You're right that this is a fight for control over bitcoin, but you're wrong on who the players are.
There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visible engineering expertise, and has has backed a series of code projects over the past two years all of which have been spectacular failures: BU, XT, Classic, ABC and BTC1-- all have had significant vulnerabilities.
Their goal: Very large blocks that cannot cross the Great Firewall of China easily, increasing Chinese centralization.
On the other side you have The Engineers: Hundreds of engineers who have contributed to Core, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto and going forward to the present day. They are called "corporate" because Blockstream hired some of them, but the blocksteram engineers are prominent only because of their contributions and smarts, not because they exercise any control.
These engineers for the past 8 years have delivered quality software and 2 years ago delivered Segwit-- a misnomer that covers a large number of improvements for bitcoin that require a soft fork to activate. Segwit enables scaling and so many more applications to be built on Bitcoin, including smart contracts and side chains.
However, Segwit also reveals an exploit. An exploit that Jihan Wu has been using to give him a competitive advantage and which is in part why he has been able to gain centralized control over bitcoin hashing. This exploit is called ASICBOOST and segwit would put a stop to it.
This is why Jihan has opposed it.
Worse the corporates have spent millions on a 50-cent army of shills to spread FUD and misinformation and conspiracy theories to discredit core.
At the end of the day-- its the engineers who know what they are doing vs the corporate shills who sneer and think it can't be that hard to deliver bitcoin software -- but have so far completely failed to deliver anything that wasn't unmitigated crap.
How it's going to play out:
Jihan Wu has declared he will hard fork his own coin (and remove Segwit) because the real bitcoin industry and core agreed on Segwit2X .... he has hash power, so he may be able to make his coin dominant... for awhile. But core has solutions to this, and at the end of the day we will likely see chain split with the hash power on one side and the engineering resources on the other. That hash power advantage can be fixed within a few weeks.... the lack of engineering talent can't be fixed for love nor money-- as any engineer worth a damn understands what is at stake and will never join Jihan's Jihad.
You are ascribing to the Bitcoin core narrative of a bunch of freedom fighters who are building a decentralized future of freedom, but that narrative does not hold water. First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative. That tells you that the allegiances and motivations within "core" have changed in just the last few years. Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous.
Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly. The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining. It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement. It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work.
If we are worries about centralization in China, then we should just compete outside of China. If you are saying we can't compete than why are we trying to change the system so that we can? Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related.
I'm not sure if it's economically possible to compete with Chinese Bitcoin miners for a number of reasons. To get around capital controls Chinese nationals invest in ASICs and mine to move money out. There is incredibly cheap power in China due to government subsidized hydroelectric and coal. Supposedly many miners bribe power officials and get free electricity. ASICs for Bitcoin mining are made in China and I assume are much cheaper there? It doesn't really matter where the miners are though unless they are colluding due to political reasons to reject transactions.
Right, because your narrative is "righter" than his.
> First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative.
With little to no input outside of Jeff and the miners that are funding him. This is the nth (where n > 4) iteration of Bitcoin that Bitmain has funded with the intent of maintaining some degree of control over the reference client. As of yet, he hasn't been successful.
> Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous.
I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied.
> Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly.
That's actually false. Block sizes aren't really an issue for the miners, they are an issue for the nodes. Each miner only needs single full node. What increasing the block size does is make running a full node (which has to store the entire block chain) extremely expensive. The larger the block sizes, the more expensive a full node becomes.
> The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining.
SegWit does nothing of the sort. Lightning Network and Sidechains, which can be built on top of SegWit, certainly reduces off-chain fees. SegWit itself only reduces the fees on witness data, but that's moot for the time being. SegWit will have little impact on fees right now.
> It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement.
See, this implies you have limited technical knowledge on the subject. That's LN, potentially SC. But that has nothing to do with SegWit.
> It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work.
PoW is just the security policy, it's not the ecosystem. The economy is the ecosystem. Miners mine, the economy chooses what they mine.
Long-term, miners need to adapt. Instead of looking at off-chain solutions as a bad thing, they need to consider that they are best suited as a Lightning Node. But that requires a longer vision than the miners have.
No one is EVER going to buy coffee on-chain. No amount of increasing block sizes are going to make instant transactions. It's either off-chain transactions or some other altcoin.
> If we are worries about centralization in China
I don't care about where the centralization occurs, I care about the nature of it. Centralizing mining is bad because it gives them power they shouldn't hold. Centralizing nodes gives governments power over Bitcoin. That is dangerous.
> Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related.
LN is an opensource implementation of something not dissimilar to smart contracts. Calling that control is laughable.
>I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied.
This always get's bandied about. There are less than 20 people responsible for the vast majority of the commits in the last year, the other 90+ are small scattered changes. Easy to verify, go look at the commit logs. Oh, and 3 of the top Contributors aren't even working on core anymore.
>SegWit does nothing of the sort. Lightning Network and Sidechains, which can be built on top of SegWit, certainly reduces off-chain fees. SegWit itself only reduces the fees on witness data, but that's moot for the time being. SegWit will have little impact on fees right now.
Segwit is all about sidechains, that's the main application, and the real purpose. Side chains mean transactions off chain. Transactions off chain mean less fees for Bitcoin miners. It's not rocket science. The only way they make it back is if the settlement costs become huge.
> That's actually false. Block sizes aren't really an issue for the miners, they are an issue for the nodes. Each miner only needs single full node. What increasing the block size does is make running a full node (which has to store the entire block chain) extremely expensive. The larger the block sizes, the more expensive a full node becomes.
The reason nodes are expensive is because they are doing full historical validation which is almost completely useless and unnecessary. Minor changes to the Bitcoin block header would make that completely irrelevant. The nodes need all data ever argument is total junk.
>LN is an opensource implementation of something not dissimilar to smart contracts. Calling that control is laughable.
How much does it cost to open and close a channel on the main bitcoin blockchain at a 1 megabyte limit with millions of users? It's not a free thing, it's very expensive. To say that won't result in centralization is ridiculous. LN is not a solution without larger block sizes.
> Segwit is all about sidechains, that's the main application, and the real purpose.
You're just wrong. Segwit is about a major malleability bug. It happens to open the way for sidechains, but do you honestly think we shouldn't fix the bug purely because it happens to make sidechains more feasible?
> Side chains mean transactions off chain. Transactions off chain mean less fees for Bitcoin miners. It's not rocket science.
Correct, but you don't seem to be following the problem the same way I am. Your major concern is how much miners get paid. My major concern is network adoption and decentralization. Pretending that your values are the only values is what makes your position distasteful.
> The reason nodes are expensive is because they are doing full historical validation which is almost completely useless and unnecessary. Minor changes to the Bitcoin block header would make that completely irrelevant. The nodes need all data ever argument is total junk.
You just literally dismissed how an open block chain works. If nodes don't have the entire history attacks become arbitrary.
> How much does it cost to open and close a channel on the main bitcoin blockchain at a 1 megabyte limit with millions of users? It's not a free thing, it's very expensive.
And guess whose in the best position to implement channels (and collect the fees associated with it)? miners.
> To say that won't result in centralization is ridiculous.
You've broken some pretty obvious rules of modern propaganda here. Ascribing Satoshi to your cause is akin to using the Great Leader proof by authority. Your arguments sound too early 20th century.
The obvious problem is both sides can make a claim to Satoshi while forking. I'm commenting here because the one thing I do know about Bitcoin is that Satoshi apparently suggested increases in block size to compensate for an increased number of transactions.
Whatever Satoshi wanted is irrelevant, but the only thing I can gleam from your amateur propaganda attempts (Satoshi is only one of your mistakes above) is that you shouldn't be trusted.
I have no bitcoin on either camp - but for engineering reasons, came to the conclusion that the 1MB block is the real bottleneck.
I think its possible Jihan and many others are acting in the best interests of Bitcoin community, on behalf of future potential users of crypto-currencies, not purely out of self interest. Many early adopters and evangelists support this view, they clearly care about bitcoin as a human technology, not just its monetary value.
I genuinely feel it is immoral to limit widespread bitcoin use by keeping the blocksize artificially small. Just as it would be to limit the distance a person can travel, or how many books one is allowed to read.
Serious question, why doesn't core switch hashing algorithms at the fork to something ASIC-resistant like Dagger-Hashimoto PoW. Seems like a win-win for them since they don't have to worry about the competitive faction causing havoc on their chain, the miners are more distributed, and there is an army of GPU hashing power that is looking for a place to direct their mining power towards with the Ethereum move to PoS on the horizon.
There's the corporate faction: BitMain plus Bloq and the ones who want to embed KYC and AML into the bitcoin protocol. Their heavy hitter is Jihan Wu who controls %70 of the hash power, via his mining chips and his pools, and his customers being amenable to his wishes (because they want to remain customers). No visible engineering expertise, and has has backed a series of code projects over the past two years all of which have been spectacular failures: BU, XT, Classic, ABC and BTC1-- all have had significant vulnerabilities.
Their goal: Very large blocks that cannot cross the Great Firewall of China easily, increasing Chinese centralization.
On the other side you have The Engineers: Hundreds of engineers who have contributed to Core, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto and going forward to the present day. They are called "corporate" because Blockstream hired some of them, but the blocksteram engineers are prominent only because of their contributions and smarts, not because they exercise any control.
These engineers for the past 8 years have delivered quality software and 2 years ago delivered Segwit-- a misnomer that covers a large number of improvements for bitcoin that require a soft fork to activate. Segwit enables scaling and so many more applications to be built on Bitcoin, including smart contracts and side chains.
However, Segwit also reveals an exploit. An exploit that Jihan Wu has been using to give him a competitive advantage and which is in part why he has been able to gain centralized control over bitcoin hashing. This exploit is called ASICBOOST and segwit would put a stop to it.
This is why Jihan has opposed it.
Worse the corporates have spent millions on a 50-cent army of shills to spread FUD and misinformation and conspiracy theories to discredit core.
At the end of the day-- its the engineers who know what they are doing vs the corporate shills who sneer and think it can't be that hard to deliver bitcoin software -- but have so far completely failed to deliver anything that wasn't unmitigated crap.
How it's going to play out:
Jihan Wu has declared he will hard fork his own coin (and remove Segwit) because the real bitcoin industry and core agreed on Segwit2X .... he has hash power, so he may be able to make his coin dominant... for awhile. But core has solutions to this, and at the end of the day we will likely see chain split with the hash power on one side and the engineering resources on the other. That hash power advantage can be fixed within a few weeks.... the lack of engineering talent can't be fixed for love nor money-- as any engineer worth a damn understands what is at stake and will never join Jihan's Jihad.