The number of auditors is inversely proportional to the size of blocks.
If you don't think automated auditing of the mint by as many disparate entities as possible is a prerequisite of sound money, then you probably think BCC makes the right decisions. If you do, then BTC makes the right decisions.
On top of that, with small blocks and 3rd party payment channels, there's very little reason for people who aren't big financial institutions to even care. Gavin Andresen put it well: "Hurray, we just reinvented the SWIFT or ACH systems."
While increasing blocks to 8 or 32MB isn't going to fix everything, it provides a lot more capacity while keeping everything on-chain and peer-to-peer. A few people being unable to run it on their home Internet is a small price to pay. And if core hadn't been so pigheaded about even going to 2 or 4MB, we'd have solid evidence of the impact in block size.
This suggestion stems from either dishonesty or ignorance and there is no reason to take part in that kind of mudslinging.
The same kinds of attacks that have been being orchestrated against Bitcoin for the past few years - political attacks. I run a node as a means to help foster a solution to the Triffin Paradox as much as I do to transact securely and to avoid the various attacks possible against me individually should I not run a node (like replay attacks should I trade BCC). My node is my means to enforcing monetary policy that doesn't destroy my Bitcoins, allow others to create more, etc.
> On top of that, with small blocks and 3rd party payment channels, there's very little reason for people who aren't big financial institutions to even care. Gavin Andresen put it well: "Hurray, we just reinvented the SWIFT or ACH systems."
This can be said of any solution that attempts to raise the block size as well. How different is a Bitcoin that only has a few hundred or thousand nodes due to resource requirements being prohibitive to others different than ACH and SWIFT either? Worse off, if I can't audit the blockchain because it's too big, then I have to depend on people. At least with lightning, I can audit the source of money.
> And if core hadn't been so pigheaded about even going to 2 or 4MB, we'd have solid evidence of the impact in block size.
Why get political? Can you really argue that Core is being pigheaded? Core's development has made a lot of sense to me considering that Bitcoin has been under attack for a long time now. What would you do if:
1. One of the primary developers went outside of the until-then productive channels of protocol development? [2]
2. To attempt to orchestrate a block size increase
3. At the same time multiple attacks meant to flood the blockchain with superflous transactions are started and continue [3][4][5]
4. While social media bots were employed in r/bitcoin that categorically downvoted all content not related to increasing the block size [6]
5. And, a massive bug fix that enables other means of scaling is propagandized against to the end of using it as collateral to raise the block size [7]
6. While the same people who have been attempting to raise the block size get behind a person claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, whom can't provide any credible proof and rather provides as convoluted as possible proof [8]
7. Who ultimately ends up on the team of the Bitcoin clone in question after appearing at a "Future of Bitcoin" conference coincidentally missing anybody related to Bitcoin's development of the past 8 years, yelling about things that no reasonable engineer can actually interpret as meaningful science or engineering. [9]
And at the end of the day, all these people call you pigheaded for continuing to develop software in such a way that I can maintain sovereignty over my bitcoins without having to ask anyone for permission. It's simply amazing to me that Core are successfully being painted as villains in this space. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users from access to the blockchain. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users of their ability to enforce a monetary policy realized by a token that those users provided the liquidity to make worth attacking. Core have been the only thing in the way.
And why should they get out of the way? The only argument people have is "because it will be fine and because Bitcoin needs to grow." That's not science and engineering. The internet is maintained by a few thousand entities, and can you say that it's decentralized enough? Once a year we have to black out websites so Congress doesn't destroy it. Once a week I read something about "if only we had better security at layer 2 or 3". And now we're going to make the same mistakes with the internet of money.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-e...
[3] http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/innovation/coi...
[4] https://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-spam-attack-stressed-n...
[5] http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/03/20/appears-another-spam-attac...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4biob5/research_in...
[7] https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-seg...
[8] https://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-stev...
Miners provide a means of reaching consensus (it's computationally very difficult to disagree in a way that complies with the rules). That's all.
The default Bitcoin signature algorithm has quadratic performance due to repeated hashing and if the block size is increased above 1MB an attacker can use this in a fairly nasty DoS attack that, worst case, might be able to fork the blockchain. The BTC/SegWit side fixes this by creating a new transaction type that moves the signatures outside the main block into a separate "witness" and uses more efficient signature hashing. The new transactions appear to older nodes as though they simply didn't require signatures, so existing software keeps working. This also fixes an annoying issue called "transaction malleability" which allows attackers to change the transaction IDs of other people's transactions; all of the data hashed to compute the transaction ID is now signed. It's apparently this malleability fix that makes off-chain payments easier.
BCH essentially replaces the original signature hashing algorithm with the SegWit one but keeps the signatures in the block. Bitcoin also has a hard cap on the number of expensive CHECKSIG operations that can be carried out to prevent DoS attacks and both sides take different approaches to raising that, neither of which is straightforward.
It also appears that there were some proposals related to SegWit that advocated putting the signatures in a separate block, but the actual implemented SegWit does not do this. Instead it simply moves the signature to the end of the transaction (which allows them to fix most of the malleability issues).
There are many proposals for scaling bitcoin. One of the proposals is to increase the size of the blocks. Segwit also does this by changing how much the signature "counts" as part of the block size. This will allow blocks to be roughly 2mb in size.
Most other scaling techniques can't currently be implemented because they rely on the transaction not being malleable. If SegWit is successful, then these other scaling techniques could be used (but they don't have to be).
It appears that one of the things some people don't like about SegWit is that it was introduced as a "soft fork". This means that it won't be activated in the client unless 95% of the clients support it. Some people feel that this will never happen because some miners are against SegWit. There are also other proposals for fixing the malleability issues and so there isn't a complete consensus about how it should be done (some people appear to complain that the implementation of SegWit is too complicated).
So instead on waiting for other scaling techniques, BCH has advocated a hard fork which increases the block size, but that does not address the transaction malleability problem. Some people have suggested that increasing the block size is the only thing necessary for scaling bitcoin and that other scaling techniques are unwanted.
My understanding is that SegWit will not, in itself, solve the scaling issue other than making a small increase in the block size (effectively doubling it), but that it paves the way for other techniques later (none of which have been decided on yet, but there are working implementations of several).
Is that accurate?
The good part is that the market as two options and anything could happen.
This does have some benefits for off chain transaction networks because it changes what parts of the block are signed and need to be verified. Off chain transaction networks can still work fine with or without segwit though.
You might want to check this 5 minute segregated witness explained video:
Or this 50 minute presentation from actual Bitcoin developer and initiator of segwit:
second: privacy even for regular law obeying citizens do you really want anyone to have access to how much CryptoCurrency you have and the record of all your transactions?
third: at the moment is ASIC resistant and anyone even using a desktop or laptop can mine, personally I think this is very important for effective distribution in less developed countries.
