Increasing the block size is a fundamental change requiring a hard fork and a chain split. It is not possible to continue on the same chain with a 2mb block. However, they could continue on the same chain with segwit which gives the rough equivalent of a 1.7mb block. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough for the other side (+lots of other reasons, valid or not, I couldn't say).
Don't be fooled into thinking a soft-fork is the "same chain". It simply tricks nodes that don't know about SegWit into validating transactions that they don't really know how to validate.
It's possible for a non-SegWit miner to accidentally mine an invalid block after the soft-fork. Here is how.
The "backwards-compatibility" of SegWit comes from the fact that it looks like an anyone-can-spend transaction. Meaning, on the old blockchain, those coins would be up for grabs.
Nodes that support SegWit know that it is not really an anyone-can-spend transaction, because they have extra data not included in the blockchain.
But a node that doesn't upgrade doesn't know about this. So here's what could happen:
1) Bob sends sends a SegWit transaction to Alice
2) The non-SegWit node sees it as an anyone-can-spend transaction where Bob is basically giving up his coins
3) Eve wants to mess with the non-SegWit node, so she sends it a (valid!) transaction which spends Bob's coins and sends them to Eve
4) The non-SegWit miner mines a block with that transaction, and the block is consequently rejected by the SegWit nodes
So SegWit needs 51% of hashing power in order to work, just like a hard fork. Without it, they wouldn't be able to reject the block with Eve's transaction, which would've been valid on the old blockchain.
The only difference is that the above edge-case exists for a soft fork, whereas for a hard fork, non-upgraded nodes would simply be split into a smaller network instead of being tricked.
Not quite, it needs 51% of hashing power in order to be safely backwards compatible with non-upgraded nodes, however it's always safe with upgraded nodes. That's the reason BIP9 has a 95% activation threshold.
Note this is by far not the first soft fork Bitcoin has done. P2SH, CSV, and CLTV for example were also soft forked in. The original design even included 10 blank opcodes designed for soft forking in features.
> 51% of hashing power in order to be safely backwards compatible with non-upgraded nodes, however it's always safe with upgraded nodes
Yes, what I was pointing out is that in a soft-fork there is a risk of an eventual re-org, whereas in a hard-fork there is not. It's a minor risk, but it exists.
I also believe that any non-SegWit miners will be pushed out of the network using the mechanism I described. It would be pretty easy to trick them into mining invalid blocks.
Let's see if I understood this correctly: once the network splits into BTC (with SegWit) and BCC (without SegWit), if someone spends an old BTC coin (where old = from before the split) using SegWit, anyone can "steal" that same coin on the BCC "mirror universe"? Sounds worse than merely replaying a transaction from one chain into the other. That's so going to be a mess.
Correct, though this isn't really anything special about SegWit. If BCC had forked right before Bitcoin added P2SH for example, the same would have resulted from P2SH transactions.
Actually, since BCC is a hardfork, they can make the Bitcoin Cash spending rules whatever they want. They could have made SegWit transactions totally unspendable if they wanted. They could have made all Bitcoin Cash corresponding to the Bitcoins sent to Blockstream spendable by anyone, etc.
I want to say that I've been on the anti-censorship boat and the 'AXA money is sketchy' and the unlimited train for as long as I've heard of it.
Just recently, someone in the ecosystem that I've known since the beginning of my time with Bitcoin came out in support of Blockstream and Segwit with a backing of other Canadian support.
I don't know what to make of it all. I spoke with him a bit and he seems to believe that those pushing against segwit are paid by ASICboosters in China because they stand to make $100,000,000/yearly from their (now not so secret) advantage.
In any case, I just wanted to add that I'm more confused than ever and things are very unclear.
>because they stand to make $100,000,000/yearly from their (now not so secret) advantage.
If anyone is confused how the 30% advantage that ASICBOOST gives translates into this huge number, remember that the 30% boost applies to revenue, not profit.
The revenue of mining in the long run approaches the costs to mine (basically the cost of electricity), leaving extremely slim profit margins. Let's say the usual revenue from mining over some period of time is $1.02, and the cost is $1.00, giving a profit of 2 cents every time unit. A miner using ASICBOOST could have a revenue of $1.32 every time unit, giving a profit of 32 cents every time unit, which is at least an order of magnitude more profit than anyone else. This miner then has more resources to spend on buying hardware and scaling up.
(The above paragraph goes for any type of optimization and isn't necessarily nefarious. It can be a problem if one miner effectively keeps an optimization secret for too long, because they'll continue to grow in size and could get more than 50% of mining power, which is a specific point that causes huge problems with Bitcoin. But the real unique issues about ASICBOOST are about how it encourages empty blocks, and how it has been secretly incentivizing some groups to argue against any incompatible protocol change.)
Your arithmetic is off. Revenue doesn't increase. Costs decrease. Effectively the increase in profit is similar, though, to your result. Just for different reasons.
Ignoring depreciation or hardware costs, the arithmetic is like this:
The closer to costs that revenue for non-AB mining is, the closer to infinity the comparative profit margin is.
That is, AB doesn't increase hashrate. (That would be a very, very much more complicated equation since the hashrate reward pie is essentially static.) All it does is decrease the amount of power required to do the same work.
The easiest way to detect who is telling the truth is to ask lots of questions and see who is making the most unusual and/or logically inconsistent (especially over time) claims.
A lot of people are, in fact, keeping track, and can point to significant numbers of problems and inconsistencies in what people are saying and what they've supported and why. Factual assertions are particularly excellent indicators. For example, if someone says Gavin Andresen is a segwit opponent, you can literally just click one link to discover that he isn't:
That was the exact point of the ASICBOOST FUD we've seen in the last week - to cast uncertainty and doubt. Taking a step back though it all seems like just the latest attempt to distract from real issues. ASICBOOST is just another optimisation from companies who make their living working on these kinds of things. It's been known about for many months now so the last few days just seem like a bizarre attempt to demonise the miners for doing what they do.
.. is to close off only the covert ASICBoost mining incentive which is directly incompatible with a host of high-quality Bitcoin improvement mechanisms. (An incomplete list of which is in the above link, near the bottom.)
Overt ASICBoost is completely wide-open, and remains untouched. In fact it's completely compatible with SegWit.
Firstly, Bernie is a Social Democrat. Secondly, Capitalism has gotten so much Crony in it that the inequality is hurting the capitalism. Bernie could have swung the scales towards infrastructure, unionism, and lowering inequality, which would put dollars in the pockets of the poor, which would in turn be spent directly into the economy.
" Bernie could have swung the scales towards infrastructure, unionism, and lowering inequality, which would put dollars in the pockets of the poor, which would in turn be spent directly into the economy."
That's a little bit of a stretch.
Inequality is a problem mostly because:
A) The benefits of globalism go to the 1%, then to the middle class in terms of cheaper prices, but the working class lose jobs.
B) US has massive importation of low-skilled immigrants. They go right at the bottom. You don't need a 'messed up system' - if you just add poor people, you increase inequality.
C) Bernie is an old-time socialist - he has no new ideas, really. I've heard him talk, he wants to massive increase wealth distribution and do it by taxing 'the rich'. This never works out, really. 'Infrastructure' is a cover - really, it's a wealth transfer exercise. Europe and Canada tried that in the 1960's it didn't go s well.
The problem is really difficult, and it's exacerbated by the sheer size of the US, also there are no ethnic ties. Sweden is only the size of Los Angeles - and they are 'Swedes' an ethnic group with fraternal social order, a Monarchy, a State Church, common cultural identity. It's easier to 'redistribute' when the person getting the service is someone you know.
The best kind of 'redistribution' is 'jobs'. Surely, increasing the minimum wage a little bit might work, and possibly having unions where none exist (Wallmart?), but strengthening already existing unions - particularly in the auto-sector and government is not going to help anyone - they are part of the problem. Auto workers and gov. workers are massively overcompensated relative to their private sector peers. Gov unions are one of the reasons government is so massively inefficient. If Bernie could fix that, that'd be great - but he's a politician, he's never had a normal job and wouldn't have a clue how to do it.
I think moving towards empowering people, making sure they can participate in the global wealth creation is very important, but 1960's style socialism is not the answer.
I'm in the middle of reading "Reinventing Organisations" and it's absolutely wonderful. It examines a handful of organisations that are doing it differently (including Holocracy) and takes notes about how their techniques compare and what they might have in common.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I am running one of those companies. Calling it structureless is as misleading as calling agile chaotic.
The "Green" stage can feel a little like the tyranny this article describes, but the "Teal" stage is anything but. It's comparatively light on arbitrary rules compared to your traditional top down company, but it's certainly not unstructured.
Does it cover the cooperative model, like the Mondragon Corporation, or the Wobbly shop? I can't find a table of contents, and DDG finds no reference to Mongragon or Wobbly on the web site. I figure that a book which doesn't discuss those two alternative forms of business organization is hiding something. For examples, hiding who owns and controls the capital, or hiding that it's not really a new model but has been around for a century.
> Industrial democracy: By analogy with political or state democracy, a description of democratic practices as applied to workplaces. There are two major ways of thinking about this concept. The first involved some liberal conception of representative structures that allow workers to have influence over decision making, responsibility and authority. The extent of such influence can vary substantially, from an employer's 'suggestion scheme' through workplace methods such as 'team-working', up to the various forms of consultation and co-determination exemplified by Kalmar, Semco, or the John Lewis Partnership and the Quality of Working Life movement. Whilst these examples provide illustrations of alternative forms of organizing, they all largely rely on the idea of empowerment as something which management does to workers. In other words, management and owners still have the ultimate sanction, and could withdraw democratic privileges if they wished.
> The more radical way of thinking about industrial democracy would be in terms of worker self-management. In this case a cooperative or an employee share ownership plan (ESOP) would mean that all those working for an organization would have a direct share in its profits and losses. As a result, they would have a clear interest in participating in democratic mechanisms to elect or deselect those who coordinate organizational activities; to dictate strategy; to take profits or reinvest, and so on (see Mondragon; Suma). Both forms of industrial democracy have been credited with increasing the motivation and commitment of workers, as well as increasing productivity and decreasing labour turnover. Whilst advocates of the liberal version might suggest that those were good things to achieve because they can increase shareholder or owner value, for the radicals all these would be secondary to the idea that labour might escape alienation in a Marxist sense. In other words, liberal ideas about job satisfaction are pale reflections of the conception of work as a form of human expression (see Fourier).
I'm about a third of the way through the book. It's tough to say whether it covers 'the cooperative model' because so far, it approaches aspects of business quite individually.
Well, in the context of traditional orgs, the board can fire the CEO. In this book, he speaks about making certain that the CEO & board members are all on board with the 'teal organisation' mentality.
In other words, I don't believe it addresses the legal structure as much as the organisational one. Unfortunately, I have to bring it back to the library today...but I'll be buying my own copy that I can cover in highlighter. It's really interesting for anyone interested in organisational structure and offers a lot of insights into potential workarounds to problems you might run into.
Knew someone who worked for them years back. They said the co-op thing meant very little to individual workers like them, it basically amounted to a newsletter regularly. I don't know enough details to argue either way, except to observe that just because something says it is a co-op doesn't mean individual workers really feel empowered.
How does it relate to Elinor Ostrom ideas? I find her "Design principles for Common Pool Resource (CPR) institutions" much more applicable than just CPRs.
