^^^ Summary of /r/btc, for those wondering

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> 10 000 lines of code highly controversial because they require... A soft fork, and will change bitcoin in a fundamental ways

Most of those lines of code are tests. It would be nice for you to say why SegWit is controversial, beyond being proposed around the same time that fees got high.

Bitcoin has had soft forks before. This one will do great many great things for transaction throughput and privacy.

> "Blockstream" have paid almost every developers of bitcoin core to push Segwit without a clear consensus from the community

Blockstream employed 5(?) Core devs, some of them part-time.

> Worse, this company actually support the huge censorship happening in bitcointalk and r/bitcoin

Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

> 75 millions from AXA

Yes, they received funds from a bank. But what matters about code is what the code does, not who paid for it. Bitcoin is open source, so you can inspect what's going on. If you have legitimate economic or technical objections to SegWit, I'd love to hear them. If you're spouting FUD, then go back to /r/btc.

SegWit is controversial because it is a key part of Core's off-chain scaling roadmap, as opposed to alternative, on chain scaling. It's pure politics: If SegWit "wins", we go down a certain route of scaling and cement Core as being the only group that has control over Bitcoin's future. There are some technical arguments against SegWit but they are largely unrelated to what makes it so controversial.

> Blockstream employed 5(?) Core devs, some of them part-time.

If you omit the arguable "blockstream have paid", the rest of the sentence is correct: almost every developer of bitcoin core pushes Segwit without clear consensus from the community.

They define "consensus" as a consensus between those who reside in (and who have not been ejected from) their tightly controlled forums.

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

Adam Back and Greg Maxwell (CEO and CTO) regularly participate in the forums that support the censorship, i.e. /r/bitcoin, and rarely post on /r/btc (for a starting overview of the censorship, see here: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... )

Is the CEO and CTO choosing to participate often and primarily in a heavily censored community not "support"?

Yep, it basically looks like core devs have this plan to:

-Keep bitcoin broken so fees go sky-high

-Push people towards their sketchy off-chain transactions

Bitcoin then becomes "bank coin", where large providers handle all the micro transactions and "settle up" with huge 1000+ btc chunks.

It's a scam and while I have my own reservations about bitcoin unlimited and making miners "too powerful" at least their plan is 100% on-chain.

Core dev's plan is suicide for bitcoin, major investors have been jumping ship to etherium driven by their insanity.

You realize a lot of people pushing the supposedly nefarious agenda you're saying here own a lot of bitcoins, and even belong to companies where timelocked bitcoins act as an incentive program, right? The conspiracy theories surrounding Core's agenda never have sensical incentive structures. This is why nobody listens to the conspiracy theorists when it comes to designing a protocol that relies entirely on incentives adding up.

It is nothing sinister though. It is just when Mr. Maxwell and Dr. Back started Blockstream they expected the 1 mb blocksize to stay 1 mb. On this assumption they built their company and sold their services as "Core" maintainers.

The Fork to a chain that does scale on its own seems inevitable and was fully expected by the original developer. It seems like an uphill battle for Core to convince people to NOT upgrade the network.

The "sketchy" off chain stuff is not sketchy either, it is just off chain. If you mean that they may be able to profit from it, I don't see why that is evil or even wrong, it is just their business plan.

That is incorrect. Literally nobody expects blocksize to stay at 1MB permanently. If they did, SW wouldn't exist, since that is a blocksize increase to about 2MB.

Obviously, you don't understand off-chain transactions.

If you do a tad bit of investigation, you will find that your fears are entirely unfounded.

Actually by the numbers, gmax posts almost more than anyone else in r\btc. So that's just incorrect.

Neither does Blockstream "employ" the developers in a bitcoin-development capacity. The number of people it employs to develop Bitcoin is something like. 1.5. That's out of hundreds of people.

The apparent consensus amongst the literally hundreds of individuals who have contributed to core should be demonstrative of the fact that a majority of technically-aware developers think SW is the safest and best way to increase on-chain capacity—this is a developer majority just by the numbers themselves.

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

Here is some very strong evidence for it: http://telegra.ph/Inside-the-Dragons-Den-Bitcoin-Cores-Troll...

Obviously, people could always say that there is no proof, because "supporting" is such a vague term. It is hard to come up with a mathematical proof. But I would say, it is already a proof that they participate mostly in /r/bitcoin and not in /r/btc. Reddit depends on participation. Therefore with their participation in censored forums in contrast to uncensored forums they at least indirectly support the censorship.

^^^ Summary of /r/bitcoin, for those wondering.

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> Bitcoin has had soft forks before. This one will do great many great things for transaction throughput and privacy.

It's an inefficient hack. For example:

https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-...

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

All signs points towards it. Do the Blockstream people even speak out against the censorship on /r/bitcoin? No. Do they prefer to use channels censoring opposing opinions? Yes.

> If you're spouting FUD, then go back to /r/btc.

Exactly the narrative Core supporters push.

> It's an inefficient hack

Sure. The creator of SegWit (Sipa) said in one of his first talks on the subject that if you could re-architect Bitcoin from scratch, then you would segregate the witness data. Nodes could potentially throw it away after witnesses were verified, to save disk space. The problem is that it would require a hard fork, which Core wants to avoid if at all possible.

SegWit hacks the coinbase and transaction structure in order to be implemented as a soft fork.

I'm not sure if it's inefficient or not, but it is a hack.

Does the fact that it's a hack mean that it's bad for Bitcoin?

That article talks about all sorts of developer troubles and losing coins without ever mentioning the testnet, which exists to allow you to lose worthless coins. If a company is pushing major updates to wallet software without conducting proper testing, then bad on them. Plenty of bitcoin has been lost to the current complexities of the transaction format. Remember those 100 BTC fee transactions?

The article's conclusion bemoans the plight of the miners without mentioning the actual users of Bitcoin, other than a hand-wave at "community consensus." I'm not convinced.

> Do the Blockstream people even speak out against the censorship on /r/bitcoin? No. Do they prefer to use channels censoring opposing opinions? Yes.

Ok, so let's assume the whole lot is rotten and loves censorship. Does that change the nature of the code that exists in the Bitcoin codebase? Censorship sucks, but Bitcoin is what really matters.

>> If you're spouting FUD, then go back to /r/btc.

>Exactly the narrative Core supporters push.

Anyone who tries the path of moderation and reason within /r/btc is downvoted into oblivion, resulting in de facto censorship of that sub.

Edit:

> Summary of /r/bitcoin, for those wondering.

You forgot the roller coaster price gifs :-)

> Do the Blockstream people even speak out against the censorship on /r/bitcoin?

Yes, gmax has, literally every time he is asked about it. His complaint is that r\btc as an organizational/policy difference is a worse place. That's by comparison. -- Which it is, since e.g. users like /u/pagex still haven't been banned after direct physical threats.

- there are ~5000 LOC of https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7910/files and almost 3/4 of these lines are tests.

- Segwit actualy block harmful form of ASICBOOST

- by "growing majority" you mean handful of chinese miners and 2% of nodes (http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...)

> - Segwit actualy block harmful form of ASICBOOST

It's - of course - not the only solution to this "problem", but somehow this paper doesn't propose anything else other than segwit, and his conclusion is a typical Bitcoin Core propaganda.

> by "growing majority" you mean handful of chinese miners and 2% of nodes (http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...)

You aren't without knowing that in Bitcoin, miners establish consensus by voting with their hashrate. Nodes count doesn't prove anything because its really easy to host a node. The point is: there is more miners supporting BU than Segwit [1].

[1]: http://xtnodes.com/#bitcoin_classic_blocks

> but somehow this paper doesn't propose anything else other than segwit

Literally there's another solution that has nothing to do with Segwit. gmax himself proposed it to block off covert ASICBoost. Here's a link:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...

Also, miners do not establish consensus. That is why if a miner mines an invalid block, even if other miners extend it, no nodes will accept it.

I want to say that I've been on the anti-censorship boat and the 'AXA money is sketchy' and the unlimited train for as long as I've heard of it.

Just recently, someone in the ecosystem that I've known since the beginning of my time with Bitcoin came out in support of Blockstream and Segwit with a backing of other Canadian support.

https://medium.com/@francispouliot/canadian-bitcoin-economic...

I don't know what to make of it all. I spoke with him a bit and he seems to believe that those pushing against segwit are paid by ASICboosters in China because they stand to make $100,000,000/yearly from their (now not so secret) advantage.

In any case, I just wanted to add that I'm more confused than ever and things are very unclear.

>because they stand to make $100,000,000/yearly from their (now not so secret) advantage.

If anyone is confused how the 30% advantage that ASICBOOST gives translates into this huge number, remember that the 30% boost applies to revenue, not profit.

The revenue of mining in the long run approaches the costs to mine (basically the cost of electricity), leaving extremely slim profit margins. Let's say the usual revenue from mining over some period of time is $1.02, and the cost is $1.00, giving a profit of 2 cents every time unit. A miner using ASICBOOST could have a revenue of $1.32 every time unit, giving a profit of 32 cents every time unit, which is at least an order of magnitude more profit than anyone else. This miner then has more resources to spend on buying hardware and scaling up.

(The above paragraph goes for any type of optimization and isn't necessarily nefarious. It can be a problem if one miner effectively keeps an optimization secret for too long, because they'll continue to grow in size and could get more than 50% of mining power, which is a specific point that causes huge problems with Bitcoin. But the real unique issues about ASICBOOST are about how it encourages empty blocks, and how it has been secretly incentivizing some groups to argue against any incompatible protocol change.)

Your arithmetic is off. Revenue doesn't increase. Costs decrease. Effectively the increase in profit is similar, though, to your result. Just for different reasons.

Ignoring depreciation or hardware costs, the arithmetic is like this:

Pre-ASICBoost: Revenue: $1.02 Costs: $1.00 Profit: $0.02

Post-ASICBoost: Revenue: $1.02 Costs: $0.70 Profit: $0.32

The closer to costs that revenue for non-AB mining is, the closer to infinity the comparative profit margin is.

That is, AB doesn't increase hashrate. (That would be a very, very much more complicated equation since the hashrate reward pie is essentially static.) All it does is decrease the amount of power required to do the same work.

The easiest way to detect who is telling the truth is to ask lots of questions and see who is making the most unusual and/or logically inconsistent (especially over time) claims.

A lot of people are, in fact, keeping track, and can point to significant numbers of problems and inconsistencies in what people are saying and what they've supported and why. Factual assertions are particularly excellent indicators. For example, if someone says Gavin Andresen is a segwit opponent, you can literally just click one link to discover that he isn't:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/60i4jl/miners_we_are_a...

That was the exact point of the ASICBOOST FUD we've seen in the last week - to cast uncertainty and doubt. Taking a step back though it all seems like just the latest attempt to distract from real issues. ASICBOOST is just another optimisation from companies who make their living working on these kinds of things. It's been known about for many months now so the last few days just seem like a bizarre attempt to demonise the miners for doing what they do.

Nobody wants to kill ASICBoost. Literally the only thing people think is a good idea, and the purpose of this post:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...

.. is to close off only the covert ASICBoost mining incentive which is directly incompatible with a host of high-quality Bitcoin improvement mechanisms. (An incomplete list of which is in the above link, near the bottom.)

Overt ASICBoost is completely wide-open, and remains untouched. In fact it's completely compatible with SegWit.

A few red flags came up for me with this post. I feel I have an obligation to post a response to this to clarify some things, lest people less involved in the community come away with a misinformed view.

A few facts on the core developers:

-- There are hundreds of developers who contribute to Bitcoin Core. Over 50 of them have 10+ commits to Bitcoin Core.

-- Blockstream employs 7 of these developers, including Pieter Wuille, Luke Dashjr, Greg Maxwell, Jorge Timon, Patrick Strateman, Warren Togami and Mark Friedenbach.

-- By number of commits, the developers Blockstream employs are ranked #2, #8, #13, #14, #19, #35, and #50, respectively.

-- Another company called ChainCode Labs employs 3 of the top 50 developers, including Alex Morcos, Suhas Daftuar, and Matt Corallo (formerly employed by Blockstream).

-- By number of commits, the developers ChainCode employs are ranked #5, #11 and #12, respectively.

As for SegWit, it is a multi-faceted gold-mine of an update with many, many benefits to scaling, security and efficiency:

1. It fixes the substantial transaction malleability problem once and for all.

2. It improves the efficiency of signature-hashing so it scales linearly rather than quadratically.

3. It 1.7x's the # of single-signature transactions per block and 4x's the # of multi-signature transactions per block.

4. It enables second-layer scaling solutions like Lightning.

5. It upgrades pay-to-script-hash transactions from 160-bit hashes to 256-bit hashes.

6. It makes it safer for hardware wallets to sign transactions by explicitly hashing input values.

7. It reduces the growth of the system's most burdensome resource: unspent transaction outputs, which are ideally kept in memory.

8. It introduces versioning for the scripting language to allow for more easy upgradeability.

Here are some facts on the developer consensus:

-- Out of the top 100 committers to Bitcoin Core, almost all of them believe that SegWit is the best way forward. There is near unanimous consensus on that front. Former project lead Gavin Andresen (no longer associated with the project) is perhaps the most notable opponent.

-- Out of all of the wallet providers, almost all of them are supportive of or at least OK with modest block increases. Almost all of the major wallet providers have prepared themselves to be ready for SegWit.

Thanks Ryan, these are good clarifications to the parent's post.

For full transparency, I [OP, author of the PDF] am currently contracting with (but am not employed by) Chaincode and am currently #39 by commits (#26 by additions though! ;)). I also think that SegWit is the best way forward; no one pays me to say that.

If Blockstream sent money to developers to endorse SegWit, they must have skipped me!

Absolutely, and thank you for the post! And congrats on working with Chaincode, I didn't know that. I can no longer edit my post unfortunately but at least people can see this follow up. Keep up the great work.

> Former project lead Gavin Andresen (no longer associated with the project) is perhaps the most notable opponent.

This is incorrect. Gavin Andresen supports SegWit. Your facts are incorrect:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/60i4jl/miners_we_are_a...

You're right, I mean that he's opposed to the "segwit only for the near term" plan. IIRC, he is in favor of segwit plus a block size increase.

>a growing majority of miners

Just a single large Chinese miner trying to hold back progress, who likely has an economic incentive to do so due to his usage of ASICBOOST.

You are severely overestimating the amount of support BU has, and downplaying the support of segwit, which the majority of nodes and Bitcoin companies are supporting.

See here, almost nobody supports BU. https://coin.dance/poli

I hope people on Hacker news doesn't get duped by all the toxic people dismissing BU and promoting Core. The facts are that r/Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org, both owned by theymos and a handful of other people, are paid by Blockstream to censor any dissident opinions. About the ongoing censorship, have a look to this article [1], which is a compilation of facts, it's very depressing. Up to a point where a second subreddit /r/btc full of banned people have almost half of the active user of /r/bitcoin, despite its relative young age.

Bitcoin core also organize troll campaigns [2], push for a radical, unwanted change of Bitcoin with SegWit, coordinate attack on nodes when a vulnerability is discovered [3], and spread FUD everyday, sometimes technical nonsens like this very non-issue that is ASICBOOST. Those people work fulltime to stole bitcoin from the community, thanks to the huge bank account of Blockstream, the company behind all this shit show.

At least this proove that Bitcoin rely on a very solid basis, because despite having 75 million in bank, blockstream opted to corrupt core developpers and community managers instead of competing for hashrate. But still, the situation is pretty bad right now.

[1]: https://news.bitcoin.com/brief-history-censorship-bitcoin/

[2]: http://telegra.ph/Inside-the-Dragons-Den-Bitcoin-Cores-Troll...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5zgefe/this_was_an_orc...

> The community and a growing majority of miners is actually switching to bitcoin unlimited

I love bitcoin too. I might be underinformed but everything I've learned so far is that larger blocks and segwit aren't a dichotomy at all. I think segwit sounds good. And I think larger blocks sound good too (but I realize that they do come at a cost). If the overall transaction throughput increases but the fee income goes down for miners, I will be understanding but not too overly concerned with the miners welfare.

IMO the folks opposing segwit are not acting in bitcoin's best interest. The folks opposing big blocks are heavily optimizing against centralization. I think the latter are genuinely interested in doing the right thing but I wonder if they aren't being a little to zealous.

> I might be underinformed but everything I've learned so far is that larger blocks and segwit aren't a dichotomy at all.

You aren't underinformed. You are completely correct with this comment. SegWit isn't incompatible with a blocksize increase, because it is a blocksize increase. :-)