Don’t Worry about Upsetting “Wizards”. Bitcoin Will Be Just Fine Without Them
It’s been an interesting week for Bitcoin. Price hit all time highs of over $2700, and everyone is talking about the “Barry Silbert Scaling Meeting”, although the agreement is vaguely worded and isn’t binding.
One thing is clear:
The Great Scaling Debate Isn’t Over Yet
Also this week, “Consensus 2017” (CoinDesk’s 3rd annual blockchain technology summit) just wrapped up in New York City.
Not surprisingly, what you read in the press isn’t always the same story you’ll get from people who were there in person.
Emin Gün Sirer, computer science professor at Cornell, tweeted:
I also had a chat with an industry leader, who had interesting words:
When you talk to the major players in person they are much more critical of Core than what they write on social media. What I can’t figure out though is why people want segwit. I think they do just because they think others do….but no one actually does.
Political Correctness and Fear
The word “toxic” has been used often to describe the environment in today’s Bitcoin space. This toxicity brings along a healthy dollop of political correctness… and fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
More specifically, I believe that some miners and pool operators hold the Core developers in too high esteem and are either afraid of upsetting them, upsetting the market, getting attacked, or simply believe that Core are the best people to be making decisions.
It’s time to expunge those fears, once and for all.
Smashing A Dangerous Myth: “We Can Only Trust a Billion Dollar Network To The Wizards.”
I understand the benefits of prudence, carefulness, and risk-aversion, especially when we are talking about a multi billion dollar asset like Bitcoin.
We can’t risk the plane crashing into the mountain by letting some incompetent, sloppy, or amateur mechanics work on the engine, right?
Well… hold on. Let’s take a closer look at what the risks truly are.
The Blockchain isn’t an Airplane. And Bitcoin Developers Aren’t Airplane Mechanics.
This may sound like a strange ‘reverse analogy’, but here’s the important key: Airplanes have single points of failure. If a mechanic makes a critical mistake while servicing an engine, it can cost lives.
The Bitcoin network has no single point of failure. It has thousands of nodes and countless miners who secure and extend the blockchain with a thick layer of redundancy.
The fact that Bitcoin has zero down time is mostly a result of the redundant structure, not flawless software, which is a practical impossibility.
What About the Bitcoin Unlimited Node Crashes?
In the last several months, bugs in the Bitcoin Unlimited software caused nodes to crash on three separate occasions.
Obviously, this isn’t desired. However, the Core Bitcoin client also has had its share of bugs over the years. Bitcoin Unlimited is a less mature implementation and some bugs are to be expected.
(I am told these were related to the new “Xthin” technology, and that the quality assurance processes used by the development team are improving. )
The important thing to realize is that the Bitcoin network suffered no damage. Not all BU nodes crashed. Those that did were quickly brought back online. No one lost any bitcoins.
In general, crashing nodes don’t affect ordinary users at all. And Bitcoin Unlimited is just one implementation.
Even Peon Alt-Coins Don’t Have Down Time
Not only does the Bitcoin network have zero downtime, but the same thing is true for almost every altcoin that has been running a network on multiple nodes for a sustained period of time, no matter how weak the developers are.
That’s the magic of a highly redundant system.
Bitcoin: Very Hard to Break
As long as the elliptic curve cryptography that underlies Bitcoin remains strong, it can be argued that Bitcoin can’t really “break” at all.
In essence, Bitcoin is simply a distributed ledger. In the extremely unlikely event that all nodes are temporarily forced offline, or a worst-case unforseen scenario, you can always build off earlier blocks.
History Has Proven That Multiple Implementations of Bitcoin Are a Good Thing
Whether or not multiple implementations of Bitcoin are a good idea has been a controversial subject all its own. Satoshi expressed concern over node consensus between implementations, but Gavin Andressen posited that it would be inevitable.
Good idea or not, SOMEBODY will try to mess up the network (or co-opt it for their own use) sooner or later. They’ll either hack the existing code or write their own version, and will be a menace to the network. — Gavin Andressen
History has proven Gavin correct (there are many independent implementations of Bitcoin existing today). The main benefit of multiple implementations is decentralization. A bug in one implementation need not threaten the others or the network as a whole.
Multiple Development Teams Are Healthy for Bitcoin
Bitcoin is based on the idea of decentralization. If the network itself is decentralized, but the development is not, this becomes just another single point of failure.
Even though there are many implementations running today, the “Core” bitcoin client still has a majority of nodes and miners. This is dangerous, because a tiny group of people essentially control what code the majority of the network uses.
Further diversification would be a very positive thing because it would mean that no one group of developers has too much influence on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Core Is Not the Only Team with Talented, Competent Developers
BitcoinXT, Bitcoin Classic, Libbitcoin, bCoin, Bitcoin Unlimited, bitcoinj, picocoin, Btcd all have smart coders and computer scientists. And much of the network already runs on these alternate implementations.
Sure, some of the Core Developers are smart guys. But even if they were demonstrably smarter and wrote better code than everyone else, what good are great engineers if they refuse to go beyond the silly 1mb limit?
Ironically, the thing that may weaken the network the most is Segwit
Segwit weakens Bitcoin because of its complexity.
It contains radical changes to Bitcoin’s code base, transaction formats, and data structures, with over 5000 lines of code and dozens upon dozens of modified files.
With increased complexity, the code base becomes more centralized, and the diversification is decreased, which makes Bitcoin more fragile. Also, such a complex and radical change discourages multiple implementations and development teams.
Bitcoin Classic developer Tom Zander summarizes some key points:
SegWit has a long list of features and the result is an over-engineered nightmare. Extension blocks was the answer to the part of SegWit that aims to ships more bytes every 10 minutes.
Flexible Transactions is a real answer to the rest of SegWit. All the features in SegWit are in Flexible Transactions (and more), but with less than 10% of the changes and a magnitude less complexity.
The fun part is that if you combine FlexTrans and a simple block size limit fix, its still 10 times less complexity. But it has the same set of features, just done in a responsible manner.
The Propaganda Continues
Of course, there are those that support the Core developers, that do not want to see them lose any power or control over Bitcoin… and that do not want to support any scaling plans or roadmap other than Core’s.
Yesterday, an article was published explaining that Gregory Maxwell and Matt Corallo do not approve of the Silbert agreement because they weren’t consulted.
Not surprising… but this definitely raised an eyebrow:
developers unanimously agreed that Bitcoin Core developers and technical experts must be consulted before deploying such a project.
Really? What developers say that Core MUST be consulted? The ones in Core?
Keep Demanding Bigger Blocks
To summarize, the Bitcoin Core “Wizards” are far from the only group capable of making important technical decisions for the Bitcoin network.
We certainly should not hold irrational fears of upsetting them by choosing to enact sensible measures such as increasing the blocksize limit.
I recently wrote an open letter to all Bitcoin miners, which I think sheds some much needed light on the scaling debate. I hope you take the time to read it and share it.
Footnote:
‘Wizards’ is a self-anointed label, originating from the IRC channel name #bitcoin-wizards.
