[mathiasrw]

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.

[nullc]

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]

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]

> 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...

[nullc]

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]

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]

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.

[phillipsjk]

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

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

[IndustrialRev4]

I think I just saw Greg wet himself