> Its authors will receive a one-time retention of 20% (2 million) of the initial MTN supply.
Need to say anything else? Sounds really shady to me.. Anyway, the Sidechain Project which is in development by the Blockstream team is supposed to do that, but above the bitcoin protocol itself, not in a 'new coin'.
If they were serious about developing a better crypto, they would have divested almost all of their coins. This ratio shows that the devs only want to make a quick buck.
It would degrade Bitcoin security, but worse, it's untested, behind several releases, has no replay protection and the nodes are designed to pretend to be core nodes to confuse the network.
I did not think Core propaganda would have made its way to HN :-(
Segwit2x would not degrade security. People think it would because they assume larger blocks would reduce the absolute number of full nodes, but historically this is not what we have seen: https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/918133693964865538
The "untested" claim is false. The BTC1 reference implementation has unit tests, and is currently run by at least ~700 nodes: https://coin.dance/nodes
The fact the BTC1 repo is currently based on Core 0.14.2 (released June 18, 2017) instead of Core 0.15.0.1 (released Sep 19, 2017) is not really much of a problem.
It has been explained numerous time why we do not want replay protection: to remove the need to upgrade millions of SPV wallets.
You know when you start by calling your opponents positions "propaganda" that it kinda impeaches your argument before you've even begun.
Bitcoin has already gone from 1-4mb max blocks this August, going to 8mb is unproven.... and it does reduce security because it increases centralization. The great firewall of china is a real thing, and I've seen first hand that 1mb blocks have trouble crossing it. Absolute number of full nodes is not a relevant measure in this issue... miner centralization is.
Untested is true... the 700 nodes that were spun up in the past could of days are not running a test network, and thus it is untested, and also 700 insta-clone AWS instances that are there just as part of the attack do not constitute testing.
The fact that BTC1 is months behind is in fact a problem, its one developer has clearly been working on his alt, and there's no indication that the code will be maintained going forward-- especially since it is months behind already.
I think it's hilarious to rephrase "Wanting to steal the bitcoin of SPV wallet users" as a "feature" of "not having to upgrade." BCH put in replay protection and did a good job of trying to be a good citizen and still people lost money.
You guys are flagrantly pushing malware that hides its nature and ARE going to cause people to lose funds... hell, you guys have been talking about straight up attacks on bitcoin as part of your attempt to launch your scam coin.
It's not hostile to disconnect incompatible nodes that are going to cause a hard fork-- you guys keep redefining terms and putting spin on your actions in a way that tells me that you know you're supporting a scam.
Nodes that do not follow the consensus rules will be disconnected anyway, this is the way bitcoin works, disconnecting immediately simple saves the network a lot of effort to discover the incompatibility... but hiding it is great if your goal-- as has been stated by you guys on multiple occasions-- to attack bitcoin.
"Propaganda" is literally what you are doing. But it also is not as negative as how you seem to interpret it. Definition of propaganda: «information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause»
«it does reduce security because it increases centralization»
Very large blocks, on the order of 100+ MB, would certainly increase centralization. But in practice a segwit2x block is going to be around 4 MB. 4 MB does not increase miner centralization. 4 MB is peanuts. There is no technical evidence showing that 4 MB would increase miner centralization.
«1mb blocks have trouble crossing it»
No they do not. If there was trouble, we would see many empty blocks being mined by Chinese miners. Currently only a small minority (<1%) of blocks are empty or close to empty. Maybe you encountered problems trying to naively run a full node on your hotel's wifi while being in China? Doing so is not evidence that the GFW prevents 1 MB blocks from crossing it.
«past could of days are not running a test network»
«its one developer has clearly been working on his alt»
No, it is one dev working on the ref implementation on behalf of the entire group of signatories who signed the NYA. And there is only 1 dev because Segwit2x is a very small patch against Core: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/0.14...btc1:segwi...
«I think it's hilarious to rephrase "Wanting to steal the bitcoin of SPV wallet users" as a "feature" of "not having to upgrade."»
That is exactly the point. Segwit2x is meant to be an upgrade. This has been said many times.
«You guys are flagrantly pushing malware»
It is not malware. Stop using that word. You do not know what malware is.
«talking about straight up attacks on bitcoin»
No we have not. Radicals exist in both camps (segwit2x and no2x) and they have talked about "attacks". But the words/lies of radicals do not represent the intent of each camp.
«It's not hostile to disconnect incompatible nodes that are going to cause a hard fork»
Nodes are not incompatible between now and the HF. It is hostile to disconnect them today. It would, however, not be hostile to disconnect post HF. But it would also be pointless because 2MB blocks are going to be automatically rejected by Core nodes anyway.
«disconnecting immediately simple saves the network a lot of effort»
It does not save a lot of effort. Literally 1 block will ever be transmitted unnecessarily (the first block with a segwit weight over 4 million), and all subsequent blocks will automatically be rejected.
Also, it's very notable that none of the people supporting the 2x scam understand bitcoin, either that or they tell lies about how it works to support the scam.
If you take the time to read the white paper and listen to the people who are explaining how things work you won't fall for the propaganda that has you posting this kind of nonsense.
But I do credit you for admitting that BTC1 is months behind.
Thanks for discussing this. I have not read the paper, but was hoping you could provide a link to it. Doubling the supply of currency (well, giving people who had orange coins an equal number of orange and yellow coins) at no expense is tempting, but what are the implications down the line?
Bitcoin has layers. One of the layers people don't understand is the layer called "core". The creators of bitcoin were cypherpunks and so they had a decade before bitcoin existed where people worked out how such a system would work. Those cypherpunks became core. While people think of bitcoin as the software, or the network or the white paper, what it really is, is a collection of engineers (you have to trust the engineers to trust the software and network and ultimately money) that is very diverse, and a genuine meritocracy. Since bitcoin attracted a lot of libertarians and wanna-be-I-think-I-am-libertarians its relatively easy to say "core is the new evil overlords! a monopoly!" when the reality is that core is a large number of people who don't agree on a lot of stuff and have developed a process of reaching consensus. So, unfortunately, some uneducated non-engineer felon like Roger Ver can spread a lot of claims about core and those get believed despite core people explaining patiently in engineering terms why the claims are false (eg: big blocks are not free scaling, segwit is more efficient, etc.)
Non-engineers simply cannot understand the technology arguments and so they are manipulatable via social engineering, which in this case is literally legions of paid shills (http://birds.bitcoin.com is the attackers site where shills get paid.)
That's the layer that's under attack now- because the powers that be want to control bitcoin and they can't beat the software, they can't beat the hash power, but they think they can maybe beat the people. (And in Ver's case, he shills BCH to keep its price up while unloading it to get more BTC.)
Actually that twitter account is one that I've seen many times before, and I would not consider him someone who understand how bitcoin works. He seems to be an engineer who has taken a superficial look and then fallen sway to propaganda.
This is the thing about bitcoin, there are layers. Here's some of the layers:
1. "Bitcoin is internet money"
2. A block chain is a chain of database entries
3. I understand what Proof of work is
4. I understand how economic incentives work in bitcoin
5. I understand why PoW will always be better than PoS
6. I understand why ethereum can never work (ultimately)
7. Now I really understand the economic incentives
8. Now I understand bitcoin
Of course this is more than a little tongue in cheek.
But a lot of the standards are found here (in various levels of adoption)... this bit is really relevant for wallets:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips#readme
Read the white paper at least once before holding any bitcoin. And then re-read it at least 5 times one the course of 2 years. It has layers and you will come to understand them over time.
Reading Mastering Bitcoin I understand is really useful too. (I got thrown into the deep end of btcd so I didn't have that luxury)
Thanks! I have definitely read the bitcoin white paper sir! I thought there was a whitepaper about Segwit2x or B2X. I read the original Bitcoin paper very shortly after it came out (!) and I am confident in my understanding of Bitcoin, the protocol, how it works, why it is excellent and unparalleled. However, I did not know that Core was a lot of people, and it makes sense that the most precarious link in the chain may be the human element. Happy to hear that the engineers / cypherpunks got it down pat (I was already rather confident in that) ... Question: why does Ethereum not work in the ultimate?
BTC1 is not months behind. They track Core 0.14 for the production branch, and Core 0.15 for the dev branch. They have not moved to 0.15 because of bugs in Core (not BTC1!)
I have had the opposite experience: the no2x people I talk to seem to not understand the technical aspects of Bitcoin, or seem to disregard logic and facts.
Well to be fair if bitcoin ever hard forked it would not have two-way replay protection in the way BCH has because replay protection would break all pre-signed transactions.
The problem with B2X is the purposeful takeover of a decentralized protocol by an industry cabal, not any specific technical aspect of it (although it does have flaws).
By "pre-signed" transactions you mean ones still in the mempool? Actually not a problem, with the change to the ten opcode those would succeed on the correct chain.
Bitcoin has forked, by the way, August was a soft fork, and it has had a couple hard forks in the past.
What's new is that 2X is an attack fork. (Maybe "assault fork"?)
Sorry if my response seems pedantic, I am agreeing with you.
No, I mean locktimed transactions, or chains of transactions as you see in payment channels.
Doing a mandatory change to how signatures are calculated invalidates all of these constructs, potentially burning coins (if people lock-timed them to the future) and certainly breaking the security of all existing payment channels.
So basically this guy is forking bitcoin, causing contention between miners, etc, and now is making a new coin that allows him to profit from that contention?
Create a problem, then offer a solution. In this case, invent a problem that doesn't exist, and your solution is one among a sea of shitty pre-mined Ethereum ICOs. It's pretty sad, really.
Economic incentives matter. Bitcoin has them right for making itself "digital gold"... but ethereum discovered the "be your own virtual altcoin at almost no cost and raise a bunch of money" application.
Nope. ~80% of miners, 90% of Bitcoin businesses, and at least half of the community are forking Bitcoin.
Jeff just happens to be the lead developer for the new client. The contention has been there for years and it's been fueled by the horrific sensorship on the main communication channels.
This is sad to see though. I don't know how he'll find time to juggle both of these projects.
Miners follow the money. They are irrelevant for hard forks.
> 90% of Bitcoin businesses
Coinbase and Bitfinex all announced 2X will be listed as an alt coin. So the largest USD > BTC exchange and the large BTC > alt exchange are both listing 2X as an altcoin.
> and at least half of the community are forking Bitcoin.
There's zero way to poll the "community". 90% of the community has no damn idea that this is going on, and of the vocal 10% the majority are supporting the current client by non-scientific accounts (population of /r/bitcoin vs /r/btc).
> Jeff just happens to be the lead developer for the new client.
By all accounts he's effectively the only developer.
> This is sad to see though. I don't know how he'll find time to juggle both of these proj
One of them is already dead per the Coinbase/Bitfinex announcement. And frankly, he wasn't doing anything with it aside from increasing the block weight anyway.
There's no evidence of that, more than %90 of miners are running core, and there are more businesses opposed to 2x than endorsing it: http://nob2x.org
Meanwhile "signers" of the New York "Agreement"[1] are dropping like flies, most recent Coinbase that says they will support the core chain.
Hell the biggest "proponents" of 2X aren't willing to risk their own bitcoin in a swap (eg: Ver who has backed out of such promises in the past too with BCH)
2X is nothing but a scam to get suckers to sell BTC for B2X while people like Ver sell B2X to get more BTC!
Its funny how the bitcoin haters talk about censorship-- reality is /r/bitcoin is not censored, but the entire 2x movement was done behind closed doors, with no peer review, with a heavily censored slack channel and mailing list-- that is if you can get on it in the first place... while bitcoin does all this in public.
2X hasn't had commits or serious work in months last I checked and I really feel sad for the people who bought the propaganda these scammers are selling.
[1] It's not an agreement when only one side agreed with itself.
It's easily proven-- go there and look at all the /r/btc brigading going on. The subreddit is full of trolls. And of course whenever one gets abusive and is banned they cry censorship.
Now look at my comment you are replying to-- -3 -- an attempt to downvote it into oblivion with no actual responses (other than yours) to the points I made.
There is censorship going on, but the ones crying the loudest are the worst offenders.
I'm looking forward to atomic swaps, but in the meantime I will endorse https://shapeshift.io/ -- it's a remarkably convenient and simple exchange. I found it far easier to use than bitsquare and far superior liquidity.
This wiki article describes an atomic swap process.
I believe the largest issue with that process is that it takes multiple steps. Those steps can be reversed if the process is halted (and are therefore atomic). However, needing to transmit to the network multiple times and wait before continuing makes it a hassle to carry out manually. That leads to either wallets or trusted third parties completing the transaction for you so you don't have to sit and wait.
This doesn't really make sense. The thing that gives cryptocurrencies value is that they are scarce. The thing that gives them security is proof of work, allowing a distributed consensus algorithm that is hard to game.
Cryptocurrency isn't a source of magic money in the sense that you could tap it for a "basic income" type scheme-- where the recipients are not doing anything to earn it.
In cryptocurrency every actor in the system has a job that they do, namely, miners mine and that's how they get paid.
I'm not saying its impossible, it just seems like it doesn't make sense at first look.
The basic idea is that each participant can distribute 'X' # of coins to every other participant in the currency. The caveat is that each individual needs to be held accountable for the choices they make as to who they "vouch" for when distributing currency.
That's not to say the amount distributed can change in some obvious way. My current thinking is that if person A, B, C say person X gets money, then they get the same "agreed upon" (or fixed) distribution as everyone else.
On the other end the coins that are created have a "depreciation" built in. Something that depreciates 100% in 5 years won't appear too valuable. But something that depreciates over the course of an entire lifetime will feel plenty valuable to the people who are the original recipients. So in other words my current target is 100 years.
Things to consider:
1. Create lots of accounts, allocate money to yourself.
2. How do you hold people accountable in a distributed trustless manner?
3. Once you have centralized identity or accountability, then there is really no use to doing a blockchain. So solving 1 & 2 is the hard part of your idea.
4. Freicoin had demurge built in, you had to spend it or it would go down in value. This is anti-capitalist-- literally, they were marxists trying out their idea-- the consequence of this is that it undermines people's ability to save and invest for the future. If your coin goes down in value over a lifetime (Which you can accomplish easily by simply having increasing inflation over time-- very much like the USD) then it becomes difficult to save for retirement or that time of your life when your medical expenses go up.
I'm looking at the "accountability" part a little differently. It's not necessarily going to be some built in rules in the coin that hold people accountable. Instead one of the critical philosophies I've adopted is "enable the people who hold the coin". The coin won't hold people accountable, the tooling needs to be available to allow people to hold other people accountable.
That's definitely an important objective. Although admittedly it won't be as pure as something like Bitcoin. I'm targeting what you could loosely equate to a scientific proof of existence, not a mathematical one.
From the "Owner's Manual" [1], it appears that this is just another ETH ERC20 token. All of the "portability" features of it are just based on atomic swaps, which means that the security of this token for most purposes is equal to the security of the lowest security chain on which it lives. Since participating in this requires being in the ETH ecosystem, and this is not designed to be an "appcoin" (single use token), but instead is designed to be a general purpose currency, I'm unclear what it really brings to the table.
Also, it appears that it will only support being on ETH initially. While I imagine it would be pretty easy to port to ETC, it's probably never going to live on top of Bitcoin, because the smart contracts would be prohibitive in terms of cost.
Details are in the "Media Kit" [1]. Not a "paper" but a "Media kit". Note that "media kits" probably have positive correlation with P&D and "papers" probably do not. Not causation, I suppose, but just an interesting tidbit for consideration.
You don't even need to hide anywhere. Since there is no regulations on pre-mines themselves, only ICOs, you could do a pre-mine in the US and be 100% fine as long as you paid the capital gains tax.
IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, I'm holding out for the day ETH crashes, ICOs end, and pumpers go back to using Litecoin forks. I'm just sitting here with a GTX 1060 ready to mine some scamcoins for lulz.
Need to say anything else? Sounds really shady to me.. Anyway, the Sidechain Project which is in development by the Blockstream team is supposed to do that, but above the bitcoin protocol itself, not in a 'new coin'.