Bitcoin: debate over scaling.

With the spread of block chain technology, Bitcoin has become known by more and more people.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency with block chain as the underlying technology.

Using peer-to-peer networking to reach consensus.

It's code is also open-source.

And taking blockchain as the underlying technology.

The bitcoin whitepaper by satoshi nakamoto was first published on 31st October 2008.

On the 3rd of January 2009, the genisis block was created.

Co-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

Bitcoin, in essence is a private currency that is not controlled by any central authorities, it undertakes the mission of macroeconomy regulation and control as well as the whole macroeconomy cycle adjustment

Founder BITCOIN.COM — ROGER VER

Bitcoin was designed to be cash for the entire world and bitcoin can become cash for the entire world.

Chief scientist BITCOIN UNLIMITED — PETER RIZUN

I think bitcoin is better money, so my interest in working on bitcoin is to help fix money for the whole world.

Huobi.com — ZHAOFEI DING

What is the actual vision and mission of bitcoin, It's vision and mission is to open the door to the era of blockchain technology with the spread of blockchain technology.

Co-founder F2POOL — CHUN WANG

No person or organization has absolute power over bitcoin, bitcoin belongs to the people.

Founder VIABTC&COINEX — HALPO YANG.

In 2010,Bitcoin had almost no value and a very low price. Back then, The original bitcoin design had no block cap So attackers could congest the entire network at a very small cost. Filling up every hard drived attached to bitcoin full nodes. Until the entire network became dysfunctional.

Co-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

In order to prevent bitcoin from succumbing to such an attack, Satoshi added a line of code, which limits the block size to one megabyte. This is the simple reason why Satoshi added the restriction of one megabyte. How do we deal with this piece of code at a later date? Satoshi actually had explained that, He mentioned that we can remove the restriction of one megabyte block size. When the blocks became almost full however, it is a pity that Satoshi left the project in 2011,It lead to a dwergence in the community on how to deal with the piece of code, And how to allow the bitcoin network to cope with increasing transaction demand.

The year of 2013 is seen as the starting year of the debate over scaling. By then, The capacity of the bitcoin network had been consumed by nearly 20%,And the entire network would be congested within the next one or two years as such, the limits removal was imperative for scaling.

Developer BITCOIN XT — TOM HARDIN

I think it's pretty clear that Satoshi set the one megabyte limitation. Just to prevent DOS spam attacks. Any other interpretation is really just someone taking opportunity to exploit that limit for some other reason.

Founder BTC.top — ZHUOER JIANG

I felt very angry that bitcoin core opposed scaling in favour of keeping the block restriction of one megabyte. I have accumulated so much bitcoin, But someone wanted to limit the bitcoin block capacity and to limit all bitcoin users, which was definitely unacceptable for me as a user. For that reason, I joined the debate over scaling. I was fighting to protect my bitcoin.

Founder BITCOIN.COM — ROGER VER

People like myself and others warned about the bad things that would happen if the blocks were allowed to become full. Because the transactions would become slow, Expensive and unreliable.

Developer BITCOINABC — AMAURY SECHET

They call the block excessive in their lingo. So the node would mark the block as excessive and put it aside and then monitor the network and if the network built six blocks or more on top of it, then the node would accept it anyway. But if not then the node would keep rejecting it. So it's creates a way for the bitcoin unlimited node to follow the main chain. But also open the possibility of having bigger blocks.

Co-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

It was in the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 that I was involved in the debate over bitcoin scaling. Buy that time, Among bitcoin developers from Western countries and the entire community, the scaling debate had lead to some unbridgeable differences. And the entire community had been divided into two entirely different camps.

Hong Kong consensus and Newyork consensus

In May 2015,Gavin undersen suggested that it was urgent to raise the block size limit due to the disagreement with bitcoin scaling. Gavin and Jeff, of the five people with code submission rights, were deprived of their power by core. Core also opposed the scaling scheme of a 2 megabyte hard fork.

Co-founder BITMAN — JHAN WU

The camp that opposed scaling bitcoin believed that scaling was very risky. And we needed to take at least 18 months to prepare for the hard fork upgrade. They said if we raised the block size limit from 1 mb to 2 mb now, will it require further expansion in future. If expanding the block size infinitely the ordinary computer would be unable to operate a bitcoin full node. And the bitcoin full nodes would become centralized on a few supernodes As such, the decentralized nature of bitcoin would be no more.

Founder BTC.top — ZHUOER JIANG

Satoshi had clearly discussed the block size his words “As the network grows beyond a certain point it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialised hardware” this is proper node performance which is called the golden mean in China.

OK Blockchain Capital OKCOIN — DAPENG HU

From a technical perspective. Segwit means to separate transaction signatures and then pack and transmit them separately. Segwit is in fact meant to solve the problem of maileability and provides a technical foundation for the lightning network.

Founder VIABTC&COINEX — HALPO YANG.

Lightning network was first proposed at the end of 2015. But it took a long time to release however, it has been live now for a while. We might have been talking more about the lightning network itself. But now, we can find the both segwit and the lightning network have not be implemented and applied and at a large scale. And it is proven that many technical problems exist in the lightning network its counting problem has never been solved.

On February 21st 2016, the miners, exchanges, payment. Providers and core developers, which account for 70% of bitcoin's hashrate reached important consensus in HongKong. Firstly important segwit by soft fork and then lift the block size limit to 2 megabytes via hard fork one year later. However, the HongKong consensus plan failed to be implemented due to members of bitcoin core group rejecting it.

Founder BITCOIN.COM — ROGER VER

I think there was bait and switched by a lot of the small block supporters they promised to scale the block size to 2 megabytes to accommodate additional demand and then they never did.

Co-founder F2POOL — CHUN WANG

Bitcoin is a decentralized open-source project, when it's founder Satoshi disappeared no one could decide the future development direction of bitcoin. When we tried to determined that consisted of ten or twenty participants in a private meeting on HongKong the development of bitcoin as a result, It was doomed to fail.

BLOCKSTREAM CSO —SAMSON MOW

They would research how to do a safe hard fork and present that research to other bitcoin developers and if there was widespread community support, then potentially it could be rolled out but it never promised a hard fork. If you read the language of the HongKong agreement, it's very very specific. I know because I was there writing it, it was almost like we were drafting some framework, like legal framework. Because every word was very carefully chosen to not mean to far one way or another.

CO-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

Once the meeting of HongKong consensus finished, the developers had changed their mind they wanted to violate the agreement and to trick miners to unilaterally support them at no cost their intent was very obvious at the beginning.

Founder VIABTC&COINEX — HALPO YANG.

The result of HongKong consensus is a freak and is very ugly. Technically it is a completely unreasonable solution.

In may 2017, the representatives from 22 countries were gathered in Newyork including which accounted for 85% of the entire global hashrate. The major exchanges mining pools payment processors and other well-known business from the industry. The largest historical industry meeting was the New York consensus, which involved the preparation of segwit 2x, the merging and activation of a segwit soft fork as well as 2 megabyte hard fork although more than 85% of bitcoin's hashrate supported the agreement due to the firm objection by bitcoin core and the lack of support in futures market prices. The agreement ended up being terminated shortly before its implementation.

BLOCKSTREAM CSO —SAMSON MOW

And for my part, they wanted Adam back to participate but I went instead of Adam. But they didn't want me to go because you know, I'm going to present alternative views or talk to them about why it's a bad idea. so, when they're trying to push something through, it's already decided that they don't want an outside voice. A dessenting voice coming into the room and saying “well, first you shouldn't do this, you can't do this, and it's not right.”

BITPRIM CEO —JUAN GARAVAGLIA

It's a paradox, because the first person I saw talking about scaling issues on block limitations and that it's problem we should address. while the blocks are almost empty, was Peter Todd. Peter Todd at the end was one of the guys that was more actively participating against the block size increase.

Founder BITCOIN.COM — ROGER VER

Fool me twice shame on me. I wasn't there in person for the New York agreement but one of my other co-workers at bitcoin.com was we agreed to to it and we abided by it but when the other side, Again, back out of that one. That was it.

Developer BITCOIN XT — TOM HARDIN

The moment I heard the new York consensus I wasn't of the opinion that it would ever happen. Because a bunch of people getting in a room and agreeing to do something has never really worked for bitcoin. What always determined the next evolution of bitcoin has been someone taking action and that action sticking.

BLOCKSTREAM CSO —SAMSON MOW

It failed because they never could have made it happen, it's declaration from a lot of bitcoin companies and a lot of miners, but they didn't take into account the users. So what we saw was the user activated soft fork, And also NO2X Campaigns that kind of activated Segwit and stopped the 2X fork from happening.

Co-founder F2POOL — CHUN WANG

I did not participate in the conference of Newyork consensus at the time, During the conference of the New York consensus, Jihan from BITMAIN called me and said that all parties reached an agreement. I asked who participated in the conference. Jihan told me that the parties include the representative from bitcoin core, bitfury and Chinese mining pools from the call. I thought that all parties had reached an agreement as such, we decided Decided to join that agreement.

BLOCK CONGESTION .

CO-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

Bitcoin network congestion has been very obvious since the end of 2016, and particularly in the year of 2017. In fact, bitcoin network congestion has also led to the rapid rise of some blockchain networks that were competing with bitcoin.

Chief scientist BITCOIN UNLIMITED — PETER RIZUN

If you have a $50 transaction fees well that's not very useful money for the world. So, what bitcoin unlimited proposed is a mechanism to increase the blood size limit to allow bitcoin to continue to grow and allow this experiment to continue to play out.

Founder BITCOIN.COM — ROGER VER

The end of 2017, the average transaction fee for BTC was over fifty dollars in fees for a single transaction. Some lead sites pay thousands and thousands, maybe more than ten thousands of dollars in fees in a single week to use it and when that happened, I knew that was the end of BTC being usable as money.

Founder VIABTC&COINEX — HALPO YANG.

Back then, we were running a free bitcoin transaction accelerator how popular was it at the time, our accelerator would release 100 free accelerations per hour. Basically, it was filling up in a second when every new hour began, 100 accelerations would be filled up within a few seconds. Many people were waiting to use such a product.

UASF and UAHF

In response to the new York consensus and the delay in passing the hashrate vote for the SegWit soft fork upgrade some bitcoin core members proposed UASF scheme. UASF Ignored the voting results of bitcoin networks hashrate to directly activate the SegWit soft fork on August 1 2017.

BLOCKSTREAM CSO —SAMSON MOW

The thing is anybody can hard fork at any time, you can hard fork right now and make your own bitcoin and lots of people have done it. There's so many bitcoin forks, but the question is who follows the forks, and with UASF, you have a massive amount of support from the users in fact, It's important to note that the bitcoin developers did not advocate for UASF. They said, “this is very, very dangerous. Don't do this.” but the users didn't care. They said, “we're running the software;we're just going to do it.”

Founder BTC.top — ZHUOER JIANG

CORE plans to conduct a user-activated soft fork, you can simply regard it as a coup. Core even sent a warning on its official website that it may cause the restructuring of the main chain and the loss of bitcoins which at the time caused a great panic. Core forced others to follow it otherwise they would blow up the ship.

UASF.

In order to cope with the possible restructuring of the main chain and loss of bitcoins caused by UASF. And to retain an original bitcoin fork that has not been contaminated by SegWit. BITMAIN and other organizations in support of scaling issued a tit-for-tat UAHF plan in June 2017. Bitcoin cash, or bch for short, diverged from the BTC chain on August 1. BCH has no SegWit and immediately increased the block size limit to 8 megabytes solving the block congestion problem through on-chain scaling.

CO-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

In order to ensure the safety of the entire network, our company (BITMAIN) and the entire big block community proposed a defence plan at that time called user-activated and fork in any way, it ensures the relevant transactions can be saved on at least one chain.

Developer BITCOIN XT — TOM HARDIN

It really was a last resort doing a minority fork but it was worth it to do it, we allowed the exchange mechanism. The infrastructure that had developed for valuing different coins to work for us and give the world a way to vote and to support the new fork.

The battle to scale through big blocks began in 2013, and the dispute which lasted more than four years came to an end on August 1st 2017. the original community was divided into two new communities and evolved towards their expected technological routes respectively.

BTC AND BCH

CO-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

Bitcoin continues forward with their established science and technology including SegWit, lightning network and some other technologies such as Schnorr signature. They are continuously developing according to their so-called virtual gold or digital-gold, Store of value tools then the bitcoin cash blockchain has been expanded from 1 megabyte to 8 megabytes and then from 8 megabytes to 32 megabytes. It has also expanded some by technical parameters. For example, the space of OP-RETURN has been expanded from 80 bytes to 220 bytes at a time. It actually gives a very clear signal to the blockchain application developers that is, our network will continue to maintain high speed and low fees. It's able to confirm transactions in a stable manner. We welcome everyone to use this block space to develop more applications.

Developer BITCOINABC — AMAURY SECHET

And in the case of BCH, the project is to create peer-to-peer digital cash and that means that we need to improve scaling, that we need to improve 0-conf that we need to improve fungibility;a few things like that and we have some general ideas and a general roadmap, at this high-level roadmap. Maybe all the details are not specified always, But we have a general idea and a general direction of where we want to move in that direction.

Founder BITCOIN.COM — ROGER VER

The bitcoin that became popular to begin with and the bitcoin described in the bitcoin white paper is bitcoin cash. It's not BTC. So that's why I'm with bitcoin cash today.

OK Blockchain Capital OKCOIN — DAPENG HU

BTC itself, is more inclined to do off-chain scaling via lightning network or other side-chains to achieve scaling which leads to more room for expansion. BCH is scaling on-chain the bitcoin network itself still has a lot of potential to explore it can develop a higher network value through bigger blocks and transaction instructions.

Huobi.com — ZHAOFEI DING

BTC and BCH, we say that we see the competition between them. In fact, I don't think they are competitors, If they want to be the means of payment in the digital world will be the rising stars I just mentioned.

Developer BITCOIN XT — TOM HARDIN

It's mostly a competition of the market because it's true that more innovation is still happening on the bitcoin core side and there is a lot of innovation in the bitcoin cash side as well and we're starting to see the divergence of the two chains with things like OP_DatasigVerify, And bitcoin OP code reenablement that are supportive of what we want to use bitcoin cash for.

CO-founder BITMAIN — JIHAN WU

The debate over scaling schemed to represent the whole blockchain world at that time The market cap of all assets in the whole blockchain industry at that time. When the whole world wanted to pay attention to blockchain they would certainly pay close attention to the debate over scaling today bitcoin's market cap has actually dropped below 40% and we can see that it will continue to decline with its market share.

For the whole blockchain space many innovations have appeared in thousands of different communities and the bitcoin scaling debate produced some of these innovations. Only in the process of seeking new things and change can bitcoin have the hope of continued development an innovative state like the cambrian species explosion will bring a greater future to blockchain.

Featuring interviews with @jihan.wu of BITMAIN, @RogerVer of bitcoin.com and more.

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