HN Gopher Feed (2017-08-01) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The first Bitcoin Cash block has been mined
253 points by TekMol
http://blockdozer.com/insight/block/000000000000000000651ef99cb9...___________________________________________________________________
jahbrewski - 3 hours ago
Can someone provide a summary explaining the significance of this
event?
avaer - 3 hours ago
There are two incompatible "kinds" of bitcoin now because people
disagreed about how to scale the technology.
juxncxrlos - 3 hours ago
Is it clear which fork was followed by most of the people?
colordrops - 2 hours ago
There are several factors at play. First is that BCH is a
hard fork, and thus miners need to actively choose to mine
BCH instead of BTC. Exchanges need to add support for BCH.
You can also look at hash rates, which show how much mining
power is behind either coin. You can also look at
transaction rates and exchange rates.Despite all this, market
forces may drive one or the other coin up or down over the
next days and months depending on how important the differing
features are to the community. It could also turn out that
there is a market for both feature sets and they both do
well.
tylersmith - 2 hours ago
By default people that don't change to a BCC client will
follow the legacy chain, so if BCC is going to be dominant it
will take a while to find out most likely. The price is
likely to be very volatile while the market figures out which
it wants to follow more.
sayurichick - 1 hours ago
It's like Brexit but for Bitcoin.For years the market wanted to
increase the arbitrary 1mb blocksize limit. They finally got fed
up with the stalling/lies and forked off.people were misled into
thinking Hard forks and >1mb blocksize was "dangerous". Bitcoin
cash proves these to be false.
gruez - 25 minutes ago
>a few hours in>nothing bad happened>"it's totally fine guys"I
mean, you can say the same about a lot of disasters
abritinthebay - 3 hours ago
Outside the bitcoin community? Not much.Inside? First salvo in a
massive political civil war between interests with different
goals. There's this Bitcoin Cash implementation vs Segwit.
colordrops - 2 hours ago
No longer a civil war at this point. The coin forked.
abritinthebay - 1 hours ago
That's still a civil war. If the fork doesn't get/stay strong
you think this will go away?It's just a strategy. Granted,
it's a good one.
Taek - 2 hours ago
The first salvo was called Bitcoin XT. And the second was
called Bitcoin Classic. And the third was called Bitcoin
Unlimited.And really, there were lots of skirmishes before any
of that even. This is a long, old battle, and the fork is more
like a resolution (two sides peacefully going their separate
ways) than a continuation of the war.
abritinthebay - 59 minutes ago
Fair, but the Segwit vs this is the current battle at
least.It's also the largest in a long while.
antocv - 55 minutes ago
Can you mention some of the salvos fired by your side?
bsmith - 4 hours ago
Now 4 blocks in: https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails
tlrobinson - 3 hours ago
Wasn't the fork scheduled to happen ~7 hours ago? Why did the
first block take so long if the hashrate is high enough to
produce 4 blocks in the subsequent half hour?
zorked - 3 hours ago
The new chain inherited the difficulty from the previous chain.
Now that the network realized there isn't as much hash rate the
difficulty has been reduced and a more normal rate of block
creation restored.Edit: that didn't happen yet, I stand
corrected
LyndsySimon - 3 hours ago
My understanding is that it will take much longer than that
for the BCC chain difficulty to significantly adjust.
eco - 1 hours ago
2016 blocks from what I understand. That's 14 days at 10
minute blocktimes.
simias - 3 hours ago
That didn't have time to trigger. Difficulty didn't change.
simias - 3 hours ago
The last common block was #478558 mined at 3:16:14 PM UTCThe
first BCC fork block was mined at 8:12:41 PM, almost 5 hours
later.The 2nd one was mined at 8:33:06 PM, 20 minutes later.And
then an other one not 5 minutes later.Meanwhile the difficulty
remained constant at 860221984436.2223Clearly there's been a
sudden surge in the hash rate.
mathieutd - 3 hours ago
That's surprisingly fast. Much more hashing power than
anticipated is backing the fork.
agorabinary - 3 hours ago
Despite having a higher hashrate than expected, the price of BCC is
crashing towards 1/10 of a bitcoin. The network effects and name
recognition of Bitcoin are too strong.
andrewla - 3 hours ago
More markets are opening; bittrex [1] just opened and the price
is now moving upwards pretty steadily (they opened at ~0.079
BCH/BTC and are now over 0.12), with good volume, 780 BTC ~=
$2.1M so farhttps://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BCC
runeks - 3 hours ago
It's interesting to note the trend for the various BCC/BTC
markets: the more volume the lower the price[1]. It could be a
symptom of most of the volume being sellers dumping into bids.[1]
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
mikeschmatz - 20 minutes ago
So, if you held 100 BTC before the fork, now you get to have 100BTC
+ 100BCC? Nice! Can we fork it few more times please? Me likes free
money :-)
whytaka - 3 hours ago
Does this mean Coinbase wallet holders have officially missed out
on the fork?
bpicolo - 3 hours ago
It means that Coinbase is currently sitting on a bunch of bitcoin
cash that they don't currently publicly plan to distribute
(Though if they do add support for cash, they will distribute it,
apparently)
jnordwick - 2 hours ago
This is seems susceptible to a lawsuit. It would be the
equivalent of a stock M/A or spin-off and your broker refusing
to give you any stock issuance you were to receive.
NedIsakoff - 2 hours ago
Or is it something like this: SingerSoft has decided to give
1 share of SingerSoft owner of each share of Microsoft.
Unfortunately you're broker isn't going to add it to your
account for you.
jonknee - 1 hours ago
Anyone is free to create a fork though, only the company you
own shares in can make changes to the shares. If I create a
fork of BCC called BCC Plus are you going to lose it when
your favorite exchange doesn't give you what's yours?
xorcist - 1 hours ago
It might be useful to note that Bitcoin Cash isn't the first
coin to be initially distributed to Bitcoin holders. I believe
there are have been two other just this year, and I don't know
how many in total.Coinbase has not honored giveaways of these
previous coins to their customers, so it sort of makes sense
that they treat this one exactly the same. Otherwise they'd
have to answer why they treated this one differently.(Most
other coins have just copied the UXTO set from a certain block
height and not the entire historical blockchain. This saves a
lot of space as you can start with megabytes of data instead of
a hundred gigabytes. There are probably marketing reasons why
it was made this way.)
mgbmtl - 1 hours ago
Which other coins? Coinbase doesn't support many types of
coins (only BTC, ETH, LTC), so I'm not surprised they are
ignoring smaller coins. I just assumed they were not worth
the hassle?Ironically, Coinbase holding onto the Bitcoin Cash
(by not supporting it, and hence not letting their users sell
it) is probably helping it, since Coinbase users cannot dump
their BCC for a quick buck. As you say, it's kind of a
giveaway..
mccoyspace - 3 hours ago
Basically yes. CB has said that they won't support the coin.
bigpeopleareold - 2 hours ago
You would think then that all this bcash is basically locked up
and can't be spent then. If bcash does become valuable, you'd
think that this would become a potential class-action lawsuit
then?
sixdimensional - 3 hours ago
As someone who missed the Bitcoin boat, I admit to having to read
up to figure out what was going on here.From what I read, Bitcoin
Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like Ethereum, but based on a
change to the original design of Bitcoin algorithms, which
increased the basic block size of the transactions. It seems this
was done to increase transaction performance.Also it seems there
were competing proposals in the community about how to accomplish
the goal of increasing transaction performance, "SegWit2x" and
"BitCoin Cash" - and the folks who started the BitCoin Cash fork
didn't agree with the SegWit2x strategy.Anybody else more in the
know, can explain it like I'm 5?Is this a good thing or a bad
thing? Are people exploiting this via some sort of arbitrage or
whatever to try to make money again? It seems risky?EDIT: Removed
quotes around the word "fork".
trelliscoded - 3 hours ago
This is a good overview:https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_lim
it_controversy#Argu...There's a bunch of political reasons on
both sizes as well.
Taek - 3 hours ago
> From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency
like Ethereum, but based on a change to the original design of
Bitcoin algorithms, which increased the basic block size of the
transactions. It seems this was done to increase transaction
performance.It is an altcoin, but unlike most altcoins it has a
shared history with Bitcoin. Basically, at the moment of it's
creation (today, August 1st), everone who owned bitcoins owned an
equal number of Bitcoin Cash. So now they are two separate coins
and two separate chains, but with a shared history.> Is this a
good thing or a bad thing?It's hard to give a judgement. When
Apple started working on a self-driving car, was that a good
thing or a bad thing? Hard to say, it more of just was a thing to
know, unless you had a horse in the self-driving car race.
Bitcoin Cash will either be successful in some capacity or it
will flop altogether, but the original Bitcoin certainly isn't
going anywhere.If you don't have a horse in the race, I wouldn't
think of it as a good or bad thing. It's just an event that
doesn't mean too much unless you are excited about Bitcoin Cash
and the principles it stands for, or if you have Bitcoin and
don't realize that you also have an equivalent number of Bitcoin
Cash (currently trading at like $200 each - a nontrivial sum!)
sixdimensional - 2 hours ago
Is this kind of like having a new denomination of currency?
For example, why carry around 10 $1 bills when I can carry
around one $10 bill?If the number of bitcoins you have stays
the same, but just the block size of storage in transaction
changes, then I'd guess it's very similar to a bigger unit of
currency.
Taek - 2 hours ago
No, not quite. It's like having $25 in your wallet in USD,
and then next time you look at your wallet you have $25 in
USD and also $25 in USD-different. Then you go to the store
and find out they only accept USD, and not USD-different, but
if you go to a currency exchange you can trade your USD-
different for $1 or $2 in USD each.Not a great analogy I
guess, but the point is that it's definitely not the same as
having a new denomination of currency. It's a whole new
currency entirely, it's just that everyone who had Bitcoin
was "granted" (sorta) this new currency too, in the same
volume that they had the old currency.
sixdimensional - 1 hours ago
I understand - thank you for sharing!I find it interesting
that the two split and then essentially float as different
currencies at different rates. Surely, there will be some
inter-relationship between them as well.
jamiegreen - 2 hours ago
>but the original Bitcoin certainly isn't going anywhere.I
don't know much about Bitcoin, so I am curious why you think
that? Mostly because I own a (miniscule) amount of Bitcoin..
thefalcon - 2 hours ago
It has the momentum and the majority mining (hash) power
behind it, which is the most important thing in a
cryptocurrency using proof of work. That said, nothing in
this life is actually certain, and major flaws in Segwit
could be found that cause the power to flip over to BCC and
BTC could end up going down the drain. Or both BTC and BCC
could lose out to Etherium or the USD or gold. Nobody knows
the future, but the easy money is on BTC remaining the lead
horse in this race.
colordrops - 2 hours ago
Labels such as "altcoin" are propaganda. It does nothing to
describe actual physical/technical properties of a chain. It
is only meant as a tool to alter people's perceptions of a
coin.
sukhadatkeereo - 3 hours ago
Please listen to this podcast to understand better. Naval
Ravikant and Nick Szabo have done a great job explaining the
basics.https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/
eosophos - 37 minutes ago
Szabo sure seems like Satoshi. Interesting that they bash
Litecoin though.
[deleted]
Kiro - 3 hours ago
> From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency
like EthereumNo, it's a fork. The fact that you put quotation
marks around the word makes it seem like you think it's some kind
of allegory. It's as much a fork as it gets. Ethereum was a whole
new chain, not a fork.
sixdimensional - 3 hours ago
I removed the quotes per your suggestion. Nothing in
particular was implied, I just thought it was an interesting
context/use of the term, which is why I put it in quotes.
burger_moon - 3 hours ago
Are there any reputable exchanges which you can buy bitcoin cash
from yet?
TaylorGood - 3 hours ago
Bittrex and others
ruleabidinguser - 2 hours ago
Bittrex is telling me I can't... what others?
doctoboggan - 2 hours ago
You can get them on Kraken
aresant - 3 hours ago
Most fascinating to me has been Coinbase's position throughout
this.Which was essentially they are treating the new Bitcoin cash
as a shitcoin, aka not supporting it.They took the position that if
you want your "free" Bitcoin Cash, move your BTC out of
Coinbase.(1)This led to the inevitable service decay & delays that
CoinBase has become well known for in the bitcoin community
whenever leading up to a high volume event. (2)And yet their
internal PR team has given somewhat measured responses that "if
Coinbase decides to support Bitcoin Cash in the future, it will
distribute the balances that accrue at the time of the August 1
fork." (3)The article w/that nugget goes on to state that when
Ethereum split "Coinbase eventually let customers withdraw their
share of the new currency, known as "Ethereum Classic," even though
it still does not allow it to be bought and sold on the Coinbase
site."Seems like a risky bet not to just say something closer to
"Hey if Bitcoin Cash is a thing and worth more than 1% of the
original BTC we'll support it. If it's not at the end of 90 days
we'll give you a way to take it out either way."Judging by the
volume of concern and disdain from newbies in the Bitcoin forums a
lot of people got woken up by this event and what it means to have
your decentralized currency controlled by a central authority.(1)
https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...(2)
http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-spawns-12hou...(3)
http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-coinbase/
endlessvoid94 - 1 hours ago
As a non-early adopter of blockchain tech, I appreciated the
clarity that Coinbase decided on here. "You don't have to worry
about anything."Which, if you aren't familiar with what the word
"fork" means in the developer world, was exactly what I wanted to
hear from a legitimate company like Coinbase.
Belphemur - 1 hours ago
Kraken made it also quite clear, like 1 BTC in your account = 1
BCC.And BCC will start at 0.01 BTC.To me you don't need to be a
developer to understand that.
endlessvoid94 - 24 minutes ago
"What's the difference? Will this happen again? Do I
automatically have any of this newfangled bitcoin cash?"
bradgessler - 1 hours ago
I don't see a problem with how this was handled by Coinbase. It's
obvious they're a central authority. When people make the choice
of Coinbase over managing their own wallet they're sacrificing
freedom for a sense of security.
JustAnotherPat - 3 hours ago
What's the difference between Bitcoin Cash and a Bitcoin clone
that anyone can set up?
Zarath - 3 hours ago
Nonzero miner and community support.
thefalcon - 2 hours ago
That's the crux of it. BCC is truly the end result of the
years long civil war within Bitcoin, and so represents a
significant minority of users and miners who really wanted
larger blocks over Segwit and are willing to put their money
where their beliefs are. This hard fork has been a very long
time coming, unlike some Bitcoin clone that anyone could set
up.
j_s - 3 hours ago
Disclaimer/FYI/FWIW: Coinbase was YC S12.
barmstrong - 2 hours ago
Coinbase CEO here - apologies for the confusion on that.I
certainly wouldn't say we are treating it as a "shitcoin". I
tweeted out a few thoughts here to share how I think about it:htt
ps://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/89248668753155686...Hope
it helps. Thx!
AvenueIngres - 51 minutes ago
Can you fix your exchange/company?Downtime should be
unacceptable and exceptional for a financial marketplace.On
Coinbase however, downtimes and unexpected behavior are common
place, and happen multiple times a week.It's outright
fraudulent when you allow your employees to trade during those
downtimes.What the hell.
45h34jh53k4j - 1 hours ago
Except it really is a shitcoin. A scam to ensure that the
mining pools can keep exploiting ASICBOOST. Ignore it and move
on in life.
colordrops - 1 hours ago
Nice drive-by propaganda comment that ignores a massive
amount of context and subtlety.
rmaus - 1 hours ago
This is completely off topic, but does it bother anybody else
that we live in a world where the CEO of any technologically
savvy company disseminates announcements as a picture of text?
bdcravens - 1 hours ago
No more than a world where college-educated professional
programmers communicate using memes and emojis.
rcthompson - 1 hours ago
Well, that's kind of the de facto standard for tweeting large
blocks of text that don't read well as a sequence of tweets.
mmagin - 44 minutes ago
I think the idea was more along the lines of "Remember blog
posts?"
sillysaurus3 - 1 hours ago
It's better than the old days of hearing nothing except press
releases.
ucha - 1 hours ago
Bitcoin cash represents 7-8% of the value of a bitcoin pre-
split. How is it user friendly to "tax" coinbase bitcoin
holders by that amount? Is coinbase just going to sell those
bitcoin cash for its own profit? Some transparancy would be
greatly appreciated. Thanks
idrism - 54 minutes ago
Answered here:
https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/892499250273107968Will
Coinbase keep BCC coins for itself?No. Coinbase does not
intend to support or interact with the new blockchain in any
way. If this were to change, Coinbase would make those coins
available for customers to withdraw, not keep them.
aresant - 40 minutes ago
Appreciate your statement.Many that left their BTC assets on CB
in interest of your core benefits - simplicity, security - will
watch with interest for further communication in the coming
weeks as price of bt cash stabilizes.
marcell - 2 hours ago
That's fine but there is obviously demand for BCH trading and
by not supporting it, Coinbase/GDAX is forcing otherwise happy
customers onto competing platforms.
bayonetz - 1 hours ago
Definitely wish Coinbase had just taken care of it for me.
Instead, I withdrew everything to a personel wallet and will
be depositing my BCC to Kraken. I'll probably just deposit my
BTC to Kraken as well since I'm going through the trouble. I
like that Kraken will give me access to a bunch of other
coins to get exposure to. On the plus side, all this is
motivating me to deepen my understanding of the cryptocoin
tech/ecosystem.
GordonS - 1 hours ago
Did the same, but from. Bitstamp to Kraken (Bitstamp took
the same position as Coinbase). Kraken supports USD now,
which it didn't used to last time I traded there, so I'll
probably just stick with Kraken.I imagine most of the
exchanges that didn't support BCH are going to lose a lot
of customers over it.
bayonetz - 1 hours ago
Folks like us voicing this stuff may make them rethink
things and they retroactively make it right for the
people who didn't bother to be proactive. Which would
then just add insult to injury for us! Well at least I
got some good experience out of it...
[deleted]
sillysaurus3 - 1 hours ago
Meanwhile, Kraken supports Bitcoin Cash from minute
one:http://blog.kraken.com/post/1150/bitcoin-cash-
and-a-critical...http://blog.kraken.com/post/1183/bitcoin-cash-
and-a-critical...Here's Coinbase's original statement, which
seems to be exactly what the grandparent comment was saying:
https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/890986442674941953"Coinbase
does not intend to interact with the Bitcoin Cash blockchain."
endlessvoid94 - 1 hours ago
Then go to Kraken!
sillysaurus3 - 1 hours ago
The point is, splits and civil wars cause customer
confusion and are harmful for bitcoin adoption. Coinbase is
throwing some political weight around by saying "We won't
support BCH." Their competitors do, so are customers
supposed to think it's a technical challenge to support
BCH?It's just strange that Coinbase either wasn't prepared
or sees BCH as a threat. Balkanization of bitcoin is
unnecessary. Why refuse to support what everyone else
supports?
https://twitter.com/Yelka_Pineda/status/891020902066003968
Mahn - 1 hours ago
In my view, as a bystander with no skin in the game, the
BCH fork is very much political, so there's no reason why
exchanges should not take a political stance in response.
It's hardly a question of supporting what "everyone else"
supports, Bitstamp has the same position for instance.
pera - 1 hours ago
Why exactly should Coinbase support every new altcoin? I
seriously can not understand your point.
dogruck - 49 minutes ago
Thank you for linking the prior statement. I read it, and
disagree with your conclusion that it's the same as the
grandparent.It simply says, not supporting BCC now, but might
in the future -- we will not acquire the BCCs for Coinbase.
bdcravens - 1 hours ago
> They took the position that if you want your "free" Bitcoin
Cash, move your BTC out of Coinbase.(1)> when Ethereum split
"Coinbase eventually let customers withdraw their share of the
new currency, known as "Ethereum Classic," even though it still
does not allow it to be bought and sold on the Coinbase site.Note
the ETC withdrawal option came after ETC spiked in price and
retreated like 80%. Coinbase then ended ETC withdrawals at the
end of 2016. I suspect you'll see the same with BCH.
fpgaminer - 42 minutes ago
Anyone who doesn't understand Coinbase's reluctance to add
support for BCH, or any other altcoin, needs to understand this
hypothetical scenario:1) I'm a long time miner who owns a
massive wealth of Bitcoins.2) I fund some developers to create a
hardfork.3) I dedicate a small percentage of my mining power to
prop up the new coin.4) Coinbase adds support for the new
coin.5) I deposit all my new split coins at Coinbase, trade for
BTC, and withdraw BTC.6) Using the rest of my mining power I
then reverse the depositing transactions to Coinbase by double
spending.7) Profit.I think it's positively absurd that _any_
exchange is supporting BCH.But to each their own peril.
QML - 5 minutes ago
6) says that coins with smaller mining pools are more
susceptible to double spending attacks correct?
jron - 2 hours ago
Anyone can create infinite forks similar to BCC/BCH. Should
Coinbase support them all?
wolco - 38 minutes ago
Depending on the interest in the coin I would say yes. Not
doing so will cost them customers.
colordrops - 1 hours ago
No, but they should support forks with significant hashing
power and exchange value behind them.
btcthrowawayy - 2 hours ago
FWIW I moved ~80 BTC out of Coinbase almost instantly
yesterday.It's not unreasonable to expect some delays accessing
their cold storage (which is key split across geographically
disparate safe deposit boxes, last I heard)That said, I was
around during Mt. Gox's failure (fortunately didn't lose anything
then) so I get a little skittish when I hear about a
wallet/exchange experiencing withdrawal delays...
pfisch - 3 hours ago
Yeah that was a pretty crappy attitude considering BCC is trading
at $200 right now. I imagine a lot of early bitcoin buyers used
coinbase and are sitting on like 10+ btc.Not really cool to be
ambiguous about stealing $2000+ from your users.
ShabbosGoy - 3 hours ago
In what way is deciding not to support BCC stealing?It's more
akin to a forex brokerage deciding not to support EUR when it
first came out over the lira. You can easily use someone else,
Coinbase is hardly the only service around.
beambot - 3 hours ago
It's more like HP shares splitting into HP and Agilent, and
your brokerage deciding that it won't track your ownership
stake in Agilent and not giving you any further access to
obtain your Agilent stock.Under these circumstances, you'd
have serious reservations about passively parking any assets
with that particular broker...
cesarb - 2 hours ago
That's one possible analogy. Another analogy would be: an
unrelated third-party decides to give, to everyone who has
HP shares, an equivalent number of shares in a new company.
In that case, a broker would be under no obligation to give
you these new shares.Which analogy is the best one depends
on your point of view on this debate.
laretluval - 2 hours ago
> a broker would be under no obligation to give you these
new shares.No obligation would exist, but I'd rather take
my business to a broker who would do so, given the
choice.
[deleted]
stouset - 2 hours ago
If you have pre-fork BTC on Coinbase, you have no way of
capturing its value as BCC since you don't own the wallet.
[deleted]
matthewbauer - 2 hours ago
I don't know if you have a historical example of that
happening but it would most likely be illegal to accept lira
but not EUR.
ShabbosGoy - 50 minutes ago
I don't have an actual historical example, it was more of a
thought experiment.
ftlio - 2 hours ago
If you don't hold your keys, you're subject to the decisions of
those who do. Coinbase is a good enough steward of most
people's bitcoins that it's a fine trade-off.
[deleted]
door - 1 hours ago
keeping 10+btc in coinbase is immensely stupid.don't keep your
bitcoin in exchanges. it defeats three of the main appeals of
bitcoin: autonomy, trustlessness, anonymity
dragonwriter - 1 hours ago
> Not really cool to be ambiguous about stealing $2000+ from
your users.Serious question: under what legal theory (not loose
analogy) is the BCH corresponding to a wallet held by Coinbase
property of Coinbase's users and not Coinbase?
wbl - 1 hours ago
Security laws. Stuff like this happens all the times in
spinoffs and the rules are very clear about who is entitled
to the proceeds.
dragonwriter - 1 hours ago
> Security laws.That's hardly specific.> Stuff like this
happens all the times in spinoffsThere's a reason I
specifically excluded loose analogies.> the rules are very
clear about who is entitled to the proceeds.And the
specific rules that specifically apply to a fork of a
cryptocurrnecy and a firm providing wallet services like
Coinbase are...what, precisely?Perhaps general securities
laws are written in a way which encompasses this scenario,
but I'm asking about the specific applicable laws that
cover the situation at hand.
bootsz - 2 hours ago
Their particular position is one thing, but giving only 4 days
notice is quite another. Especially considering any BTC held in
their "vault" service takes 48h to transfer into standard wallet.
I (and I'm assuming many other folks) would have happily
withdrawn if I had the time and wasn't busy doing things over the
weekend.
fosap - 2 hours ago
They can have any stand they want. But they deny me my
property.Imagine a bank anouncing they would keep all the
dividends of one particular stock, because the didn't like it.
That's what coinbase is doing. It plain and simply theft.
dragonwriter - 2 hours ago
> But they deny me my property.Is it your property? It's a
benefit that people have decided to extend to whoever
controls existing Bitcoin wallets. Do you have an agreement
with Coinbase that obligated them to transfer to you any such
benefit that should accrue to the Bitcoin wallet they control
for you?
fosap - 1 hours ago
Of course. The Bitcoins are still mine, even i keep them in
a coinbase wallet. (ownsership vs perssesion). Now every
btc owner gets bcc. The owner is me, not coinbase. I gave
the persession of by btc to coinbase to trade them
eventually, not to give up ownership. And as the owner that
never 1) gave away usufruct I'm entiled to all profits from
them. See the share/divident analogy.1) At last not legaly
binding, that had to be there at the very least in red
flashing letters, possibly even then it would have been
void.
dragonwriter - 1 hours ago
> The Bitcoins are still mine, even i keep them in a
coinbase wallet.Right, that's governed by your contract
with Coinbase, and is the service they offer.> Now every
btc owner gets bcc.No, everyone controlling a BTC wallet
is now also controlling a BCC (or BCH, I've seen both
used as the abbreviation) wallet with an equal number of
coins.I'm guessing rights to coins on alternative chains
that Coinbase ends up controlling due to BTC forks are
not covered in your contract with Coinbase.
fosap - 1 hours ago
Edited my comment to make it clearer.There is a
difference between ownership and possion. Technically (in
the meaning "how it is realized in computer code") bcc is
given to the person possessing btc. But by the law the
owner is entitled to the profits of a thing. But coinbase
does not own my coins, it merely posses them.
dragonwriter - 1 hours ago
> There is a difference between ownership and possionYes,
ownership is a matter of law. By what law does the act of
a fork which grants possession of BCH to controllers of
BTC wallets grant ownership to anyone else?> But by the
law the owner is entitled to the profits of a
thingThat's, at best, imprecise. I own money, which I
hold on a bank, which contracts a certain rate of
interest (which may be zero) to be paid on it while I
hold it there. I absolutely do not own any profits the
bank is able to realize through holding the money (any
more than, beyond those contracted, I am liable for any
costs associated with their holding of money); indeed,
their ownership of the net profits realizable by having
the money in their hands is central to their business
model. (There are restrictions on their ability to use
the money they are holding to prevent undue risk of them
not being able to pay my money back, but if they gain a
windfall, I don't share in it.)The real question seems to
be legally whether BCH is a gift to those owning BTC or
those possessing it. In the absence of very strong
evidence to the contrary, I think the law is likely to
say that who possession was given to also determines who
ownership was given to. If I give a thousand dollars cash
to everyone I see wearing a green hat, and one of those
people had borrowed the hat, the owner of the hat is
going to have a difficult time arguing that they own the
thousand dollars.
nandhp - 1 hours ago
I got three notifications from Coinbase, dating as early as
July 19th; that's way more than 4 days notice.
orisa2 - 44 minutes ago
I received zero notifications. I'm assuming they selectively
decided to notify users based on how recently they had logged
in perhaps, meaning that there may be a large amount of
cumulative bitcoin whose owners were not notified. I only
heard of anything from being on Hacker News.
ringaroundthetx - 4 hours ago
with an ounce of confidence, maybe people will be too greedy to
sell it off.
[deleted]
provost - 4 hours ago
Interesting -- It still shows "NO UNPLANNED CHAIN SPLIT DETECTED"
on https://www.btcforkmonitor.info, which a lot of folks are using
to monitor the fork (from the other HN thread).
celticninja - 3 hours ago
Scroll down to the blue box. That's the bitcoin cash (bch)
monitor and it says that the split has occurred as expected. The
others were changed to bitcoin that were not expected to cause a
fork.
rory096 - 3 hours ago
Well it's not unplanned.... Note how the Bitcoin Cash box is a
different color and says "This node's scheduled chain split has
occurred."
xbeta - 3 hours ago
Quick Question: Sorry, don't know much about Bitcoin, but does this
mean Block #478559 is the last block that was forked? Or the first
block that was forked?
redog - 2 hours ago
478558 is the last common block 478559 is the forked one.
mathieutd - 3 hours ago
Interesting to see that the backlog in unprocessed transactions on
the original bitcoin chain is exploding at the same time: https
://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h
TD-Linux - 2 hours ago
I suspect that many people are sending their balances to a new
address, so that they can import their old keys into a Bitcoin
Cash client.
BenoitP - 1 hours ago
The fees are very low, and all the same sizes.My take on this
is this is partisans of big blocks saturating the original
chain; as if to try to prove a point. It does cost them some
little amount of money, though.
xbeta - 2 hours ago
ELI5: For folks who moved BTC out of Coinbase before the hard-fork,
what's the next step? Said I want to keep both BTC and BCC. I had
a hardware wallet, what are some implications that I move my BTC
now to my hardware wallet?
landhar - 2 hours ago
I had the same question earlier, and I found the following
statement by the maintainers of the Electrum wallet very
englightning:https://electrum.org/bcc.txtIn particular this
section:> How to redeem my BCC?> BCC wallets will require you to
import your seed or your private keys, which can be exported from
Electrum. Doing so will expose all your Bitcoin funds associated
with that seed to the BCC wallet you decide to use.> Therefore,
after the BCC fork, but before you enter a seed or private key in
a BCC wallet, you should move all your funds to a new Electrum
wallet, with a new seed. You will still be able to use the old
seed or private key with BCC, because BCC has replay protection.
Wait until your funds are confirmed in your new Bitcoin wallet,
before you enter the old private key in a BCC wallet. This will
protect your BTC funds from rogue/untrusted software.
xbeta - 2 hours ago
Great find! I guess I will have to wait for that Electrum
wallet which supports BCC then, then transfer?
thescriptkiddie - 1 hours ago
Ledger is offering a split tool in their hardware
wallets:https://blog.ledger.co/managing-the-bitcoin-cash-fork-
7229dd...
TekMol - 4 hours ago
1.9 MByte in size / 6985 transactions.This is about twice as much
as is possible in a block of the old Bitcoin chain.This will become
super interesting.
hendzen - 4 hours ago
Yeah, if the fees are lower and the network is less congested I
wonder if legacy Bitcoin could get overtaken for small
transactions?
TekMol - 3 hours ago
If so, that would be a historic victory of pragmatism.A lot of
popular engineers in powerful positions have been working for
years on how to scale Bitcoin.Now some people said "Fuck that!
We will just increase this integer from 1 to 8".Reminds me of
how Linus Torvalds created a simple monolithic Kernel while
GNU&Co were working on sophisticated microkernels. Now, 26
years later, everything from servers to smartphones runs on
Linux. And GNU Herd is still considered experimental.
justadeveloper2 - 3 hours ago
Except nobody was "investing" (speculating) on GNU Herd. It
should give a lot of people pause that Bitcoin can just
suddenly split like this. What's to stop it from being split
again and again?
opportune - 3 hours ago
The split itself is not damaging. It's like if 100 bars of
your gold were suddenly 100 bars of gold and 100 bars of
gold cash. The original gold marketplace is only affected
as much as it is replaced by the gold cash marketplace. So
it doesn't matter how many times the coin gets split in
this fashion
johannes1234321 - 1 hours ago
While This analgy works only to some limited degree -
gold has a value in itself, you can use it to build some
jewels, an electric conductor or a door stopper among
other things. A Bitcoin has no inherent value. If nobody
is interested in Bitcoin (or Bitcoin cash) anymore it's
just a few bits in a disk which can be overwritten.
sayurichick - 2 hours ago
simple. The cost of pulling it off.Even if I had a million
dollars in funding, that would buy me mining power for oh
so long. All the meanwhile, If I change the rules too much
no one would even attempt to join my fork.Even If I had
another million dollars to pay developers to build services
on my new fork, there'd be no users and no economic
activity. The fork would die.There SHOULD be a lot of hard
forks. Why? Because they're voluntary and most will fail
without doing harm (they require consensus to matter). The
good ones will survive on merit and act as protocol
upgrades.
epistasis - 3 hours ago
It's not so sudden, it's been a continuous debate for
years. It's likely that there will be future splits as
well. The split is only successful if enough people start
using it. It involves a lot of trust, but no more than one
has had to have from the beginning of bitcoin.What should
give us pause about that?
omgtehlion - 3 hours ago
With the same success you could have forked bitcoin with the
same block size, or just minor increase.BCC is currently not
congested only due to small number of transactions happening
there.
poorman - 3 hours ago
And here I thought Linux won out because BSD was wrapped up
in a lawsuit.http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-
software-compan...
kbenson - 3 hours ago
Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers'
ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt
adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about
BSD's legal future.In the time frame they are talking
about, 1993-1994, almost nobody was using Linux
commercially (except tjhe distros selling it). Even after
that, Linux was fairly immature. If BSD was going to be a
real contender, it still had a sizable lead. That it
didn't win in the end leads me to believe other factors
were more important, such as the license (which the article
you linked also notes).The BSD license is more permissive
and appealing to a lot of organizations, but the
requirement of the GPL to give back ultimately lead to a
virtuous cycle where companies moved portions of their code
in-kernel, because out of kernel is more problematic if
it's also not proprietary.
MBCook - 3 hours ago
I've heard that's one of the big reasons Linux succeeded
over 386BSD (?), but GP is right that GNU could have just
made their own OS a few times over in the time Linux has
been around and they've barely achieved anything other than
starting over at least once with a new kernel.
ue_ - 3 hours ago
GNU has made an OS, and it is frequently used in
conjunction with Linux. HURD on the other hand according
to Stallman is of lower priority because there is already
a major copyleft kernel and so the pressure of necessity
is much lower, leading developers to want to spend more
time on other projects.
legulere - 2 hours ago
GNU is not an operating system, but a collection of
mostly commandline tools.If you look at Linux
distributions, GNU ist just a relatively small part if
you look at lines of code. And of that most is GCC and
GDB:http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux/
snakeanus - 1 hours ago
GNU is often used with Linux in order to comprise a full
OS as defined by POSIX. It so happens that GNU can also
be used by itself to do the same thing (by using GNU HURD
and GNU MACH).>GNU is not an operating systemCould you
please elaborate on this position?>but a collection of
mostly commandline tools."Mostly" being the keyword, it
also contains multiple implementations of different
programming languages as well as their standard
libraries, a kernel as well as a package manager. Also in
the commandline tools it includes most (if not all) of
the tools that are required by POSIX.> If you look at
Linux distributions, GNU ist just a relatively small part
if you look at lines of codeI am unsure how this is
relevant. In fact, I would argue that this is to be
expected, especially when considering that the link
checked everything in the main repository.
legulere - 1 hours ago
That's like saying busybox is an operating system,
because it helps Linux to comprise a full OS as defined
by POSIX> Could you please elaborate on this position?GNU
is not an operating system, but some small projects that
are used as minor components of Linux distributions> GNU
HURD and GNU MACHNobody uses them. They are as relevant
as the Windows Services for UNIX
Zarath - 3 hours ago
No, Litecoin already exists.
hendzen - 3 hours ago
The killer feature is having the same UTXO history as legacy
Bitcoin. That is a genius way of on-boarding a huge array of
users without having to worry about a premine/crowdsale
considering those are ridiculously overcrowded at the moment.
antocv - 1 hours ago
The other genius part was doing this today, when the small-
blockers and segwit proponents already had marketed this
day for their supposed "USAF" - the anti-miner consensus-
by-amount-of-nodes change.Had this fork been done months
before, not many would have noticed or cared. Well played.
mtgx - 4 hours ago
I don't think increasing the block size is an obvious win. I've
seen others say it won't in fact do much to increase scalability,
and there are also these arguments against it:https://www.reddit.
com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5p9iv8/arguments_a...https://en.bitcoin.it
/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
MichaelGG - 3 hours ago
It's been an obvious win for a long time. If Chinese miners
want to delay propagation, they can just do that.The other
complaints about expensive nodes are unfounded. Just
downloading existing blocks is still very feasible at 8MB even
with data caps.This could have been prevented by going to 2 or
4 megs years back, avoiding the stupid arguments and providing
real solid experimental data in the process. It'd have
alleviated some of the congestion, too.
RustyRussell - 2 hours ago
But segwit did go to 4MB (worst case), except done in a
backwards compatible way, and removing the current
unfortunate bias that creating new outputs is cheaper for
transactions than consuming old outputs, though obviously the
latter is better for the network as a whole.
celticninja - 3 hours ago
Unfortunately the following 3 blocks were tiny in comparison,
whether due to a malicious miner or lack of transactions is
unclear.
mathieutd - 3 hours ago
Lack of transactions. The mempool is almost empty: https
://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/uahf/#2h
jnordwick - 2 hours ago
Not surprisingly, when BCH started, it ran up about $150 and at the
same time, BCT fell by a similar amount (approx $2800 to $2650).
And as BCH slowly falls, BCT is slowly climbing. Which makes sense
if you view this as an equity spin-off.I would expect this
relationship to hold -- that for every dollar BCH gains, BCT is
prevented from gaining a dollar. Unless somebody has some good
reason this wouldn't be the case.At the same time ETH ran up from
about $205 to $225.
tlrobinson - 1 hours ago
(I assume you mean BTC not BCT)I would expect the total value to
decline if there's not one clear winner, since the value somewhat
depends on network effects (e.g. Metcalf's Law)
techaddict009 - 39 minutes ago
Finally BTC has been hard forked and BCH & BTC are live.Some fun
facts: Forked should have name XBC as per ISO bt thats already
taken so they named BCH1st BCH block 478559 & BTC Block no 478559
where mined by ViaBTCViaBTC dedicated BCH block to her daughter by
adding comment on 1st Block of BCH "?_M?*/ViaBTC/Welcome to the
world, Shuya Yang!/?q???3?0c"
jamiegreen - 3 hours ago
Forgive the naive question, but how does the whole 'free Bitcoin
Cash' thing work? I have a small amount of Bitcoin in the Exodus
wallet.
gwbas1c - 1 hours ago
Basically, Bitcoin cash is another kind of cryptocurrency as
Bitcoin. The naming is somewhat confusing. If you owned Bitcoin
at the start of Bitcoin cash, you get free Bitcoin cash.There are
technical differences that may make one or the other succeed.
pkilgore - 2 hours ago
Think of it like copying twitter's database then launching a
competitor. All tweets, users, etc. on both sites are the same
up until the day the database is copied. Then the tweets, users
etc. can be different depending on which site folks use.You get
all your tweets on the new site for free.Same with BCC. They
copied the Bitcoin database at block 478558. So if you have a
coin in a BTC account before block 478558, you now have the same
coin on the BTC chain, and a copy of that coin on the copied BCC
chain.To use it, you just need to use a BCC wallet, the same way
you'd use a BTC wallet to use BTC.But if you don't know your
private key (usually because your coin was on an exchange) then
you are out of luck. Google if your exchange will credit you
BCC.
tylersmith - 2 hours ago
I've tried explaining this to numerous people but never thought
about comparing it to starting a clone of a website with the
same DB to start with. Great analogy.
k__ - moments ago
Also, you can write 1000 character tweets in the fork.
brndnmtthws - 3 hours ago
To me, it seems like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is just a cash grab (no pun
intended) by a minority of misguided Bitcoin enthusiasts. From what
I can tell, the main reason for the resistance to Segwit is that it
reduces the power and influence of miners. That's why the people
who are pushing BCH are also invested in mining. Miners earn money
from transaction fees, and therefore have an incentive to
artificially inflate the fees by delaying transactions
(transactions are processed in order of highest to lowest
fees).There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation
here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-
split-...
MichaelGG - 3 hours ago
Why would a larger block size increase fees?ASICBoost might be a
reason miners are against segwit. But enabling offchain payments
kills the P2P aspect pretty hard.There's no good reason for not
having had at least 2MB blocks years ago. And it'd have provided
solid info on the real impact, not just fear mongering.
brndnmtthws - 3 hours ago
I addressed this in another reply, but I'll repeat: it's a
temporary solution. You're merely delaying the inevitable,
since the block size limit can't be changed without a hard
fork.
MichaelGG - 2 hours ago
I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. But 2x or 8x'ing
the capacity would be welcome, especially a while ago when
the mempool was dozens of MB.It's silly to say it's not a
permanent solution therefore not worth doing at all.
dwaltrip - 3 hours ago
There isn't a legitimate reason to restrict block sizes to 1MB.
That is the primary reason for the fork.Some claim that anything
larger than 1MB will "hurt decentralization", but many others
have shown this to be a very weak argument (sorry, I don't have
any links handy).You don't need every Jane Smith running a full
node on a rasberry pi to have robust decentralization.
brndnmtthws - 3 hours ago
There is still a plan to activate 2MB blocks, at a later date
(which is part of the Segwit2x proposal).I actually don't fully
understand the reasons for why the pro-segwit side doesn't want
to increase the block size (even beyond 2MB), except that it's
a slippery slope: with Bitcoin, every time you change the block
size it requires a hard fork.Increasing the block size isn't a
long-term solution, because there's always going to be some new
ceiling. Eventually increasing the block size will become
impractical.As an aside, some coins have a variable block size
to deal with this. AFAIK Monero is the only "major" coin which
features variable blocks. It's also the only coin that's
actually private.
fosap - 2 hours ago
I don't understand why bitcoin is afraid of hardforks.
Ethereum hard forks like there is no tomorrow, and so far the
number of major block-chain-splits is equal, two. The offical
implementation not forking does by no means prevent anybody
else from hardforking to begin with, Bitcoin cash
demonstrates.
andrewla - 2 hours ago
I think ZCash is the only coin that is private in a real
sense; Monero is somewhat private, but as I recall, by
watching the mempool, it is possible to see the chains being
built and to reconstruct the payments. That's all transient
data that is not included in the blockchain itself, but for
agents interested in tracing future transactions or logging
current transactions there's a significant amount of
pseudonymous traceability.
jstanley - 1 hours ago
I think this is FUD about Monero. You don't see any more in
the mempool than you do in actual blocks.Can you cite any
sources?
ftlio - 2 hours ago
None have shown it to be a weak argument. None. If you could
post your links so that HN can see the kind of pseudo-science
the Bitcoin community has had to put up with, it would be much
appreciated.
duckingtest - 1 hours ago
Calling it 'weak' is giving it too much consideration. The
only sensible argument against larger blocks is that they
boost mining centralization because larger blocks may take
more time to propagate. Which may be true but it requires
1GB+ blocks. 10Gbps connection isn't a noticeable cost item
for a serious mining operation, which means latency for a 1MB
block and a 1GB one should be almost identical.That's it.
Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners,
and miners only. 'Nodes' in the whitepaper are synonymous
with miners.Non-mining wallets need to have enough bandwidth
to download blocks from miners as they appear. For 1GB blocks
20Mbps is enough. Which means a full verifying wallet for 1GB
blocks is practical on a LTE connection.Storage is also a
non-problem with utxo commitments.
sayurichick - 2 hours ago
as someone who was involved with bitcoin since 2009. you are VERY
wrong.this article will probably cover it better than I can.
https://coingeek.com/core-think-bitcoin-cash/but there was only
ever the "big blocks" camp to begin with. Starting with Satoshi
and Gavin Andresen. The "small block" movement is the newer
"vision" and didn't/wouldn't exist if not for the financial
interest suddenly employing the core developers.The market has
wanted bigger blocks for YEARS, and each attempt was
slandered/DDoS'ed/attacked. Bitcoin Cash is the result of the
market finally getting what it wants.
andrewla - 2 hours ago
It really takes some twisted logic to paint BCH has a miner-
friendly measure. It is unfriendly to miners in every way that
matters, which is why miners have never achieved consensus on any
of the large-block proposals so far.Specifically, it:- reduces
the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a
sufficiently scarce resources- makes orphaned blocks more likely,
which means that the probability of losing a block that you
already successfully mined is increased.Although I'm a large-
blocker myself, Segwit has one thing going for it, namely, fixing
transaction malleability. For anyone who has to deal with
bitcoin in bulk (any business using bitcoin, basically),
malleability is a killer bug -- it makes it very hard to detect
if your transactions have made it on to the network, and
impossible to chain transactions together reliably. That's who
benefits from Segwit, and it's a big benefit.It also enables some
off-chain solutions that are infeasible in a malleable-prone
network.The opposition to Segwit, in my opinion, stems mainly
from the fact that it is complicated, and was given priority over
the "clear and present" problem of blocks being full that had a
simpler solution of hard-forking to increase block size. So it's
being held up as a totem by the large-blocking crowd of the poor
decisions of Core, and for alleged conflicts of interest around
the off-chain solutions.Other than the risk of a hard fork
itself, the negative effects of a block size increase are so
small as to be meaningless, for users and for miners.
dwaltrip - 2 hours ago
> reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is
no longer a sufficiently scarce resourcesIf bitcoin popularity
grows, more transactions with lower per-tx fees will likely
result in more total fees per block, compared to a world in
which the block size is fixed and individual fees are higher.
The induced demand will be a significant factor. This is fairly
straightforward economics. This is a good thing by the way
=)Regarding orphan rates: I don't understand all of the gritty
details, but I have seen some convincing explanations
describing how, if block space isn't scarce, a miner's decision
to include an additional tx is largely based on the likelihood
that adding the tx will result in a block they find being
"orphaned". So it is a self-regulating feedback loop of sorts.
And as another poster said, it should affect all miner's
equally, assuming they have a sufficiently sophisticated setup
(low-latency, well-connected, etc).For those don't know about
orphan rates: An "orphaned" block is one that is wasted (and
the reward thus lost). This happens when another miner finds a
competing candidate block at a similar time and manages to
propagate it more quickly through the network such that it is
chosen by the majority as the next block.
flashdance - 2 hours ago
> makes orphaned blocks more likely, which means that the
probability of losing a block that you already successfully
mined is increasedA higher orphan rate won't reduce miner
profitability. Since everyone would experience the orphaning,
the difficulty will stabilize at a lower level and
profitability should be the same.
RustyRussell - 2 hours ago
No, you don't have an orphaning problem on your own blocks,
so it drives centralization.This is exactly what happened
when blocksize jumped from 100k to 250k: every small miner
jumped to the largest pool (ghash.io) because they were
seeing increased orphan rates, driving that pool over 50% of
hashing power.
tlrobinson - 1 hours ago
Block size increase will further centralize mining (as you
mentioned, it makes orphaned blocks more likely, especially for
smaller/less well-connected miners) and is a linearly scaling
solution to an exponential (?) scaling problem.
googletazer - 2 hours ago
Yup you got it. Bitcoin cash is a game of musical chairs - you
can only raise the block size so much before its completely
centralized (even more than it already is), by hardware
requirements.
throwaway9966 - 2 hours ago
How centralized does 8mb blocks (the max for BCC) make bitcoin?
Seems decentralized enough for me.Blocksize should be growing
at the same rate that bandwidth availability is growing, but is
isnt. Why not? That wouldnt affect decentralization at all.
aphextron - 2 hours ago
tl;dr what does this mean?
antocv - 52 minutes ago
There is 2 bitcoins now. Bitcoin Core with feature of segregated
witness (segwit).And Bitcoin Cash with increased block size
limit.
dang - 2 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881 is related.
solotronics - 3 hours ago
the tyranny of the miners.
JohnJamesRambo - 3 hours ago
It has a lot more hashrate than I expected, I've been pretty
surprised. Last number I saw was 3.9% and 247 petahash/s and
climbing. I hope it can survive, I actually prefer it to the
segwit Bitcoin plan and it seems to follow the original Satoshi
plan.
xorcist - 3 hours ago
There are some key words that are copy pasted into every
conversation of Bitcoin lately. "Satoshi's plan" is one of them.
Make of that what you will. Personally I find it a tad bit
creepy. Bitcoin is innovative, but it attracts penny stock-like
investment schemes like sugar to ants.Of all the sales pitches
for this coin, Satoshi's original plan makes the least possible
sense. This is a fork from Satoshi's coin that removes features,
the most important of which is the enabler of payment channels,
which if anything was Satoshi's plan.It's not like it's hard to
read Satoshi's writings directly from the source. It's seven
years ago, not ancient Rome. The forum has almost all of it
intact verbatim and then there's the wiki. In what little sense
there ever was a "plan" it's in plain view for everyone to see
and read all about what people thought of payment channels, fraud
proofs, and everything else.
ringaroundthetx - 3 hours ago
out of curiosity which part? the 9 year old white paper never
mentions payment channelsthis isn't an opinion about any
bitcoin fork, just curiosity about what you are referring to.
you say its not hard to read satoshi's words, but you rely on
having to read and interpret every single forum post scattered
around the internet?
resf - 3 hours ago
Literally the first sentence:Commerce on the Internet has
come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions
serving as trusted third parties to process electronic
payments.
ringaroundthetx - 2 hours ago
So an interpretation to support an ideal despite the
optional nature of payment channels, got it. I had ctrl+f
"payment channels" and got zero results.Payment channels,
as described by the lightning network, are optional.The
mempool on both chains are practically empty and both
chains function the same, until the mempool is full.One
chain will allow for optionally greater throughput via
payment channels and possible a block size expansion.One
chain will allow for block propagation upwards of 8
megabytes.Neither relies exclusively on third parties. The
first mentioned chain has an optional ironic future where
everyone operates a payment channel and eventually
consolidates into one payment channel provider, I
guess.Both chains have other "threats" towards
centralization.
dane-pgp - 2 hours ago
If anyone wants to see what the "practically empty"
mempools look like over time, this is a great
resource:https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1wThe
connection between full blocks and transaction fees is
here:https://i.redd.it/ec0r495f4nny.jpg
ringaroundthetx - 58 minutes ago
yep, when full (or when there are more than 1mb of
unconfirmed tx) these chains function differently.if it
wasn't clear, I was writing that they are practically
empty right now. at the time of writing.
xorcist - 1 hours ago
Many of us as has hung around the forum for some time, and
followed the discussions as they went along. (If it's any
consolation, most with only intellenctual interest and not
based on any desire to wire money to some gung-ho Japanese
corporation without proper business accounts, which is easy
to regret now. But I disgress.) Satoshi posted under that
username to mailing lists and forum. They contain everything
and it's all open to search, but if you're not looking for
something specific it might seem overwhelming.The white paper
is only the overview of the underlying system. You're not
going to find anything about the marketplace (look that up,
it's funny), payment systems or other applications of Bitcoin
in there.That's why I mentioned the wiki. Like all wikis it's
bit rotten and outdated, but it contains a lot of good
pointers to the source material, both code and discussions.
The page about "Payment channels" isn't a bad first guess. It
is too old to help you understand modern systems like
Lightning, but it will contain pointers to several other
payment channels that have been proposed. Including Nakamoto
fast transactions, which as the name might suggest was
suggested by Satoshi. It turned out to be a flawed design,
but the underlying ideas are basically the same as today.As
an interesting side note, that design was based on
replaceable transactions. Another popular thing to copy paste
into Bitcoin discussions is some conspiracy why this was
developed (and it was indeed proposed for removal in the
altcoin chain released today), but here you can see it was
actually in Bitcoin from the beginning and how it was
supposed to work.You will also note that many other
developers were sceptical about payment channels and
preferred instead to work on sidechains, ecash bonds, and
other methods. It's not like Poon and Dryja worked in a
vacuum, but their work looks like it could actually be
useful. Personally I don't expect it to be the final design
for payment channels, and there are still much work to do on
other methods of zero-confirmation high-throughput payment
networks for Bitcoin (such as the above mentioned).There's
still a tremendous amount of work on the technical side of
Bitcoin almost every day. Much of it just isn't end user
visible because people are still laying the ground work for
things to come. We're still very early. This is probably also
the reason why these types of work doesn't stir up so much
discussion on the mailing list. People are not going to re-
base their ongoing work to some other codebase just because
someone on Twitter threw a tantrum.
[deleted]
colordrops - 3 hours ago
How are "payment channels" part of Satoshi's plan?Satoshi's
plan is defined by his original whitepaper and his public
comments, which are pretty specifci.
yarrel - 2 hours ago
Bitcoin's original codebase is presumably part of Satoshi's
plan. It contained sequence numbers, lock times, and
transaction replacement.
hisabness - 3 hours ago
the whole thing reminds me of religion. "He intended this, he
intended that"
kensai - 3 hours ago
Thou shalt not speak His name in vain! :D
sboselli - 2 hours ago
What??I'm not for or against either side, but what you just
said is just plain wrong and it looks as if you are the one who
has not read either the paper or the forum post. He did not
mention payment chains either in the paper or the old original
post about block size.
xorcist - 1 hours ago
There are not "sides" as much as there are countless copies
of Bitcoin.There were lots of discussions around applications
of Bitcoin at the time. Payment channels were only one of the
suggestions, but it was what Satoshi advocated. Why do you
think opcodes for lock times were put in there?See my answer
below. There is no reason to lash out with misguided
accusations when everyone can read the discussions in
verbatim.
Animats - 28 minutes ago
That gets the chain un-stuck. The difficulty starts off with the
old, huge value. The next difficulty adjustment will be at
ceil(478560 / 2016), correct? That's 1248 blocks ahead. Check me on
this, please.If mining of that chain is very low, it will take a
long time before the difficulty adjusts downward. So far 6 blocks
have been mined on that chain.[1] Rate is maybe one per hour,
instead of the usual one every 10 minutes. That puts the difficulty
adjustment maybe six weeks out. We'll have to see who mines on that
chain. The hash rate may go up or down, depending on what the big
miners do. Mining will be unprofitable until the next difficulty
adjustment, because the price of the coin is lower than the
"mainstream" coin. Confirmations will be really slow. After the
next adjustment, the chain will work better.Something similar
happened to some altcoins. Some big miner mined for a while, made
some money, ran up the difficulty adjustment way up, and then
stopped. Block generation then stalled. This thing self-adjusts,
but adjusts to big changes in hash rate very slowly.[1]
http://blockdozer.com/insight/
cesarb - 22 minutes ago
IIRC, this particular hardfork has a change to allow for fast
downward adjustments of its difficulty after just a few blocks,
in case too few blocks were found in the last 12 hours. It should
already have enough blocks for this special code to get
triggered.
Animats - 11 minutes ago
Here's the code change.[1] "Triggering it require to lose 92%
of the hashrate abruptly." That's protection against a total
stall. It looks like hash rate is down, but not by that much.
It may still take a while to get to the next difficulty
adjustment. It's up to the big miners.[1]
https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298
fpgaminer - 22 minutes ago
Something very important that I don't see advertised, with regard
to BCH. The primary client, BitcoinABC, completely changed
consensus rules a mere 5 days before the
hardfork:https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-
abc/blob/174846aaaf56...The important bit:> Enforce strong replay
protection (require SIGHASH_FORKID and SCRIPT_VERIFY_STRICTENC
compliance)That completely changes the consensus rules of BCH.
Again, 5 days before a hardfork. 5 days.I just ... I can't wrap my
brain around why _anyone_ in their right mind would think that BCH
should be worth anything, if this is the acumen of the development
team.Why would any exchange trust the code? Why would users trust
the code?If BCH is any kind of experiment, it's not an experiment
of big-block vs small block (Bitcoin has had bigger block
functionality for over 6 months now). It's an experiment to see if
cowboy programmers can patch a live $40 billion network willy nilly
and convince everyone that that's okay.
mchristen - 8 minutes ago
If anything the fact that things are working as intended(so far)
proves that such a change is not nearly as dangerous as BCC
developers make it out to be.If you don't trust the code powering
BCH then you can simply ignore all your coins on BCH and pretend
they don't exist, you're in the exact same situation as you were
yesterday.The fear mongering of 'all hard forks are dangerous' is
just that, fear mongering, and has no basis in actual reality.
Misker - 6 minutes ago
I agree with the fearmongering bit, but ignoring BCH is a
little more difficult. BCH just caused a pretty decent dip in
the price of BTC, and will likely make it drop further.Unless
it crashes and burns, in which case faith in Core will be even
stronger.