Awaiting the propaganda wave in response to my comment...
One could be a regular visitor to r/bitcoin and have no clue that there is a huge political battle going on amongst the users, miners and developers.
Makes me wonder what other communities are oblivious to moderators influence.
True story, I'm one of those visitors. Off to go read up on some stuff, apparently.
What seems to be mostly adolescents continually scream 'censorship' without knowing the meaning of the word. Without that moderation, you get the cesspool funded by Roger Ver.
The meaning of the word, according to Wikipedia:
Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.
If members of a subreddit are engaging in the suppression of ideas they consider objectionable, that is censorship. Smart people understand that there is no actionable defense against such censorship, but lacking an actionable defense doesn't diminish its status as censorship to something lesser. Similarly, it's still censorship whether done by the government, reddit, or Bob's Corner Bakery.
The segwit softfork may fix some things that make side chains more feasible, but that undersells it severely. It mainly solves a bug in bitcoin that prevents a good implementation of Lightning Network (which is not a side chain), and it also upgrades on-chain transaction capacity by doubling it, while solving another bug in Bitcoin (quadratic scaling of sigops) which make such a capacity increase safer.
More information here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/
For instance we have a solution for the transaction malleability issue - Flexible Transactions - which causes a tiny fraction as much technical debt while offering big benefits in future-proofing. Why bother with Segwit when we have a better solution?
But that's neither here nor there because Segwit doesn't even solve the actual problem that everyone wants fixed right now - block size. The small, one off, slow to deploy solution offered by Segwit isn't a scaling solution at all. It's likely that take-up of Segwit wallets will be fairly gradual which means it'll probably never even prevent the blocks being full. Even if it does we'll be back in the same hole in a few months time anyway because of the small one off change. What's needed is a solution which actually fixes the problem.
That solution is the lightning network, which the transaction malleability fix of the segwit patch fixes and makes possible.
Mike Hearn would disagree with you, and he knows a lot about how Bitcoin works.
https://medium.com/@coolbearcjs/the-mike-hearn-experiment-ha...
The same Mike Hearn that recently announced the failure of his R3CEV venture to deliver a blockchain solution for banking?
https://twitter.com/Beautyon_/status/834152812405735425
The same Mike Hearn that tried and failed to push through a fork of the bitcoin network called Bitcoin XT that allowed for a personally controlled black-list?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-blacklist...
Yeah. That guy. He has an agenda, and it hasn't been aligned with bitcoin for quite some time.
The blacklist article is pure FUD, seemingly written with the sole intent of smearing Hearn.
Letting miners decide when to increase block size is a long term solution. Segwit is not.
The computational costs of larger block sizes are borne on the entire network, however the effects are most severe for miners as larger blocks tend to increase the profitability of large geographically-close pools in comparison to small pools [1]. This is why segwit is only an increase to ~2.1MB.
[1] http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz...
The higher the tx backpressure, the higher the fees. The larger the block size, the lower the pressure regardless of overall tx volume.
However, miners can't simply apply the limit to themselves without a consensus rule. There is code in Bitcoin Core to apply a soft limit, but as long as there is any fee pressure, ignoring transactions leads to a disadvantage compared to other miners, so in practice all miners tend to always use the maximum permitted block size. Most proposed schemes for increased or variable block size still enforce the same size across all miners for this reason.
Incorrect. The most severe effects are on the nodes.
If their hardware is viable for an altcoin then it seems like increasing the Bitcoin block size would not be in their best interest. Why not maximize shortterm Bitcoin profits and hedge long term profits with altcoins?
Miners are playing a game of chicken to milk the fees while hoping users don't swerve to another chain.
As segwit generally improves the protocol (makes it more efficient, fixes a transaction malleability issue, increases capacity and gives way to proposed future improvements) and doesn't require a hardfork, I think it makes sense to apply that first.
And if with segwit and all the improvements it enables the capacity still doesn't prove to be enough for the future growth, we can hardfork to dynamically increase the block size.
But for now, we need to do something. Why not do the thing that's simpler to put into effect and provides more benefits?
Larger blocks are not actually necessary with other layered solutions to bitcoin. The people who are pushing big blocks are mostly uninformed of this reality.
In an era of Chinese fabricated asics running on state subsidized energy, I fail to see node centralization as a priority.
https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/fix/ho...
> Connection type : upload bandwidth
> ADSL : Up to 1Mbps
> ADSL2+ : Up to 1Mbps
> Cable (Base Plan) : Up to 1Mbps
> Cable (Speed Boost) : Up to 2Mbps
> nbn™ Fixed Network (Base Plan) : Up to 5Mbps (only available in a small proportion of locations)
> nbn™ Fixed Network (Very Fast Speed Boost) : Up to 20Mbps (only available in a small proportion of locations, and only to business customers)
> nbn™ Fixed Network (Super Fast Speed Boost) : Up to 40Mbps (only available in a small proportion of locations, and only to business customers)
> nbn™ Fixed Wireless : Up to 5Mbp (only available in a small proportion of locations)
Welcome to the world outside of your bubble. A node currently takes up about 35% of the upload bandwidth of an internet connection. At a minimum.
> I fail to see node centralization as a priority.
And therein lies your problem. While you continue to hold to that belief, you will find that the direction of bitcoin will go contrary to your desires.
Because the way I see it, both SegWit and BU are under 30% activated, and the most plausible future is the status quo.
Over 100k transactions in mempool (waiting to be confirmed)
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/all.html