The Blocksize war - Jonathan Bier

 

• The dream of a world where ordinary people have ultimate and direct control over the rules that govern their money.

First Strike

• Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen.
• Bitcoiners were typically anarcho-capitalists or libertarians who strongly supported free speech.
• People tend to like reading things they agree with and follow people they agree with. Confirmation bias features heavily on social media platforms and causes polarization.

March To War

• This type of upgrade was called a softfork, i.e. a new rule tightening restrictions on block validity. It is a softfork because adding or lowering the limit tightens the rules. Increasing the limit would relax the rules and is therefore known as a hardfork.

Scaling I - Montréal

• The company appeared to be perpetually worried about the risk of high inflation, driven by monetary easing from central bankers and the prospect of large fiscal deficits.
• There was no real distinction between validating nodes and mining nodes.

Scaling II- Hong Kong

• The same was said about the French insurer AXA, whose venture arm also invested in Blockstream. The former CEO of AXA was Henri de Castries, chairman of the steering group for the Bildeberg meeting, a close-door gathering of the world's financial and political elites, which provided perfect material for conspiracy theorists.
• Proof of work was there to solve the double spending problem.
• Roger Ver backing companies such as Blockchain.info, Bit pay and Kraken.

SegWit

• SegWit is a way of increasing the Bitcoin block size, without the new client being incompatible (I.e. it was soft fork rather than a hard fork ). A Bitcoin transaction consists of various components, one of which is the signature, authorizing the spend. This signature is typically the largest part of the transaction, based on the amount of data. SegWit was a new transaction format, where the signature would not need to be included in the old block, which still had a 1MB limit.
• Bitcoin is more than just engineering and computer science. It is also a social system, a live payment system, an economic system, and a financial system.

Lightning Network

• Lightning essentially works by aggregating multiple payments into a smaller number of Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin transactions are used to open payment channels, which, once set up, facilitate a flow of multiple payments. Entities can have channels with many different counterparts, forming a network of channels. Payments can then find a path along the channels, which are already connected to each other, until they reach the final recipient.
• To some of the small blockers, this layer-two architecture made much more sense for a high capacity and cheap global payment system. On-chain, blockchain-based payment system typically work in a "broadcast to everyone" mode, in that when one make a payment, one needs to broadcast the transaction to all participants network. All participants are then required to process this transaction to see if it's a payment to them. This system is considered highly inefficient, especially for small payments. If someone is buys a coffee in France using Bitcoin, why should a merchant selling concert tickets in Japan needs to examine the transaction? That is essentially how on-chain Bitcoin payments worked and, to small blockers, the architecture made little sense for small payments; it was only needed as a base layer of a monetary system.
• Instead of broadcasting a transaction to everyone, the transaction can be send more directly to the payment recipient, more of a peer-to-peer architecture. If one of the parties to the transaction is dishonest and tries to steal money, then the other party can broadcast a transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain and reclaims the funds. The blockchain, and Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus mechanism, is therefore used as a dispute resolution service. When both parties are honest, the nuances, inefficiencies and scalability constraints of the proof-of-work process can be avoided.
• Large blockers could claim, with some legitimacy, that the small blockers were highly intelligent computer geeks biased towards complex, technically elegant, but impractical solutions.
• At the time of writing, although the lightning network is gaining traction and the technology is rapidly improving, merchant adoption of the lightning network is limited.

The DAO

• In the summer of 2016, a project called the "DAO" (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) began to grab the attention of many inside the cryptocurrency community. The DAO was a smart contract built on Ethereum and styled itself as a kind of autonomous investment fund. Rather than the stodgy (lourd), old top-down-managed investment funds, the DAO would make investments as determined by votes from its users and would be governed by the code in the smart contract, rather than the law.
• The opportunity to make money was the primary driver of this trend. The success of Ethereum had driven a wave of copycats and new coin offerings.

Exchanges

• The most significant change was the emergence and growth of several cryptocurrency exchange businesses, whose success was driven by considerable demand from the retail market in the Asia Pacific region. Companies such as Poloinex, BitMEX and, perhaps most significantly of all, Bitfinex.

ASICBoost

• ASICBoost is a way to reduce the amount of work a miner is required to do when making a hashing attempt for Bitcoin's proof of work (PoW). SHA256, which is the hashing algorithm used for Bitcoin's PoW, splits the block header into 64-byte chunks before the computation occurs.
• As of today, more than 70% of Bitcoin blocks are mined using overt (déclaré) ASICBoost.

Dragons'Den

• The co-author of the lightning white paper, Joseph Poon.
• Bram Cohen, the inventor of Bittorrent.

Litecoin

• Unlike Bitcoin, which had a 95% activation threshold, Litecoin had a 75% miner activation threshold. Litecoin had the same two week rolling activation windows, followed by a two-week grace period.
• UASF: User Activated Soft Fork.
• This was clearly a good start to 2017 for the small blockers. They had achieved three victories in a row: exchanges, ASICBoost and now Litecoin.

User-Activated Softfork

• Segwit increases the block size, fixes transaction malleability, and makes scripting easier to upgrade as well as many other benefits.
• "Bitcoin is valuable in part because it has high security and stability; segwit was carefully designed to support and amplify that engineering integrity that people can count now and in the future." "First do no harm". Gregory Maxwell.

New-York agreement

• There are two group of people which have two different visions for Bitcoin. None of these visions is "wrong". One group values more things like decentralization, lack of government, censorship resistance, anonymity. This group thinks that Bitcoin will transform our world in 20-30 years. To reach this goal, it's of utter importance to stick to those values. There is no rush. The other group values more things like reaching one billion users in the next 5 years, or serving real unbanked users today, even if that requires a political agreement now.

Bitcoin cash

• The new alternative would exclude SegWit.

SegWit2x

• Most people just wanted to be on the winning side.
• The large blockers never really supported SegWit2x, their hearts went to Bitcoin Cash.

Victory

• Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide.
• It was now, finally, widely accepted that arranging meetings with large corporates in the space and trying to decide on changes to the protocol rules would not work.
• End users always control Bitcoin.
• Over this two-year battle, the small blockers and users had overcome the miners and the large businesses in the space, and, despite their large blocker adversaries investing literally hundred of millions of dollars into the cause, the small blockers won an incredible and resounding victory. Bitcoin demonstrated that it could be the user-controlled money, that it was always meant to be.