If you read the article, some people ask some really good questions of him... that he doesn't answer.
Mike, How were you able to sell your coins if your claim “Couldn’t move your existing money” is true?
-wraith808
Simple. Right now, because of the low blocksize limit, transactions with higher fees are accepted/added to the blockchain by miners while transactions with lower fees are delayed/ignored. You can easily move your money if you're willing to pay exorbitant fees.
Just a couple of months ago I could make transactions for a couple of cents. Now I've heard the average transaction fee is about 10 cents. While still relatively low, there is no reason for artificially increasing the fees by keeping the blocksize limit small as the miner reward of 25BTC is still pretty significant! Even when it halves to 12.5BTC (scheduled to happen in about 6 months) that's ~$4,750 every ten minutes at the current exchange rate.
I think someone who quits an open source project to work for a company that does basically the same (centralized blockchain) should not comment on their previous "employer". It’s the lowest thing you can do, you lost all credibility and if I were an employer I would never hire someone who just talks crap about an ex-employer.
-wraith808
This isn't a question.
You do realize that these messages are poisonous to Bitcoin… And that, especially coming from you, this might be a nail in the Bitcoin coffin. I mean, it’s a little petty to spread these articles to destroy the confidence in Bitcoin, just because things didn’t go the way you wanted it to go. There would’ve been better solutions… I’m just saying, we all have a problem now… I hope Bitcoin won’t respond too much to this article..
-wraith808
This also isn't a question.
That said, I read Mike's post not as being harmful to nor as a condemnation of Bitcoin, but as a condemnation of the Bitcoin Core developers who, it appears, are doing their very best to bring down Bitcoin from within. People who believe in Bitcoin still believe in Bitcoin. They just have very little to no confidence in the Bitcoin Core devs.
My opinion is that I agree with a lot of what Mike Hearn stated about the current problems with Bitcoin (Core). However, I disagree with his final conclusion that BTC is dead/failed.
People got sick of the Bitcoin Core devs strong-arming their ideas on the entirety of Bitcoin through ignoring the community at best and censoring/silencing opposing viewpoints at worst. It's the Core devs who are/were "killing" BTC, but the beauty of an open source project and a distributed blockchain is that you don't have to stick with a tyrannical leadership. Finally, a group of people organized a fork called
Bitcoin Classic which is rapidly gaining traction/popularity/acceptance and looks like it will be the dominant fork of BTC relatively soon.
The data show consensus amongst miners for an immediate 2 MB increase, and demand amongst users for 8 MB or more. We are writing the software that miners and users say they want. We will make sure that it solves their needs, help them deploy it, and gracefully upgrade the bitcoin network’s capacity together.
We call our code repository Bitcoin Classic. It starts as a one-feature patch to bitcoin-core that increases the blocksize limit to 2 MB.
As stated, they're taking action to double the blocksize limit ASAP (within a few months) and then gradually increase it on an ongoing basis thereafter.
There's also strong community opposition to Replace By Fee (RBF) which makes it incredibly easier for people to rip other people off and basically cripples the ability for BTC to be used in commercial transactions (i.e., paying for goods in brick & mortar stores). Core is trying to ramrod this into the client despite the strong opposition to it, and has already committed some RBF code to the repository. Classic
may remove this "feature" (though at this time AFAIK they will not commit to anything until they've finished the one-feature patch to increase the blocksize limit). For an explanation of what RBF is and why it's a bad idea, see the long description below:
Long explanation of RBF
To explain what RBF is, I have to explain a bit about how BTC transactions work (which I'm sure many of you already know, but just to cover all the bases...)
The gist of it is that when accepting BTC payments, to be sure someone doesn't "double-spend" the money, you should wait for at least 1 confirmation (meaning the transaction is on the most recent entry in the blockchain ledger) which takes about 5-10 minutes at best or much, much longer given the current issue with high fees and the blocksize limit being nearly reached. To be "ultra-safe" it is recommended to wait for 6 confirmations which takes about an hour (~50 minutes) longer than the first confirmation.
To backtrack slightly, a "double-spend" is when someone makes a transaction paying one person, and then almost immediately (before the first confirmation) makes another transaction paying another person (possibly even themselves). In such a scenario, only one of these transaction will come out the victor and be added to the blockchain (i.e., only one will be confirmed). Typically the first transaction, chronologically speaking, is the one that is confirmed. But there are ways to make the 2nd transaction the one that confirms. I may be wrong about this, but I think you would basically have to send the transactions to two different miners and hope the miner who got the 2nd transaction is the first one to confirm it.
Either way, this means the transaction that didn't go through is effectively void and the recipient didn't actually get paid. I've heard that this is relatively easy to do if you know what you're doing, but probably it's beyond the ability of the casual/usual BTC user. This is why it's recommended to wait for at least 1 confirmation, to assure that you get your BTC. On the other hand, imagine going to the drive-through and having to wait 10 minutes or longer after you paid to get your coffee. Nobody would do that! Thus, some businesses accept the relatively small risk of double-spends by delivering the goods without waiting for the first confirmation. This is called zero confirmation (or some variation of 0-conf). It makes more business sense to accept the risk of the occasional double-spend (losing money on the sale) because the convenience of 0-conf brings much more business in than it loses to double-spends.
Enter RBF: Replace By Fee allows a person to easily replace a 0-conf transaction with a NEW transaction, and as long as it has a higher fee than the old transaction the miner's software would be instructed to ignore the first transaction and only accept the second transaction. This sounds like and is proposed as a great idea if your transaction gets stuck in limbo forever because your initial transaction didn't include a high enough fee, but this is wrong for two reasons:
1. Transactions shouldn't be getting stuck due to low fees. There's no reason for fees to be so high. The only reason the fees are so high is because Core won't increase the blocksize limit. Increasing the limit will allow more transactions to go into the block, reducing the amount of fees required to be included. Core is artificially increasing the fees and then proposing RBF as a solution to the problem they're creating.
2. The even bigger problem is that the new RBF transaction could be to anyone, including the person making the payment. So with RBF a person could go into a shop, buy something, walk out with the goods, then make a new RBF transaction paying the money back to themselves, and basically get things for free.
In my opinion, a much better solution to the problem of transactions getting stuck in limbo forever is the following:
1. Increase the blocksize limit. As stated before, a higher blocksize limit means miners can fit more transactions into a single block, thereby reducing the artificial limitation on supply and therefore reducing the fees required to be included in a block.
2. Child Pays for Parent (CPFP).
A quick explanation of CPFP: If a transaction gets stuck due to a low fee, another transaction (made by the recipient of the "stuck" coins) which spends the "stuck" coins--and has a high enough fee to be included in the block--will pay for the stuck transaction to go through.
Recent Posts
I meant where is the picture from. But that's no longer pertinent now that the font has been identified.