Status Quo

Chainsmiths
Jul 20, 2017 · 7 min read

The scaling debate, the never ending battle between the camps it has birthed, how some within the community defend short-term solutions to Bitcoin’s “scalability issue” despite the hassle of a hard fork, despite how it threatens the network’s decentralization and its security. These are the reasons why this article was written.

Honestly, The only good thing about the acrimonious scaling debate is the fact that it is open and visible. Anyone can be part of it. Thanks to Bitcoin’s decentralization and transparency ethos, you do not need more than a Twitter or Reddit account to check what is happening within the community and contribute.

However, at this point, hard it is to tell who is or is not involved nor to how many camps the community has split into. A division due to camps’ incapacity and unwillingness to reach a consensus regarding: how should Bitcoin scale? To which limit? and when?

A new BIP will probably chime in in the next days. I mean, who knows!?

Let’s have a quick look back at these past 2 years:

P.S: i only highlight some points about the bips stated below. lest the article be too long. More details can be found here.

BIP: Bitcoin Improvement Proposal

BIP109: a hard fork in order to increase block size limit to 2MB given a 75% activation threshold as of 2016. Removes the static block size limit and hands the decision to miners and “free market” as of 2017.

BIP100: proposed by Jeff Garzik, delivers to the “free market” the control of blocks’ capacity. It is the very first proposal that aimed to change the block size limit. The size is voted for by miners (should not be less than 1MB nor bigger than 32MB), and would have activated if a threshold of 90% of mining power accepted the proposal.

BIP101: proposed by Gavin Andresen, aimed to increase block size limit by 100% every 2 years, based on Nielson’s law (consumer bandwidth increasing about 50%/years). Also starts from 8 MB, for whatever reason.

BIP102:submitted by Jeff Garzik, aimed to double the block size limit (from 1MB to 2MB) in order to gain time and open the path to a more stable solution to come into fruition.

BIP103:Proposed by Pieter Wuille, increases the block size limit by 17.7% each year. Counting from 2017 to 2063.

Bitcoin XT: implemented BIP101 and was proposed by Gavin Andresen along with Mike Hearn as a solution to the block size problem. Put simply, BTC XT amplifies the block size to 8MB. Blocks’ capacity would have doubled every two years until a size of 8GB is reached.

BIP141 aka SegWit: suggested by Eric Lombrozo, Johnson Lau and Pieter Wuille. Although not technically a capacity increase, it allows for a new type of transaction that, if used, would result in more capacity. It’s also a fix to the malleability problem. It does that by creating a new data structure called ‘witness’ which contains the scripts and signatures of transactions. Therefore each tx will have two id’s: witness data and base data. BIP141 is a Soft Fork, unlike the other proposals.

BIP9: activation method adopted for BIP141. Requires that 95% of new blocks signal miners’ readiness for SegWit so it can be activated.

BIP148 aka UASF: this user activated soft fork is suggested as a (forced) trigger to bit141(segwit). It hands segwit support to the ‘economic majority’, in this case full nodes, instead of miners.

BIP149: suggested by the same author as BIP148, Shaolin Fry, it would be deployed in case of failure to lock-in/activate BIP148 before the 15 November 2017. It uses version bit 1 for signaling.

BIP8: activation method adopted for BIP149 which is also an extension of BIP9 and doesn’t require miners’ signaling to activate.

SegWit2x: a proposal that activates segregated witness given 80% of miners’ support, it uses bit4 for signaling and increases the block size up to 2MB(BIP102)

BIP91:proposed to prevent from a hard fork by making sure both segwit2x and BIP148(UASF) are compatible. (version bit1)

BU or Bitcoin Unlimited: relies on a decentralized decision making aka “emergent consensus” to define a block size limit. It enables nodes to adjust the block size they accept as valid and miners too can change the size of blocks their nodes produce.

Status Quo side of things

Decentralization is a core value of Bitcoin. Censorship resistance is the ultimate goal. It is this very attribute that makes it valuable and distinguish it from the current financial system. It is this exact characteristic which makes it fundamentally the best form of money to build upon a newer, better and stronger economy. That is the Bitcoin many of us signed up for, isn’t it?

However, it is clear that Bitcoin’s decentralization stands at odds with bigger blocks. It is undeniable that larger blocks will cause to drop off average users from the network, those who can not afford the costs of running a full node or partake in the mining process, as more tx/sec leads to a need of bigger disk space, bandwidth and data allowance. The other consequence of higher requirements to run a full node is that verifying the consensus rules will become restrained to few. Which is a serious threat to Bitcoin’s trustlessness.

This is only paving the way to an increased centralization and a less secure network. Why? because those same users who will be wiped out from playing part in the ecosystem will have to trust centralized services to do it for them.

Furthermore, bigger blocks will cause a number of small miners to drop because of economy of scale. The bigger the blocks, the bigger the advantage of bigger miners. That too will centralize mining even more, which is already way too centralized today.

All of this is antagonistic with the founding and core purpose of Bitcoin: Decentralization.

Small fees and “instant” transactions existed before Bitcoin, decentralization did not. If you are using Bitcoin today, it’s because of the latter feature not the formers.

If the user wants decentralization, she has to accept its trade-offs. Bitcoin is not perfect yet. Micro payment can wait, your coffee can wait.

Also, many would argue saying ‘other cryptocurrencies provide better user experience than Bitcoin’ or even ‘People are leaving Bitcoin because of high fees’ Great! A reminder, that this is not a crypto racing competition and never will be. People will be more eager to cease using Bitcoin, not as a result of high fees, but when a chain split happens causing them to lose their money therefore their trust in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is Great. But the current solutions to scaling it are not.

Let’s not turn a blind eye to how a block size increase based on the current proposed protocols and solutions, could destroy Bitcoin. Because rather than paying high fees we will find ourselves suffering the pretence of decentralization.

Time to rethink and question the aftermath of short term solutions that will likely disrupt, maybe destroy Bitcoin. Time to unify the community once again. For it is through its union that the power to tackle anything threatening to Bitcoin may fundamentally lie.

Mouna.

Those who have met me in the past year already know my strong opinion about the recklessness of bip148 “UASF” and their counterparts BU, BABC, and Segwit2x. I’m not active on Reddit nor Bitcointalks, I’m
just lurking on the Core Slacks and Telegram groups.
I’ve heard we, the silents, might actually be the majority. At least among the people who understand Bitcoin.
This past year has been really sad, people I respect(ed?) going full ad hominem, insulting other “figures” of the industry with childish arguments especially. But more recently the “CEOs” entering the fight with their random agreement. Seriously who the f* do you think you are? Bitcoin is not going to be controlled by corporations. Not Bitmain, not Coinbase, not Blockstream. It’s never been, it should never be. I understand the conspiracy theories, if anything Bitcoin is already an amazing political tool.
Do I believe Blockstream is changing Bitcoin to fit its roadmap? No. And even if they did, as long as they don’t f* it up for other people I’m fine with it. Do I think Jihan is a bad actor? Not really either. He is talking a lot, but so far didn’t attack the network. He could have if he wanted (not without consequences).

People complain about fees, people complain about mining monopolies, some complain about the developers… great we heard you. After 2 years maybe we could just move on? To another topic I mean, not to another random scaling “solution”.
The UASF supporters I meet are newbies and/or don’t understand the precedent valid blocks censorship would set. I don’t have a problem with newcomers but I do when they want to disrupt our network.
The long time bitcoiners I spend time with are mostly unaffected with the rejection of Segwit, it didn’t go through and that’s OK. The problem here is not Segwit being activated or not, the network works just fine today. We actually have seen for the first time a real controversial upgrade to Bitcoin, we need to work on making the next one smoother.
Anonymity on the mailing list, maybe on the Github too, would be a real first step. Bip8 deployment might be interesting too.

I’m very attached to Bitcoin’s attack resilience. It is currently proving its ability to whistand a major crisis involving a majority of hashpower on one side, and that’s something we really needed to see sooner rather than later. Bitcoin is working perfectly today. Bitcoin doesn’t care about Segwit. Bitcoin doesn’t care about BU.
Now a lot of noise — too much to be organic if you want my opinion, but that’s another topic — is made about forking. Forking to bigger blocks. Forking to a censored chain accepting only bit1 blocks.
Forking for the sake of it.
And that’s making me mad. If you want segwit so bad, just move to Litecoin. If you want bigger blocks (or is it lower fees?) move to whatever chain. If you just want to fight about forks, go to Ethereum.
But please, stop this nonsense of disrupting Bitcoin if you are a bitcoiner.
I don’t care if the price go down, I don’t care if fees go up, I just don’t want to compromise on security, decentralization (which should be the priority, not scaling), censorship resistence.

I’m for the Status Quo. Not forever of course, but until a good proposal comes up. Definitely not a Hard Fork for 2MB or any other one-time increase that would need another HF soon. Not a “soft-fork” censoring valid blocks. Not a fork that would worsen centralization.
Right now, the best technical choice to me is definitely Bitcoin as we have it.

Time for us, the silents, to speak too. Enough with the YOLO forkers (soft or hard).

Kevin.

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Chainsmiths

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Non Bullshit blockchain stuff.

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