I'm honestly a bit scared about some of the scaling proposals. I know there is lots of fighting right now, and it seems like the code needs to change only ever so slightly. But just one new opcode or whatever can mean major exploitation down the road. As you know, I consider it a big bug to have allowed for that SegWit discount, and then they found a way to store garbage data in there, instead of making it cheap to consolidate transactions, which was the original intent. So this is the sort of stuff I worry about..... unintended consequences.
Bitcoin’s 'Existential' Challenge: From Freedom to Fragmentation
- Thread starter schizo
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The last major upgrade was Taproot, it took over a year of coordination before it was activated, the bitcoin miners started signaling support in order to reach over 80% (or whatever the majority threshold was)
It was exciting, lots of privacy features were implemented... it also enabled Ordinals
https://www.theblock.co/learn/271535/what-is-bitcoins-taproot-upgrade
I don't really know what you mean about "there is lots of fighting"
Tick tock next block... and fees are cheap now, that's why Pek has been quiet about it, check mempool.space
Maybe not exactly fighting, but disagreement about how bitcoin should scale. There are several different versions of Covenants, and so each of the different devs wants the changes implemented in their way. I hardly know enough to even be able to summarize them of have my own opinion about which one would work best, but just the fact that this creates shared UTXO's means there will be restrictions placed on these transactions, and this also means that there will be future dependencies between UTXO's, or something like this. Or wait, it was something like limiting where that UTXO can be sent once it is spent.
Right now it seems pretty straight forward. You produce a signature or the minimum threshold of signatures for a multisig, and that UTXO is unlocked and can be moved. But this is gonna get way more complex with what is proposed.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for scaling, I'm all for increased privacy, and I'm all for increased security because this will lead to UTXO vaults so there will apparently be some way to stop a rouge transaction, but who knows what else this brings down the road that was never intended.
I'm guessing when you mention UTXO, you're talking about mainnet and when you refer to scaling, you're referring to L2 solutions like Lightning or Liquid
I'm reminded by a quote (I think) by Samson Mow that Bitcoin is not for everyone, but Bitcoin is for anyone(?)
It's obviously true here on ET, we got some die hard til death nocoiners, won't mention any names, haha
The context of the quote was that there's only 259k sats for every person on earth, but obviously with millions of lost bitcoins and also the fact that the average Bitcoiner owns millions, or 10's of millions, or even billions of sats...
The reason it's relevant (to UTXO management) is that the Bitcoin mainnet is not a place for someone with a small amount of sats ownership due to the tx costs
I'm sorry, but I do not worry about tx fees on the Bitcoin mainnet, I've transacted when the mempool high priority is as high as hundreds of sats/vbyte
perhaps it's because I've spent disgusting amount on Ethereum tx fees that I'm just used to it
To address your concerns, though, in the future (I'm assuming is what you're worried about) when 1 bitcoin is $1M, a tx fee of 4,000 satoshis is equivalent to $40 (1 cent per sat)
No problem. I don't use multisig, so my transactions are simple, I have fairly large UTXO's, millions of sats usually, so inputs wise, I'd probably use a single input for 90% of my transactions, remember a million sats is $10k
Everyone else who do not own big enough UTXO's, should try to consolidate them when fees are low, such as now....
or look into putting their UTXO's on L2's
I was managing my Lightning Network bitcoins manually on my Umbrel node with a Bluemoon wallet and not sure if you caught one of my posts I've moved to Aqua wallet as my Bitcoin L2 solution
Aqua wallet is a btc, usdt, L2 Lightning and Liquid wallet, and has a built in exchange for BTC-LN-Liquid-USDt
For people in the future when 1 bitcoin is worth $1M or higher and only own the minimum allocation per person on earth which is less than 200k sats, they HAVE TO use a solution like Aqua wallet
Bitcoin is not for everyone. I'm sorry
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People are trying to figure out how to do scaling on the main chain. Look at how Peter from WBD has been trying to figure out how lightning scales when you need at least 1 on-chain transaction. This mean evening Lightning has scaling issues, especially if you want it to be non-custodial.
The term i forgot to mention in my previous reply was that some of these upgrade suggestions would allow for UTXO sharing. I barely know anything about it, but the idea is that since most people in the world will not own a single UTXO, sharing might be an option. But this opens up lots of challenges.
Anyway, I was just trying to outline the issues when you asked about where the fighting was coming from. Its all these different proposals about trying to scale Bitcoin, on the base layer, and what code in Bitcoin needs to be changed to make it happen.
10 minute block times on average, a 30 minute or longer block is not uncommon, how much scaling would be possible if you want to pay for coffee or a meal with sats?
Unless of course a change in the consensus mechanism outside of the most powerful computing network in the whole world (PoW)
This is correct
(Pure) Bitcoin (mainnet) is not for everyone (who cannot own at least 10 million sats). I'm sorry
Everyone who owns less than 10 million sats, whether it's by choice or not, will need to sacrifice some level of decentralization
They can own 10,000 sats on the Strike app
Or better yet (imho), they can do it on the Aqua wallet
For example, someone in Turkey or Argentina is able to purchase 10 USDt on the streets can send it to the Aqua wallet app, exchange it for LN btc which is also dual-function on the App as a Liquid btc,
and that's it, no one-time Bitcoin mainnet transaction as Peter said on WBD to enter the Lightning Network
https://trustmachines.co/learn/what-is-liquid-network/
https://aquawallet.io/?ref=jan3.com
- Bitcoin is not for everyone
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I agree fully, and hence why all the current scaling solutions they want on Bitcoin don't make too much sense. Why does everyone need their own UTXO?? Most just need the value that Bitcoin brings. Bitcoin forces the system to be fair.
No reaction yet?? This sounds like a real crisis that could result in internal rift. It seems like we're going down the same rabbithole as the Communist International. Anyone old enough to remember the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky?
Bullish.
I am of the opinion that if there is too much clashing, nothing gets changed or upgraded, and bitcoin continues to function in its current form. It really doesn't need any upgrades. Sure, improvements to increase scaling sound great, but I'm always worried about the unintended consequences, so if no improvements come for a decade, its a sigh of relief in some ways.
As for miner centralization, yes, this can be a problem, but at the same time, if Bitcoin was dying, you would think miners would be leaving, and this could then decentralize it. I think the mining itself is decentralized, but the mining pools are where the centralization is. All of these miners can easily switch to a different mining pool in mere seconds. Its interesting to me that they don't, but I think if a real crisis ever came, the miners should be incentivized to switch.
As I have dug deeper into Bitcoin study though, I do have to wonder if there isn't a better way. Its good that so much compute is going to Bitcoin, because it prevents a big actor from that dreaded 51% attack. At the current hash rate, its impossible for anyone to acquire enough mining rigs or electricity, so that is good. But this also means that the biggest players get bigger and more powerful. Think of how many of us true bitcoiners would love to mine for the network, but it makes no practical sense. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PoW, but I also wonder if there isn't room to enhance this even further. Hear me out.
When it comes to voting, I have seen how everyone getting a vote sounds democratic, but is it really? US is bringing in illegal immigrants simply to be voters for the democrats. Voters will always go with the party who promises more free stuff. If you're not in the top 10% of income earners, you will likely want free stuff, because you think someone else is paying for it. I have also seen it suggested that the only people who should be allowed to vote are land owners because they have the most at stake. It makes sense because those people who don't have much will happily vote for new taxes on property. So when it comes to voting rights, we of course understand that a democratic process where everyone gets a vote makes sense, but some people are clearly too dumb to vote, and some people have more at stake, so their vote should almost count for more.
So I as a bitcoiner, who is holding bitcoin, would love to be able to decentralize mining and contribute to the hashrate, but I know that its not feasable given the current setup (and I would love to mine for Ocean). So I wonder if there isn't a better way. If I own 1 bitcoin, that is only 1/21M of the supply. But the biggest miners have a much smaller ratio of bitcoins to their hashrate. So wouldn't it be cool if there was some way to keep this proportion in sync? I think it introduces even more incentive to keep the network strong. No single actor could go after more hashrate if they didn't hold the bitcoin to in some way "prove" their allegiance to the network.
This way, the more that bitcoin is distributed around more holders, the higher chance there is that this distributes mining even more. With the current system, mining is only profitable for the biggest miners, and although we would like to think they are on the side of bitcoin, if they own very little, we have to question their motives, especially if they continue to point their hashrate to questionable mining pools. This is no different than people who vote for a president in a country in which they no longer live. Is it really fair to get a vote if you have not much of an allegiance to the country?
A 51% attack would never be possible because nobody will have 51% of the bitcoin, or at least of the bitcoin that you can point to as proof for adding so much hashrate. If you currently have 10 bitcoins lets say, and you lock up 8, this is only 8/21M, but when you think about who else is doing this, you might likely have 0.1% of the hashrate. (a small number, but not inconsequential) If you're currently a huge miner, and want to keep mining, you would have to buy more bitcoin to maintain your ratio, and this gives incentive to not do anything to the network to spoil it, like censoring transactions.
Its like like the way bitcoin is flowing into more and more hands, becoming more widely distributed, I would like to see mining distributed as well, but given the current incentives, its actually becoming somewhat centralized.