volumes, microtransactions, etc.

( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2011-07-15.html#... )

2012-04-13 17:56:22 <jgarzik> IMO I think the current bitcoin's endgame is as a not-high-volume settlement network.

( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2012-04-13.html#... )

Or,

> 2012-09-09 20:00:32 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I am against changing block size, FWIW. I think the market will properly intervene, bitcoin will reach a steady state where all blocks are 1MB, and the best bidding gets block placement. SatoshiDICE and other data apps automatically solve themselves, once 1MB is normal.

> 2012-09-09 20:00:48 <jgarzik> I think I will be overruled, but that is my position.

> 2012-09-09 20:03:24 <jgarzik> bitcoin exists _because_ of certain constrained limits. money creation is one of them. block space is another.

> 2012-09-09 20:03:35 <jgarzik> that is a fundamental constraint; messing with it massively changes the economics

( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2012-09-09.html#... )

There are plenty of tough trade-offs in Bitcoin and reasonable people can have no end of a disagreement about them. But these discussions, mostly from before any credit card company ever heard of Bitcoin-- show that a nuanced understanding existed all along.

Disagree if you like, but the conspiracy theories are an insult to everyone's intelligence borne out of a malicious and dishonest rewriting of Bitcoin's history pushed on by court decreed fraudsters like Craig Wright. You have plenty of alternatives-- if they're better then they should stand on their own without the abuse and deceptive FUD.

sunared 2356 days ago

> Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.

He was talking about people like you. He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit. Stop trying to twist his words.

Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise. At least here I won't get censored by theymos like on r\bitcoin and bitcointalk.

> He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit.

I don't know about 'centerally planned' but he hardcoded a limit into the consensus rules.

> Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise.

That's the point. And I a pointing out that they said all these things in 2010-2014-- as you can see some of the quotes (esp from Jeff) are quite emphatic. I could quote a lot more.

The narrative a lot of people are transmitting about Bitcoin is untrue, and by showing the diversity of these views going WAY back from people who later tried to push through changes I think makes that point pretty well.

I guess that you do not understand the meaning of the word "enforce"?

Not, nodes set rules, they enforce them.

cedivad 2356 days ago

He "hardcoded" a spam protection measure at a time when it was legitimately expected an attacker would spend a few dollars and clog up the blockchain significantly.

This was always intended as a temporary measure and it was understood by the community at large that the limit would be removed as soon as it started hindering adoption. As an example, see this reddit thread of mine 86% upvoted: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35hpkt/please_remi...

As history will remember, what happened then is that you decided you had missed out on the boat and you started raising money for your stupid little layer 2 solution while censoring everyone suggesting it had to coexist with a bigger block size.

I'm not going to mince words, you are the reason Bitcoin is a speculative scam instead of a real payments revolution as it was intended to be. It had one chance and thanks to you and your cronies the only people benefiting from it are the ones liquidating noobs on bitmex.

teh_infallible 2356 days ago

The counter argument to this is that the white paper refers to Bitcoin as “a peer to peer electronic cash system.” If high fees force users to centralized, custodial second layers, then it ceases to operate as peer to peer cash. It becomes Venmo.

xorcist 2356 days ago

It might be prudent to note that "cash" has meaning in the context of electronic payment research, going all the way back to DigiCash in the 90s. That system required a trusted third party to operate, but it was still cash in the sense that it is a transfer of value, not debt. The way most payment systems operate is that they are settled at a later date (in some cash equivalent). In that sense, credit card payments as well as Venmo are layer 2 solutions.

Bitcoin has decentralized non-custodial second layers.

But if they didn't-- which would be sad-- your logic doesn't follow: Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used?

Venmo is venmo. Venmo adoption Bitcoin as a currency on their platform would not turn Bitcoin into venmo. It would just create another option for using Bitcoin-- one with it's own positive and negative trade-offs.

There is a balance. The system is not very valuable at the extremes of resource usage or limited capacity, like many other systems.

etherael 2356 days ago

> Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used?

It would be very easy to argue that it would not be if the present mechanics of the cash system were restricted to a maximum global throughput of 3 transactions a second. But no other monetary system would actually pursue such an asinine goal on purpose except as a means of sabotage.

Which explains you.

Don't worry Greg, we will get to you in due time. It's always interesting how you love to cherry pick and take things out of context. Then this was always your motive.

The reference you like to quote about my wanting to limit the size of the blockchain is of course completely out of context. The creation of overlay networks allows bitcoin to act as a single reference source while also having different quorum systems that act independently. You will note that I did not say I would get increasingly piratical regarding the block size. Rather, I note in December 2010 just before I left the public development of bitcoin fact that users of bitcoin were getting rather tyrannical. I do understand that you failed to complete your education, but to help increase your erudition, this is a reference to others seeking to objectively restrict something that should not be restricted in the way that you're proposing.

Eric Vorhees, Garzik and others like you wanted a system that could not be controlled. Unfortunately for you, you chose a project, bitcoin, that is highly resistant as it scales to your type of shenanigans.

Yes, I do understand that having a system outside of government control helps with your side projects such as selling malware, ransomware and other projects that have are generally tainted feel. However, you will find that bitcoin isn't good for this.

I do wonder if you pointed out to anyone that the entire purpose of having a Merkel tree is scaling. In fact, if you take the basic structure of bitcoin and limited to 1 MB blocks, the entire need for a Merkel tree is obfuscated. Where you have limited numbers of transactions, a simple index would do. But then, you are not seeking to educate people about bitcoin are you...

Unfortunately for you, lots of things have been happening in the background. You never understood a single percent of what bitcoin was about. I don't blame you for this, I don't think you're smart enough to understand why I created bitcoin or even the origins of any of the parts or components. You're a great troll. You're also a useful idiot. In separating out the fools you have allowed me to finally manage to take bitcoin to where it needed to be. It was never EGold or any of the other anarchist systems that you wished to create.

Did you forget that I said the protocol was set in stone? No, I don't think you did. But then, you have a habit of taking things out of context, twisting them, outright lying. The problem you seem to not understand is that you haven't stopped anything. The time you figure it out I will have a patent on everything needed to scale blockchains. Then again, you will bitch and complain and say it's not fair. But a public yet but we have it a target of 1,000 patents (in total) this month and the pipeline will take me to 2,500 papers this year.

It is a real shame, well not really, that you're going to have to watch is all you have tried to corrupt falls apart around you this year. Have a nice life Greg, I wonder what rock you're going to crawl under next time ?

askmike 2356 days ago

If you come to HN claiming to be Satoshi, better bring some technical proof that will actually convince the techies here.

You might be asking a bit much of him, this technology stuff isn't super easy for everyone.

In two easy steps:

$ ./bitcoin-cli signmessage 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB "Digital signatures are to scammers as garlic is to vampires. I am hn user nullc, but you are not Bitcoin's creator."

$ ./bitcoin-cli verifymessage 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB "HJ0VgbIY9BAud6MiZ4Qh0KSwhmA7gwkFm07tjPJeHsYNcj5oIAVlVR2JnKTF7EjqTWEaD9QbAPzk8QII8QJxW4s=" "Digital signatures are to scammers as garlic is to vampires. I am hn user nullc, but you are not Bitcoin's creator."

true

onesatoshi 2356 days ago

Some 'techies' around here actually understand that keys don't represent identities.

Devar 2356 days ago

DrCraigWright has had his account blocked, he states (Why!?), so he asks this to be posted:

---

Yes, I know you love to run around going “Craig’s not Satoshi, don't listen to him”. However, all of that is irrelevant. The simple fact of the matter is that I've taken the original protocol that I designed and implemented it and it scales and it works. Not the way that people like James A. Donald desired (and yes, he is a child pornography and paedophile and that is part of why he wanted an anonymous coin, something I didn't realise in 2008). Rather, it is a micropayments system that changes the entire nature of the Internet. It allows companies like Google and Facebook, or rather the ones that will replace them to create systems that earn through micropayments and at the same time allow individuals to earn the money to pay for this. It's not the concept that people in the cryptocurrency space think about, but then the people in the cryptocurrency space are rarely those who will take this forward.

Don't worry, you can still play. I do know how to fix lightning; I have patents on it. Likewise, I have patents that would fix Ethereum but then I don't need to, bitcoin doesn't need Ethereum.

It surprises me how little people bother to learn. The entire cryptocurrency space is premised on ideas that have gone before. The only true innovation that I added to bitcoin was an economic system that linked to a traceable pseudonymous series of transactions. Proof of work-based Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. Distributed Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. The entire technical and corporate space 20 years ago was larger than the entire bitcoin space and in fact cryptocurrency space at the peak a couple years ago. But then, few bother to actually do the research. Few and then fewer even bother to understand that the concept of a blockchain, of hashing a block of information into next block was not new. It was published 25 years ago.

Yet none of you seem to have bothered to take the time to read the source documents. I shouldn't be surprised at this sort of attitude, I sought in students all the time. People are becoming lazy, not all of us but many.

It's interesting in a way that people believe that bitcoin acts outside of government and law. In the Whitepaper I stated that bitcoin nodes, miners enforce the rules. I didn't say that they create the rules. I said that the rules were set in stone. The incentive system allows miners to act in a manner that keeps them honest. You see, in law, the definitions of used in the Whitepaper have meaning. In particular, the term attacker has meaning.

Bitcoin is an economic system. Miners always end in data centres. It doesn't matter how you change the proof of work protocol. If an ASIC device was never created, it would still be more efficient for miners to end running many many computers in a data centre. In scale there is efficiency. The problem is that you guys think you can beat me. You don't even realise you've already lost. Then, commenting on information that I know when you don't and some of you will say this informational asymmetry is an unfair advantage. I'm sorry if you're a snowflake and I don't care.

This collectivist, socialist mindset that has infiltrated what people call libertarian thought is rather despicable. You seem to actually believe, surprising as that seems that you have a right and that I have an obligation to give you information. That when I'm not seeking anything from you, what am not asking you to help, where in fact I don't actually care two damns about your existence that I should do something to obtain your gratification or even some respect from you. I'm sorry, I don't care about the respect that some people seem to garnish and gather from social media sites to their pseudonymous identities. It is funny to watch however.

Enjoy. 2020 is going to be an interesting year and some of you are going to find out how interesting very shortly.

that you want to use the _Dread Pirate Roberts_ defense - I was only just handed these keys... But that will never be. It does not matter at all what you say. You shall learn just how far gone you are this year and just how many people see you as the fool.

Enjoy failure... It has been your life and it shall remain so.

- DrCraigWright

Oh. I have technology. I have patents and more.

You suffer from the misapprehension that your opinion matters. I'm sorry it doesn't. HN does little for the real-world contrary to what many in Silicon Valley culture seem to think.

A large reason for the creation of bitcoin stems from the promise of micropayments. Therefore Google and Facebook collapsed into the shit show that they are, they couldn't solve it. Your belief is not needed nor warranted. I'm not seeking money or investment from you and nor do I really care about you or even know you. We have companies coming to use my technology, and I'm not talking about ICO pumpers or other scammers seeking to replicate the frauds of the 90s. I'm also not talking about the bucket shops that pose as pink sheet scam markets under a new name.

We have companies such as Nike now getting into blockchain. Basically, the idea being to save data. Interestingly, the focused concept in the Nike patent is covered by my 2016 filings placing me two years ahead of them. Which is fine, they now have a choice. They can use BSV freely or they can pay my company royalties.

So why is it you think that I need to convince you?

Why do you think that it matters that I have you believe me or come on board as my disciple?

I hate to tell you that you're a little bit deluded if you believe that. You see, people will build on my platform whether you like me or not. I have a technical solution that works, I have solutions that scale, and mostly I've had the time to patent every aspect of how bitcoin works. You see, while other people have been trying to understand my protocol, I found that the best way of stopping people hijacking it further was to start building what some people call a patent fortress. You can't scale without SPV. Unfortunately, people didn't understand what it was. So much of bitcoin was not understood even though was common.

It is interesting how people think that I invented the concept of blockchain. It was published in the mid-90s. However, it was a set theoretic mathematical construct and not as simple as it was resented in the paper.

And I know, bad Aussie man. Scary bad man doesn't want our form of Internet anonymous money. You seem to think that it matters all that get funding because you run round saying that I'm nasty and mean and I hurt your feelings. I'm sorry to tell you but none of that actually matters. I'm sorry to tell you that bitcoin is not anonymous and cannot be made such. It is a concept known as traceable pseudonymous transactions. If you look you will find a number of papers dating to around 1994 on this concept.

And whether you like the fact that I created bitcoin are not or whether you believe me is irrelevant. You see, when I file a patent it is independently verified and passed and granted without reference to who I may have been and what I've done in the past. I know that's a difficult concept to some of you, but every time I create something it is tested based on the merits of what I've created that time and not the laurels that I wear.

You seem to think that I'm creating another shit coin. No, I'm just freeing up bitcoin do what was meant to do. The way designed it. Not so that you can speculate, so that businesses will be able to use low fee transactions that are fast and cheap. See, in the next five years we will have transactions that process for under 1/10000 of a cent. And yes that is the correct number of zeros. It's not about a political circle jerk that comes from this fallacy of code is law (which was discredited in 2001 by Prof Timothy Wu). It is about the technology. In this is the point, while you guys circle jerk talking about how you're going to change the world with anonymous money that helps drug dealers and terrorists...

We are building something that will actually help the world.

And no, your liking me, your wanting to be aligned with me, your care as to what I'm doing matters to less extent than you could imagine.

I can't tell if it's the actual scammer or a parody of the scammer.

I know! you could post a digital signature to autenticate yourself.

Oh wait!

mrsnuffy 2355 days ago

bathtub365 2356 days ago

Do you have any evidence of this kind of collusion?

Blockstream (Which funds Core developers) was funded by AXA Strategic Ventures with about $80Million in two rounds.

Digital Currency Group, which has investment in a lot of Bitcoin companies has a controlling interest from MasterCard.

That alone does not prove anything, but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale. When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.

Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).

The truth is that BCH forked from BTC after 4 years of obstructionism. We forked just in time: because the huge transaction backlog on BTC happened within months of the fork. The result was an entirely predictable result of failing to scale.

once_inc 2356 days ago

> but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale.

Citation needed.

> When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.

The upgraded version of Bitcoin is the version that holds consensus among its users. Bitcoin Cash never held that position, and probably never will. Calling it "Bitcoin (BCH)" shows your bias.

> Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).

If I were to run a direct blockchain copy of Bitcoin and change some arbitrary rule (such as making the difficulty readjust every 2000 blocks), that does not a bitcoin make. I would be running a dead chain nobody uses. If I were to argue the change and everyone follows my chain and runs my code, only then would it be Bitcoin, since it carries consensus.

> The truth is that BCH forked from BTC

Correct. You forked off, and aren't bitcoin. The 2017Q4 spike in transaction fees was probably due to a number of separate issues and misconfigurations, such as wallet fee estimation being mostly broken, users feeling FOMO and wanting in at any price, and transactions not optimally filling the space alotted to them (which SegWit partially fixed, as designed).

BCH forked off to reject the SegWit+RBF add-on that ain't Bitcoin. Replace by Fee has caused ATM hacks and breaks trust in 0-conf. BCH upgraded version holds consensus among its users & fees are low as P2P Electronic Cash System was designed to have had.

https://www.removeddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/...

Yes read this history

tapland 2356 days ago

I didn't know it was that bad. That couldn't scale to a small city =/

trickstra 2356 days ago

Don't listen to him. The whining about small blocks is just a narrative BCH folks want to push. Yes, it's true that currently bitcoin blockchain processes about 7 transanctions per second. But mempool is almost empty, 1sat/byte transactions go into next block - there really isn't any pressure to make blocks bigger right now. No emergency. And making blocks bigger comes with a big risk of spammers, so if we have other alternatives, we should take them. By the time people need much more than 7 transactions per second lightning will be fully usable, so there really isn't any problem.

once_inc 2356 days ago

That is the price to pay for decentralization. That said, further optimizations will increase the number of transactions per block, and second layer solutions can scale bitcoin to a vastly larger size.

No we are not. Lots of devs, miners and businesses got together and forked to BCH.

The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.

ibz 2356 days ago

How is Tether holding up BTC price? Can you elaborate?

zallarak 2356 days ago

Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions):

- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.

- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!

* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.

sfjailbird 2356 days ago

> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions

That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.

> Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash

How so? As far as settlement is concerned, a cash transaction is pretty much exactly like a bitcoin transaction (and quite unlike a credit card transaction).

>That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.

Until it doesn't. A payment network is graded on how it handles disputes, not regular transactions. Bitcoin can't do refunds or chargebacks, making it rife for fraud.

Sure, you can implement escrow, but then it's no longer competitive like GP said.

Still limited to 1 000 000 bytes per 10 minutes and then some for segwit which was a unnecessary hack job that actually makes blocks bigger without much added throughput.

That isn't true.

In Bitcoin the block size limit was eliminated and replaced with a block weight limit which better reflects the long term operating costs for node. The raw 'size' of transactions inherently is becoming less meaningful in the long term with things like transaction compression and compact encodings.

The weight limit doesn't map perfectly to any size limit because its limiting different things, this evening most blocks have been about 1.3 MB.

BigBubbler 2356 days ago

Probably technically true, but, it is just a part of the dishonest language-shell-game to fool people into thinking BTC can really scale to become a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. 1.3 MB is still tiny! Pretending a small difference matters is so disingenuous.

Blocksize is a rate.

If you were traveling at 120 MPH and then accelerated to 156 MPH you would not say that this was a small difference without consequences.

It mattered significantly, in several respects. E.g. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

j23450n 2356 days ago

Blocksize is clearly not literally a rate; that's a ridiculous statement. When you artificially cap it, like putting a limiter on your car in your analogy, it can be rate limiting, i.e. limiting the transaction rate - an actual rate. That chart you posted in meaningless in this context, but clearly just greg being greg, trying to manipulate; are you seriously trying to suggest that the tiny increase from segwit shenanigans is responsible for that (cropped) decrease in tx fees? That's demonic.

mathiasrw 2356 days ago

> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions

Why not?

ra5 2356 days ago

From a slightly more nerdy perspective:

Because these credit card companies have thousands of _their_ machines, in _their_ locations, running _their_ software, to meet _their_ standards.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin is run god knows where, for god knows who (as rightfully intended of course), on god knows what software.

Sadly speed is just naturally part of the tradeoff in this scenario.

kain_niak 2355 days ago

Yes this is true because Bitcoin core plays by the speed of the weakest link.

It's not true for Bitcoin Cash which plays by the "if your node is not making you money why are you running it"

When we upgrade every 6 months or useless nodes just get stuck on the old chain forever and that's it.

Last upgrade there was one miner who upgraded one block to late and lost about 1000 USD. That miner will be the first to run the new software in may.

We had a hacker who got a smart card to get Bitcoin cash to work like a credit card without needing to be online.

Bitcoin cash tx are instant and take on average about 2 seconds to spread to about 1999 out of 2000 mempools.

They settle on the chain on average 10 minutes.

Credit card tx also take a couple of seconds but much longer to settle.

Right now BCH can not yet scale like Visa but we already have the capacity to compete with paypall.

Satoshi's design works at scale but only when you don't delete point 6 from the whitepaper which is "Simple Payment Verification"

Core tries to make you belief the whitepaper was written without points 6 and 7.

7 is how to make the blockchain smaller by pruning it using merkle trees.

Nobody does that yet because storing 200 GB for 10 years is super cheap.

But 6 and 7 are ESSENTIAL in the design to scale.

Core completely ignores them or says: Well SPV is not 100% secure there for it's insecure and should not be used.

Gmax does this with everything, he flips it to extremes.

Meanwhile right now on LN there is couple of hundred thousand dollars that is very easy to steal from non technical people.

1) you find people that want to open a channel with you. These people go online to post their ip addresses and open ports on /r/bitcoin. These posts are encouraged on /r/bitcoin.

2) You open a channel with them for like 100 USD in BTC.

3) You push the balance to their side of the channel by using a swap side that accepts both LN and other coins.

4) You sell this 100 USD for another coin.

5) You publish an old state.

6) You do this to nodes you monitor using nmap to see if they go offline on a regular basis for longer then nlocktime.

7) You can't lose money on this, only win with people that should not be running LN but are.

There is like 6 million USD locked up in LN and about 10% is for grabs.

8) The victims have nowhere to go because if they post about it on their channels they get called stupid and banned and their post deleted.

9) People are already doing this but the victims are still not speaking out. They just belief it was their own fault and move on. Meanwhile the watchtower software is not there yet and if a node does not go offline for nlocktime you can easily DDOS that node for 144 blocks and you doubled your money.

nemild 2356 days ago

Compared to credit cards:

- Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks

- Bitcoin's base protocol transaction throughput is low

- There is a fixed cost per transaction (credit cards have low marginal costs for the credit card processor, and variable, percentage-based fees)

Nursie 2356 days ago

There is an uncorrelated cost for every transaction, it's not exactly fixed.

__s 2356 days ago

Credit card transactions are not immutable. This is a feature

You could build that feature on top of bitcoin, but it isn't a feature that should be built into bitcoin transactions. See the lightning network

cyphertruck 2356 days ago

If you read the bitcoin core release notes going back at least the past 5 years, and look at the road map, every release and every planned addition has improved scalability— many of them very significant improvements.

The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive.

Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes.

But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.

DagAgren 2356 days ago

It is a claim also made by anyone who understands bitcoin. It just doesn't scale. This is a fact, no matter whether scammers also agree.

johndevor 2356 days ago

Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)

JohnJamesRambo 2356 days ago

Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

pshc 2356 days ago

In what sense is Lightning not peer-to-peer? It seems permssionless in that any two people can agree to open a channel.

breavyn 2356 days ago

You're missing the keyword 'network'. If you're routing a payment across the lightning network, then it is technically not peer to peer. You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on.

As you said, any two parties are able to open (and close) a channel. However, these actions require an on chain transaction, and your funds are locked until you close the channel. Unless you're going to be exchanging many transactions in a short period of time with your peer, you would be better off creating transactions directly on chain.

I won't get into this here, but the lightning 'network' has its own set of scaling problems, which imo are much worse than that of the bitcoin network itself.

trickstra 2356 days ago

Torrents also go through network, but we call them peer-to-peer. I think you don't understand what peer-to-peer means. It means you don't need central authority, a central node that would handle the connections, match them together. And that is true for Lightning, torrents, and all other things we call peer-to-peer.

> You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on.

It's not technically a payment at that point, since the payments is atomic end to end. But yes, you send a message your peer, which sends it to another peer, which sends it to another peer...

like any other P2P network.

[2] https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/

shilch 2356 days ago

I don't think that "Peer-to-Peer" in the whitepaper's title ("Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System") refers to the network structure being p2p - and that's probably also not what most people mean when they talk about bitcoin being peer-to-peer. The very first sentence makes it pretty clear that peer-to-peer means person-to-person without any intermediary:

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1]

Furthermore, the previous title was "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" [2]. So reading "Peer-to-Peer" as "Person-to-Person" would mean that the title hasn't changed in meaning, it just became a bit more catchy.

Also, when analysing the incentives of participants in the bitcoin network, it turns out that network nodes do not actually form the ideal-typical p2p mesh network (where all nodes are equally distributed and connect to a few other nodes) but a more densely connected network where connectivity to mining nodes is strongly incentivised. This topic has been researched and discussed by Dr. Wright (See [3] for more information).

[1] https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf

[3] https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-wo...

I_am_tiberius 2356 days ago

Comparing the lightning network with a bank is totally incorrect. Your funds cannot be seized and the middlemen privacy aspect is very similar to the Tor network. I don't think there is a better way of solving a decentralized payment system.

Lightning is the same as writing a check. Until it's verified on the bitcoin network, it's just like a bank in that regard.

I_am_tiberius 2354 days ago

But there's no way the bitcoin network doesn't accept the settlement. A bank can just throw checks away if they like.

bduerst 2354 days ago

Bitcoin will not accept a settlement if the wallet no longer has funds.

Banks throwing away checks is not a problem. Bouncing checks are a fraud problem, which is why most everyone have moved on from using checks is many situations.

Lightning's solution is to just 'watch' everyone you do transactions with, which is a lazy, non-viable solution analagous to continuously watching an anonymous stranger's bank account when they write you a check.

wayoutthere 2356 days ago

Tor is a privacy nightmare; not sure what the situation is currently but at one point the US government ran something like 10% of the exit nodes. This is how a lot of the "dark web" operators got caught until folks caught on and switched up their opsec.

corporate_shi11 2356 days ago

Can you explain why you think it's a convoluted mess?

themagician 2356 days ago

If you read the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions."

It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.

pshc 2356 days ago

Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though.

I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.

Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.

6nf 2356 days ago

No it does not. LN is terrible for all kinds of reasons and nobody uses it.

Empact 2356 days ago

Based on what I last heard from merchants that accept it (e.g. Bitrefill), it's about tied with Ethereum for second in payment volume, after Bitcoin.

6nf 2356 days ago

Thats bullshit. ETH has loads of transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin. Lightning network transaction volume is almost zero right now.

You have no idea what lightning transaction volume is, for all you can tell I'm currently making 1000 transactions per second in a loop between a set of lightning wallets. :)

Because lightning is actually relatively scalable it doesn't broadcast every action to everyone.

https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...

phillipsjk 2354 days ago

Researchers have done black-box capacity testing. It can process around 7,000 transactions per day. Even BTC can handle that volume on-chain.

6nf 2356 days ago

The current implementation of LN does broadcast to everyone. At any given moment, every node on the network needs to know the size of every open channel on the network (for routing calculations) so every time a transaction happens, the updated channels sizes get broadcast to everyone. The volume is almost zero right now.

mathiasrw 2356 days ago

You have to pre-setup a connection to others that you know and hope they know someone that knows someone that has a connection to the person you are trying to buy from.

This is how the design of lightning network incentivises mega hubs that know most people. So if facebook made a big hub with all its users it would work smoothly.

Also: You can not receive payments if the computer/wallet that hosts your lightning node is not online. Not super smooth.

> and hope they know someone

The system has routing, and it turns out that it doesn't take much for the probability of a graph to be connected with low average diameter. See: The six degrees of kevin bacon.

If lightning doesn't work for a particular payment, you can simply make a payment without using it, potentially by splicing out funds from one of your channels.

Yes, Lightning has trade-offs. You have to be online (though there is ongoing research into changing that), and some moderately complex software had to be written to create it.

But in return you get get massive efficiency increases and instant irreversible payments.

For the transactions that it's intended, I think for these are pretty good trade-offs... though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.

phillipsjk 2354 days ago

> though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.

No true: due to limited block space on the base-layer.

I am not convinced you get any efficiency increase with the LN: just more difficult capacity planning because everything is suddenly so hard to measure.

Sending a payment, whether on the first or second layer, will take a certain amount of: bandwidth, processing and storage.

Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires.

Even is we assume the processing and storage requirements are equal: it will be more expensive on the LN. On the base layer, your data is protected from Byzantine faults by having each node verify the transactions as they come in. With the LN, state is local to each node. That implies you need redundant hardware to protect against Byzantine faults. I have been migrating my machines to ECC RAM and redundant storage: it is not cheap. What I save on hardware costs by buying old servers I pay in extra power use.

The above paragraph did not even mention the capital requirements of maintaining a Lightning node.

nullc 2352 days ago

> Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires.

Today sending a transaction communicates 10 messages for each of ~100k nodes in the network. Once its confirmed, that transaction will additionally be sent once to every new host to join the network, forever.

Lightning sends a couple of messages back and forth among the nodes directly involved in the transaction... maybe 4. (The average shortest path length is about 2.8 currently).

So the marginal communication cost for a transaction is literally hundreds of thousands times lower-- even ignoring the cost to future nodes joining the network-- and this advantage grows as the number of nodes increases.

BigBubbler 2356 days ago

Lol, no LN does not solve almost anything. It will be good for some centralized and KYC-rich uses by businesses and their customers. It will not make BTC into a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.

Among the "Bitcoins", only Bitcoin Cash is keeping that dream alive.

cletus 2356 days ago

So having a “currency” (its not really; is an asset) being controlled by an unaccountable “Tony cabal of developers” instead of a central bank is better how exactly?

I’ve never understood this argument.

It's good you don't understand it, because it wouldn't be better. It be much worse, because as unaccountable as central banks can be they'd be more accountable than that.

But that simply isn't how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin developers have no such authority. People with no special power beside respect and goodwill, write software on their own as they're free to do just are you're free to do. Other people voluntarily chose to run it. If people don't run it, it's completely inert. They cannot force anyone to run it. Subject to the limitations of public review, they cannot make hidden changes. The software has no automatic updates, and the developers have a long history of being extremely vigorously opposed to automatic updates.

Because whatever effect the software has on the network could only be slowly realized as it's deployed (short of something like a crash bug or an RCE or similar) there is ample time for the public to review a new version -- even if they chose to ignore the open development process -- and sound the alarm against running it if they judge it to be adverse.

If you don't like software put out by one developer, you can run software from another. You could create your own (or pay someone to do it) from scratch. You could run an old version. You could take a version you don't like and make modifications until you do...

Moreover, the biggest community of developers in Bitcoin makes their software all free software, develops it on public lists/websites/irc channels, and has taken considerable efforts to maintain compatibility with other software specific to maximize your ability to choose to not run it without feeling too much conflict or hesitation-- You can happily go take Bitcoin 0.8 from 2013 or and years old copy of knots or a number of other forks or alternative implements... start it up and it will sync and come to consensus with the network. (I wouldn't necessarily recommend running something that old exposed to the internet-- due to vulnerabilities-- but you could and it would work fine.)

I would say your freedom is like your freedom with free software, but it isn't quite: If almost everyone else chooses to run something incompatible you can still keep running your original, but you might find yourself on a separate currency from everyone else. Since money gains it's value from network effects you might fine that less than ideal. But that's the limit, and it's also why the Bitcoin community is cautious with incompatible changes-- essentially never having intentionally made one. Faults in version prior to 0.8 make them self-incompatible, unfortunately. If you want to run a version prior to 0.8 and come to consensus with the network today you'd have to patch a database handling bug in it.

I think this is better. It's certainly very different properties than a trusted third party, and even if you're not sure it's clearly better-- perhaps you can agree that diversity and choice is useful and that you're better off for having the opportunity to use it should the need arise.

blueprint 2356 days ago

Yeah let's increase block size without a way to control the precedent of size increase so only a very select few groups have the compute power to mine. Yay centralization

mrsnuffy 2355 days ago

"I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers..."

No... we're not.

There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin.

To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_

ArchD 2356 days ago

Big blocks are probably easier to censor and harder to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.

Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority.

You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.

> Big blocks are probably easier to censor

Only if they get extremely big, and the clients cannot handle them.

> to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.

These people should use light wallets or SPV wallets, which is what we already use on mobile phones.

> Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison.

Only Siths deal with absolutes. This is a false choice.

Small blocks, and large fees, also have a centralizing effect on the network as small miners gets priced out as the transaction fees removes a larger fraction of their income.

And miner decentralization is the most important type of centralization there is, because that's what provides censorship resistance and network security.

CalmStorm 2356 days ago

With Segregated Witness (SegWit) enabled on July 21, 2017, the Bitcoin block size has been increased by approximately 1.6 - 2 times. So the TPS should be increased correspondingly.

leondavibe 2356 days ago

7tps would mean about 600 000 transactions a day

Years ago BTC once managed 550 000 transactions in a 24 he period

Now at best just over 400 000

So in reality it's more like 5 TPS

rkagerer 2356 days ago

I agree with the desire to scale, but there are tradeoffs and I for one appreciate the mindfulness to chaindata growth rate.

Bitcoin already scaled on the Bitcoin Cash chain all whilst Bitcoin Core dev payroll was taken over by Blockstream co and Chaincode Labs co who's vested interest lies in limiting the core protocol to sell side-chain tech. The market still trades BTC as Bitcoin because of the strong branding and censorship in various online communities.

All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.

jobeirne 2356 days ago

I am so glad Bitcoin Cash exists for people like you.

Absolutely, there is no good reason for private entities who take over an open source project and limit it for private interests when a major chunk of people reject it.

The allegation of "take over" is both dishonest misinformation and a really abusive attack. The people you're accusing of taking Bitcoin over have been there essentially all along, -- long before you ever heard of it. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have also been with Bitcoin all along: as a look into the history shows, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347

Sorry, the real attack was by the group led by Adam Back who himself dismissed Bitcoin initially before having a VC fund him to cater to his plan http://cashbleed.com/

Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past.

The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side. On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC..

The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.

xorcist 2355 days ago

> when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access

It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.

Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.

Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.

It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.

(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)

https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...

> led by Adam Back

Adam, the only person who's name is mentioned in the body of the bitcoin whitepaper, was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.msg2371674#ms... though Adam has never been actively involved with the bitcoin software project itself-- beyond some mailing list discussions and such.

Aside, the numbers on the website you linked are randomly generated nonsense. Embarrassingly for its author, their made up numbers which are trying to claim to be astronomical fail to make their point because they're not that high when compared to other highly paying tech companies ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJDgs... ).

That whole allegation is odd. Blockstream has (had?) a program where a significant part of employee pay was in the form of pre-purchased Bitcoin which vested over time. This was intended to create a significant incentive for employees to see bitcoin's value grow-- specifically to address concerns that somehow Blockstream could create incentives against that when it employed a couple long time contributors. ... it turns out that buying Bitcoin at $450/each was a really good deal, and it panned out well for employees. It worked exactly as advertised, and some anonymous troll is spinning it as some kind of fraud?! Weird.

> 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit,

Not going along with a proposal you think is bad is not an "attack"-- it's the actualization of your own personal freedom.

> The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access

Gavin's commit access was removed by Wladimir, -- not one of the people associated with Adam or our company. When it was removed it had been completely unused for a year and barely used for several years. Its ultimate removal was triggered by Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer as being Satoshi which was especially concerning given his comments about "handing the repository over" to 'Satoshi'.

Good security practices should have had the access dropped long before then, and he'd been asked by Wladimir to resign them but kept responding that he'd sleep on it. Wladimir had wanted to avoid the drama of revoking them, but once Gavin was loudly endorsing a scammer the threat of poorly maintained access seemed a lot more serious.

> he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi

Wladimir (and the other people you are insulting) were also there back when Satoshi was still active. Even back in 2011 Wladimir was the most active contributor, with two commits for every one by Gavin (348:152). In 2010, Satoshi made 215 commits and Gavin made 35.

Leading in a open source collaboration is a complicated question. Gavin was an extremely valued contributor, including valued for his public speaking at a time when many of us were keeping a low profile because we were really concerned that our involvement in Bitcoin might result in legal prosecution. That, however, doesn't mean he was leading in strong sense like you'd apply to the leader of a business. If you look at actual decision making in the project it, once Satoshi was gone it was always an extensive collaboration.

This fact is why e.g. some people have falsely accused me of controlling it when I didn't have any particular authority at all, just a history of reasonable insight and persuasive arguments.

> and DDoS

Bitcoin nodes got DOS attacked with some regularity in the past by people trying to interfere with block propagation to cause competing blocks to get orphaned (and still do, though less often now-- because we implemented countermeasures to make those attacks much less effective). There is no evidence that anyone saw any DOS attacks other than those. None of the people I know would have bothered not expected a DOS attack to do anything: the system is designed to be designed to resist DOS attacks.

The falsity of those "nodes" was also demonstrated by their near overnight disappearance once the pumping of competing altcoins stopped...

> we've come a long way with optimizing transactions

I don't believe that bitcoin abc has deployed any scalablity improvement not previously existing in Bitcoin. The primary one in it over the original p2p protocol, compact blocks, was designed by myself...

BigBubbler 2355 days ago

The new "owners" of BTC will not let it grow. BTC was intentionally captured and development-centralized to stop it from being able to scale and become peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.

chris123 2356 days ago

No, the block size must remain small. I just don't transactions and speed won't be handled on a second layer solution. people who think they want a bigger block size can go with Bitcoin cash or Gavin or whatever consortium was the fork and go with that. Good luck.

mathiasrw 2356 days ago

Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling.

Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit.

Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.

Every release of Bitcoin ever made has had the capacity limitations it has now, or more restrictive.

It's true that Satoshi added the 1MB limit after the first release, but at that time and before then blocks were _implicitly_ limited to somewhat a bit over ~500KB-ish due to issues in the database layer.

This is the reason that you cannot sync a pre-0.8 node all the way to the tip today without modifying it. 0.8 fixed the database problem and made actual 1MB blocks a possibility and the larger blocks triggered pre-0.8 nodes to randomly split off the network.

mathiasrw 2355 days ago

The limitations are not just the block size. It's all the little things stripping the usability crippling the ecosystem. Amongst other elements:

- Abandoning instant payment by introducing replace-by-fee where you can "undo" a transaction not in a block yet.

- The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.

- Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.

Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.

nullc 2355 days ago

> Abandoning instant payment by introducing replace-by-fee where you can "undo" a transaction not in a block yet.

Unconfirmed transactions are inherently at risk for being replaced, which is why confirmation exists in the first place.

When transactions are explicitly market non-final the software makes replacing easier instead of having to broadcast to the entire network yourself. Replacement for non-final transactions was a feature in the very first version of the software but it was disabled because it was vulnerable to a DOS attack (replacing a transaction over and over again in a tight loop). When a fix was found for the vulnerablity the feature was restored.

This is no way inhibits "instant payment"-- if you don't want to honor _non-final_ transactions until they're confirmed or replaced with a final version, just don't! (However, actual testing shows that doublespends of unconfirmed transactions are highly successful even without making them replaceable.)

Regardless, this wasn't a "stripping"-- it was _original functionality_ which was restored.

Aside, I see you are promoting Craig Wright's scammy BSV coin in other posts. I assume you are aware that the "Genesis hardfork" which they are about to release activates replacement in BSV too? https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/blob/dev-Genesis-be...

> The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.

Vulnerable opcodes were disabled-- by Satoshi back in 2010. There has not been a single opcode disabled in bitcoin by anyone except Satoshi.

More recent softforks such as BIP141 have made it easy to reenable (fixed versions of) and add new opcodes. But there has been only moderate interest in reenabling any of the disabled opcodes, particularly since on altcoins and test networks (like elements) where they're enabled they've gone unused.

More interest right now is going into bip-taproot, since its structure enables users to use fancy scripts in an extremely efficient and private way-- allowing them to invoke the script only in exceptional cases.

> Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.

That was also done by Satoshi for attack mitigation reasons, but it hasn't been the case for several years now.

> Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.

That is an outright lie. Vitalik never made any made any contact to the bitcoin developers or community related to this. Had any such effort been made it would be easy to point to public evidence of it. It simply doesn't exist.

Moreover, "build(ing ethereum) on bitcoin" would have made it impossible to "premine" 72 million coins (2/3rds of the current ethereum supply) and pocket tens of millions of dollars, as he's done. The folks that he collaborated with to create ethereum had done several prior altcoin pump and dumps and went on to do several others after ethereum.

It's unsurprising that he didn't seek out collaboration with Bitcoin however: He was well known as a scammer in the Bitcoin community at that point because shortly before starting etherum he had been making a nuisance of himself soliciting investments for a "quantum miner" scam. https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e...

Edit: I was just pointed to these chat logs where Ethereum was first suggested-- they strongly refute your claim, https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1214250162069164032/ph... https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1214250162069164032/ph...

For readers, BSV is an Bitcoin clone created and promoted by Craig Wright. An austrialian man who fraudulently and without any evidence claims to be Bitcoin's creator and that BSV is his (Satoshi's) Vision (thus the name).

Well not just 'not any evidence' -- he claimed to provide a cornucopia of "evidence" all of which turned out to be easily proven to be forgeries. Things like editing his old blog posts to insert mentions of bitcoin (archive.org shows they were added years later), or claimed "digital signatures" by satoshi which were just literally copies out of the blockchain, or trickeries of unsound cryptography ( https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone... ).

Unfortunately, the media loves a headline, and all too often doesn't care much about the facts. And cryptocurrency appeals to a diverse collection of people including many that are highly exploitable by Wright's bombastic approach, including a number of business leaders.

Wright has a long personal history of fraud with numerous judgments in courts and administrative bodies against him. His Bitcoin related fraud appears to have begun with an R&D tax rebate scam where he claimed millions then attempted tens of millions in tax credits which he couldn't have possibly earned without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. To justify that he had hundreds of millions to spend, he claimed to be Bitcoin's creator.

From there it appears to have evolved into an advanced fee fraud plus scammy cryptocurreny pump. Essentially he's been claiming that he owns a million bitcoin but it's locked in a trust and asking for investments that he'll repay or getting people to buy his crypocurrency which he assures them will go up in value when he 'dumps' his Bitcoin and uses the income to buy up BSV.

Annoyingly, to pull of this scam he's and his representatives engaged in a massive campaign of harassment and fudding towards people involved in Bitcoin, particular developers and former developers like myself... lying about the history of Bitcoin, our activities in Bitcoin, etc. He even falsely accuses me of funding ISIS and other such nonsense (e.g. https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 ). ... and generally just making a mess and turning a previously fun domain to work on into a frightening morass of attacks and threats from conspiracy filled crazy people or people pretending to be ones.

By attacking the credibility of the people most able to call out his deceit he isolates his marks from the very people who would protect them. Walking over all this has clearly had a protective effect, but it doesn't save everyone.

mathiasrw 2355 days ago

I love the main business proposition from BSV: that the protocol is set in stone. Its makes sense to invest time and development power into something that is aware of not changing the logic that I'm building a business around.

This liberates me from having to focus on who initiated the project - because it is meant to be frozen whoever initiated it can not change the setup at will.

To me it's not important who made visa or who runs it. I use it anyway because it got utility letting me pay at the bakery on a tiny island on the other side of the world.

I don't care about who made the HTTP protocol. I use it every day without knowing.

Utility is the real value of a technology.

jtown4321 2356 days ago

For thinkers: Look at BSV in the context of this conversation (scaling) and not the avatar that nullc seems to be so focused on.

There is more to BSV than a single person.

Also, BSV seems to be a parody of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

You wanted large blocks? We'll give you large blocks!