SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
During the month of November 2017, approximately 90 days after the activation of Segregated Witnesses in the Bitcoin blockchain, a block between 1MB and 2MB in size will be generated by Bitcoin miners in a move to increase network capacity. At this point it is expected that more than 90% of the computational capacity that secures the Bitcoin network will carry on mining on top of this large block.
The upgrade to 2MB blocks has been agreed first during the Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus in Hong-Kong on February 2016, and then ratified by the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement in New York on May 2017. These agreements stipulate the activation of Segregated Witness support and an increase of the maximum base block size from 1MB to 2MB.
Segregated Witness support has been locked-in as a soft fork expected to activate around August 23 2017 (block height 481,824). Bitcoin clients that are not currently SegWit-compatible and wish to benefit from the new type of transaction must perform extensive upgrades to various subsystems, including changes to transaction serialization, signature hash computation, block weight calculation, scripting engine, block validation, a new address scheme, and P2P protocol upgrades. Fortunately Segregated Witness compatibility is opt-in, and existing Simplifed Payment Verification (SPV) wallets and full nodes are expected to continue working without changes after SegWit activates.
Be prepared.
Source: https://segwit2x.github.io/segwit2x-announce.html
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:25PM
But I've got this really high-quality inkjet printer. Couldn't I just print the coins somehow?
It works for me whenever I have to pay rent.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:48PM (5 children)
So does this mean that someone who, hypothetically, owned some bitcoins now has two separate sets? Bitcoins on both block chains? Which can be spent separately? 🇺🇸
(Score: 5, Informative) by Snow on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:55PM (4 children)
No, this is a different split.
The split you heard about was the Bitcoin Cash split that occurred on Aug 1. If you held bitcoin prior to that date, you will have equal amounts of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Legacy Bitcoin (BTC).
The article is talking about another, upcoming split. The story behind the split is far more interesting than the split itself. In short, there have been two camps for a long time. One side wants bigger blocks to fit more transactions. The other side refuses to increase blocksize, instead preferring 2nd layer solutions (that require Segwit to work. Parts of Segwit are patented though, so...)
The big blockers and the small blockers have been at war for 2 years now. The small blockers run the bitcointalk forums, as well as the /r/bitcoin subreddit. They employ heavy censorship and silently remove any dissenting opinions. The big blockers got pissed at being censored, so moved to /r/btc.
Time passes, and eventually the small blockers are pissed because segwit had failed to activate for 3/4 of a year because it didn't have the necessary support. They decided that they would 'fix' that by doing a 'UASF' (User-Activated-Soft-Fork). The idea here is that some people wanted to run nodes that would regect non-segwit signalling blocks -- essentially forcing a chain split.
The miners didn't want a chain split, so they had a big meeting in New York. There, people representing 85%+ of the hashpower agreed to Segwit2x. First, they would activate Segwit, then 90 days later, they would increase the block size. This had been tried before in the Hong King agreement in 2015(?). That agreement was essentially the same, but Bitcoin Core (the most widely used client implementation) refused to include code to support the block size increase.
The big blockers were concerned that the New York agreement would result in Segwit Activating, but that the small blockers would not follow through with the block size increase. So, the UAHF was born (Bitcoin Cash). UAHF too affect on Aug 1, and Bitcoin Cash(BCH) was born. (BCH) increases the block size to 8mb, and includes a number of other improvements.
It turns out, the big blockers were right to be skeptical that Bitcoin Core would follow through with the block size increase, as they are now publicly stating that they will not support it. So, come block 494,784, we may have 3 bitcoins - Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Legacy, and Bitcoin2X.
Now, Bitcoin Legacy and Bitcoin2x will have identical transaction formats, so a transaction will be valid on both chains. That is going to cause a royal fuck up.
So what's up with Bitcoin Core then? Why are they so resistant to larger block sizes? Most of the Bitcoin Core developers are employed by BlockStream, who recieved their funding from AXA. There is strong evidence that they would like to keep the block size small to force users to use layer 2 solutions (that they will conveniently provide, and protect with their patents).
More information on the censorship /r/bitcoin employs and the debate. It's not complete, but it's a start:
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5wwznc/please_read_our_frequently_asked_questions_faq/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 23 2017, @12:00AM (2 children)
That should be trivial to prevent with a given pile of coins, so it only affects those ignorant of it affecting them; the blockchain they know about will work as expected. For the informed, bonus coins! Somethingsomethingmeritocracysomethingsomething...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snow on Wednesday August 23 2017, @02:23AM (1 child)
It will take some time before you can split your coins safely and reliably. Even once you are able to, I think it's going to be a pain in the ass.
In any case, this will cause people to lose money. Bitcoin is supposed to be safe.
It looks like it's going to happen though, so buckle up :)
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:36AM
Nah, it'll be easy. Here's one example, probably not the cleverest. Given that chain A is significantly longer than chain B, and chain A has a block height of X, we can write a transaction whose outputs can be spent using a signature from one key if the block height is greater than or equal to X, OR another key regardless of height. We sign and propagate a transaction for chain A using the first key, and we know it can't be included in chain B yet. Once chain A has verified our transaction we sign a transaction for chain B using the second key, and we know it can't be spent on chain A because the funds have been moved to a different output already.
Yeah, I don't actually think that's a good thing. I don't think Bitcoin is ready for mainstream adoption, either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:44AM
> Parts of Segwit are patented though
False.
> So, the UAHF was born
Bitcoin cash was created to avoid segwit (and possibly protect ASICBOOST), not out of fear that the 2x part of the NYA wouldn't happen.
> as they are now publicly stating that they will not support it
Core *never* supported it, they weren't invited to the meeting where businesses agreed to it, and no core devs signed the agreement after the fact.
> Most of the Bitcoin Core developers are employed by BlockStream
Completely false. MIT employs more core devs than blockstream, for example.
> and protect with their patents
Blockstreams patents are defensive and in any case do not cover segwit or lightning.
I appreciate you trying to inform users on the issues but this summary is biased and full of false statements.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rigrig on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:06PM (6 children)
From the second link [medium.com]:
So if 58 companies control 83% of the mining, and they even get together to make agreements like these, how decentralized is Bitcoin really?
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:17PM (1 child)
It's decentralized 58. 58 is the amount of decentralized it is.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:09AM
I thought you only need 50% hashing power in order to control BTC? In that case the decentralization should be less than 58. Assuming the 58 companies all have the same hashing power, 35 of them already have more than 50% of the hashing power. Any asymmetry (and it is quite likely that their hashing power differs) can only reduce that number.
So the decentralization of Bitcoin is at best 35, probably lower.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:19PM (3 children)
It is another cabal, or ponzi scheme, depending on which angle you follow it from.
If some of those companies also manufacture the difficult to acquire mining hardware, it becomes even more dangerous, since they very well might control that remaining 17 percent of the network indirectly.
This is also an example of why ASICs need open source code, instead of the closed source 'trust us' mining going on with many of those multi-thousand dollar mining rigs, which come a few months too late and barely (if ever) break even.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:56PM (2 children)
I think that AMD is starting to produce mining cards, so that should help.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday August 23 2017, @01:14PM
Let me know whne they start producing Geek Cards too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:07PM
that has nothing to do with mining btc and asics.