CRYPTO-CURRENCIES NEWS: Poll: Bitcoin Scaling
Bitcoin became too successful, and the block size limit of 1 MB caused the commission for transactions to grow rapidly in the last few months. Many believe that a solution is urgently needed in order for Bitcoin to continue to grow as a payment system, and not simply as a value depository.
Currently, the network can support up to seven block transactions per second (in practice, three), although many transactions occur outside the blockroom. For comparison, PayPal processes about 100 transactions per second, and Visa - about 4000 per second.
As the network reaches the capacity limits, most of the ecosystem agrees that it is necessary to implement one of the many proposed solutions, fearing that other payment systems that solve scaling problems will soon become more attractive to users and developers.
Over the past few years, the Bitcoin community has divided in its views on how Bitcoin should be modernized so that the network is scaled. Over the past year, the main contenders for overcoming this impasse have become SegVit Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited.
We interviewed our readers to find out which solution to scale they prefer.
Options
SeqVit is a scalable solution presented by Bitcoin Core participants. It comes in the form of a soft fork, an advanced compatible update that can work even if some users do not update their software.
SegVit introduces a new transaction format and updates the block size in 1 MB to a block size of 4 million units, while reading the serialized evidence data as one unit and block core data as four units. The data does not become smaller, but instead is counted in such a way that it is possible to effectively increase the limit of 1 MB.
SegWit offers many benefits including increased bandwidth, greater security for multi-signature transactions, linear scaling of sighash operations, version control of scripts and much more. But most importantly, SegWit will correct the plasticity of transactions - the possibility of an attack that allows you to change the unique identifier of the Bitcoin transaction before the transaction is confirmed on the Bitcoin network. This allowed the attacker to trick the victim into accepting a transaction that was not actually valid.
SegWit also paves the way for second-tier payment systems, for example, the Lightning Network . The Lightning network allows computers to commit block transactions, which can be included in the chain later. Lightning transactions are virtually instantaneous and can be made in amounts of thousands to millions per second with a commission of the percentage of a cent.
For the current deployment of SegWit, 95% of the miners are required to have the update activated. Voting is conducted by the ministers, which include certain data in the blocks they are chasing, thereby informing their decision regarding the proposal.
So far, only 30% of the miners reported support.
At the same time, another proposal - BIP 148 began to gain momentum. According to this proposal, which is still controversial, users will activate SegVit on their own, trying to encourage the miners to do the same.
Bitcoin Unlimited uses a completely different approach to solving the block size problem. Instead of a hard limit on the size of the block, Bitcoin Unlimited gives you complete freedom and flexibility, and also allows miners and users to come to a consensus on block size limitations on the fly. Specifically, this means that the miners and users can signal which block size size they prefer, and converge on an agreed value.
The control of the miners over the block size in this system is not unlimited, since users can also refuse to increase the block size. However, the default settings in Bitcoin Unlimited give the managers control over the limit, since most of the network hash will override the user preference after four blocks.
However, opponents argue that such flexibility can lead to the fact that the miners will choose larger and larger blocks, which makes it difficult for miners with limited resources and thus concentrates the extraction in the hands of several miners.
In addition, the New Consensus , one of the aspects of Bitcoin Unlimited, which modifies the block size limitation, is the hard-core Bitcoin Core software. Hard fork creates incompatibility between new and old protocols, which creates the risk of a network split if people decide to continue working on both protocols, thereby creating two separate chain blocks.
To Bitcoin Unlimited was successfully implemented, everyone will have to move to a new blockade and completely abandon the old one. This is an unlikely result, as Bitcoin has supporters from both sides - Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited, which are likely to support the protocol they like best.
Bitcoin Unlimited requires that the embedding level be 75% before implementing the fork. If this percentage is reached and maintained for a certain period of time, the hard fork will be implemented - but again, the miners can not force users to follow them.
Other options for scaling the Bitcoin network were proposed, including Bitcoin XT, a solution that originally assumed an increase in the block size limit of up to 8 MB. With the support of Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin XT received considerable attention in mid-2015, but it gradually declined as it lacked the support of the wider community.
Bitcoin Classic is another proposal, which aims to increase the throughput of Bitcoin transactions, initially by increasing the block size limit to 2 MB. In November 2016, there were changes, and the project moved to a decision that transferred the limit to the hands of miners and knots.
Bitcoin Classic is also an attempt to transfer the technical management of the Bitcoin project from Bitcoin Core developers to the voting process involving the largest community of miners, businesses, developers and users.
The concept of extended blocks has also been proposed in several cases, with the recent Bcoin offering attracting the most attention. In this model, a separate chain with a large block size becomes a soft-fork in the Bitcoin network. Both the source chain and the new chain with a large block size will exist on the same network, and users will be able to send bitmicons between the two circuits.
Another concept, similar to the proposal of expanded blocks, is the concept of a large sidechain block.
At the beginning of last month, a new proposal was promulgated, which received significant support from some of the world's largest Bitcoin companies and miners. On 23 May, at the Consensus 2017 conference, Bitcoin start-up executives and miners held a meeting at which more than 50 companies signed an agreement , including the Digital Currency Group, Bitcoin.com, Blockchain, Coinbase, ShapeShift, as well as major players in the mining, such Like Bitmain and BitFury. The proposal includes reducing the barrier to activate SegWit to 80% of the network's mining capacity. Technical information on this proposal is still small, but the solution will be based on new software that is not currently developed and may be incompatible with existing software. Despite the support of some of the largest companies, many criticize the complexity of the solution and believe that it is used as an attempt to block the activation of soft fork by users.
Results
CoinJournal conducted a survey, which interviewed more than 1100 readers *, which of the proposals they prefer. The results show that SegWith is a clear winner, and 71% of respondents chose this option as their preferred solution. Approximately 18% answered Bitcoin Unlimited, and about 11% said they prefer another solution. Respondents were also given the opportunity to comment, and many of them expressed support for the activation of soft-fork by users ( UASF ).
* Users were randomly selected and only one entry per IP address / device is allowed.
By the way, note that 74% of respondents said they will miss the debate about scaling.
By the end of this study, an agreement was reached at the "Consensus 2017" conference between various Bitcoin-companies and miners, and the concept of soft-fork activation by users for SegVit (via BIP-148) acquired some supporters. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to measure the support of both of these proposals among Bitcoin users. At the moment, it seems, these are the two main proposals.
What The Community Thinks
We interviewed several prominent representatives of the industry, what is their preferred method of scaling and why.
Samson Mow (Samson Mow), Head of Technology Research at Blockstream:
"Bitcoin's scaling debate is not really a debate. This is a coordinated effort to influence and control the development of the protocol. Bitcoin is the first and most successful protocol of money, so the temptation to control it and reward for various parties is huge - especially for businesses that are looking for short-term results that provide a way out or provide liquidity. These short-term goals are not consistent with Bitcoin developers who are working diligently to create digital gold, which requires stability, maintaining backward compatibility and real scaling through development. This led to the formation of a group of people, completely focused on one variable - the size of the block, to attacks on developers through tales centered around "scaling", which is ridiculous. Simply because the wicked Internet-mobber screams that the block size should increase from 1 to 2 MB, does not mean that progress in scaling has stalled.
It is said that everything a company does is marketing - from hiring employees to servicing clients, etc. The same principle is also applicable for scaling. All that bitokoya developers have been doing for the last 7 years is bitcoin scaling. Anyone who worked closely with Bitcoin at any level knows that there were huge scaling improvements: signature caching, ultraprun, parallel script checking, first header synchronization, block file truncation, libsecp256k1, memory pool limitation, and this list can be continued. Unfortunately, most people do not care to closely monitor the development or read the public chat logs, e-mail discussions and meeting minutes. This problem is further exacerbated when the "captains of the industry" make misleading and irresponsible statements about development. The most absurd example of such a statement was made by the CEO of a small start-up Internet discounter, which states that 400 or so different geographically dispersed volunteers from Bitcoin Core are a "monopoly".
SeqVit is the solution for those who require more bandwidth; Nothing else is even approaching viability."
Josiah Hernandez, Head Of The Strategy At Coinsource
"SegVit is an elegant solution to a complex problem. This is the culmination of many years of research, testing and development, which has already largely reached a consensus between business and Bitcoin-nodes. By providing the basis for level 2 scaling solutions such as the Lightning Network, it also offers a method that will immediately solve the problems of increasing commission pressures and increase the transaction confirmation time by effectively increasing the block size to 2 MB. As before, this is an ideal offer on the market.
While BU has minor support for miners, it often has stability and code quality problems that prevent serious players from using it massively in production. Several incidents have been reported, which resulted in more than 50% of all active BU nodes, which could lead to problems of network reliability, financial reduction and the potential loss of network effect due to a decrease in trust in bitcoin if it is used on a large scale. Scaling level 1 by increasing the maximum block size is largely seen as an inefficient, crude scaling method that would rather lead to a decrease than to growth. "
