Bitcoin block expansion is at a stalemate, and core maintainers have no plans to expand?

The issue of Bitcoin block expansion is currently at a stalemate, with no progress and no future progress. No matter how many people in the Bitcoin community demand an increase in block capacity, the Bitcoin core maintainers have no plans to expand the capacity at all, which is completely different from what people in the Bitcoin community imagine.

In this post, I want to talk about the current status of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 100, why Bitcoin Core maintainers will not raise the block size limit, the recent admission by Bitcoin Core maintainers that they do not actually make decisions by consensus, some of the lowdown on recent DoS attacks, and why this December’s workshop will not change the status quo.

BIP 100

BIP100 is a proposal that is supported by about 60% Bitcoin hashrate. I understand why Bitcoin miners like this idea, but the current status of BIP100 is:

1. BIP100 is just a proposal that has not yet been implemented.

2. BIP100 proposer Jeff Gochuck is busy with a small virtual machine called Moxiebox and is changing the database layer. BIP100 is just one of the projects he is preparing to do in the future.

3. Even if someone else does it for Jeff, the BIP100 code will not be included in the Bitcoin Core code base. The two Bitcoin Core maintainers who have the final say have not expressed support for BIP100, and they don't seem to think that things should be decided by miners voting.

Core staff opposes decision-making based on miners’ voting

At the Bitcoin Scaling Workshop in Montreal, discussions about specific plans for block size expansion were banned, although people still had some "illegal" discussions in the hallways that were not officially allowed. According to the meeting summary report, the meeting produced almost no agreement. But there was one thing that everyone clearly agreed on:

Hard fork method: prefer "if (timestamp > X)" to mark the hard fork one day in the next few months, set a setting in the version high, resulting in a negative number, so as to make the fork cleaner. Miner signaling - As for Bitcoin miners, use the method used recently, through the coinbase mark to indicate whether they are ready. This miner signal is not binding (the miner's signal value is not tested). Before implementing a hard fork, it is best to have a plan to cancel the hard fork in case of several unsuccessful hard forks.

Translated into language that everyone can understand, unlike BP100 or BP101, there will no longer be a miner voting process, and even the decision to start a hard fork will not take into account whether the miners are ready.

Miners can only express their opinions and suggestions, and Bitcoin Core maintainers can listen to the opinions of miners or not. Regardless of whether enough miners are ready for the necessary software upgrades and whether they have the support of any members of the community, these core maintainers can choose a date to fork. Because the democratic voting of miners is cancelled, Bitcoin Core maintainers can create a method (not yet determined, but presumably centralized) to cancel the fork.

Incredibly, after criticizing Gavin Andresen and I for proposing a change that would only require 75% of miners to vote in favor, the few core developers themselves agreed in the meeting that the miners’ views were completely irrelevant when it came to block size increases.

But it doesn’t matter. Here’s why:

Core staff will not raise the block size limit

People in the Bitcoin community generally believe that all Bitcoin developers want to increase the block size, but it will take some time to come up with a solution that everyone agrees is the best. These beliefs may come from what Bitcoin developers have been saying all along.

These beliefs are completely wrong.

Only five people in the world can modify the Bitcoin Core source code:

• Gavin Andresen
• Jeff Garzik
• Wladimir Van der Laan (official Bitcoin Core maintainer, he is the one who does the releases)
• Gregory Maxwell (Blockstream)
• Pieter Wiulle (Blockstream)

Three of them (Gavin, Jeff, and Peter) would not make changes that would displease the other two, which meant that it was actually just two people, Wladimir Van der Laan and Gregory Maxwell, who controlled the core source code repository.

Wladimir Van der Laan expressed his disapproval of increasing the block size early on, posting his thoughts after months of debate on the block size issue:

“Yes, [my position has not changed]. If we learned anything from the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, it’s that nothing will continue to grow exponentially, and making decisions based on that assumption is dangerous…. Changing the rules of a decentralized consensus system is a very tricky problem, and I don’t think it’s something we’ll be able to do anytime soon .”

Remember, Core Group members have controls that miners don’t have, so this is coming from a person who runs Bitcoin. And he believes that technology won’t continue to advance because banks gave American homeowners a lot of subprime loans in 2008.

This is absolutely ridiculous: computer speed has nothing to do with subprime lending, and the financial crisis was not caused by exponential growth.

So if you’re waiting for the core group to agree to a block size increase, remember this: no code will be included in Bitcoin Core unless Wladimir agrees, and he believes that any block size changes cannot happen “in the near future.”

So what does Maxwell think about increasing the block size? He often contradicts himself; claiming that he wants to increase the block size, but at the same time saying that expansion should not happen. So far, Maxwell has not explicitly supported any expansion proposal. Judge a man by what he does, not what he says: When Gavin and I asked Maxwell to come up with a specific expansion proposal, his response was   Lightning Network (and block size permanently stopped at 1mb).

I don't think the Bitcoin Core team will allow the Blockchain to have a future. Not now, not in December, and not ever. The two people who have the power to decide what goes into the Bitcoin Core source code will not allow it.

Conflict of Interest

Many of the Bitcoin Core developers are employed by a company called Blockstream, which recently launched a commercial sidechain product called Liquid, which is primarily used to connect Bitcoin exchanges, with customers paying the company a monthly fee.

This is a cause for concern, because it means that those trusted by the Bitcoin community to maintain and bootstrap the blockchain have a strong incentive to keep it working poorly and never improve. No wonder Blockstream’s official position is that the blockchain should remain largely unchanged, even with simple and obvious improvements like increasing the block size not being made.

Below is a list of Bitcoin Core developers who have been employed by Blockstream:
• Gregory Maxwell (has access to the Bitcoin Core codebase)
• Matt Corallo
• Jorge Timon
• Mark Friedenbach (aka maaku)
• Patrick Strateman (aka phantomcircuit)
• Warren Togami
• Adam Back

Pieter Wiulle (has access to the Bitcoin Core codebase)

Developers making decisions by consensus is a lie

Perhaps despite this, readers still believe that these core developers will take action on suggestions that everyone can reach consensus on, and they just won’t adopt controversial ideas. I’m sure you have seen these statements many times.

The fact is not like this.

It's not that everyone agrees, but as long as those who have access to the Bitcoin core code base decide to change it, the core version will be changed... Maxwell recently admitted in a debate that a change he wanted to make to the Bitcoin protocol rules was something that many people disagreed with.

[Thomas Zander] “Bitcoin Core claims that they strictly adhere to the principle of consensus and do not make any decisions if they cannot reach consensus. This is why the block size has not been increased for so many years.”
[gmaxwell] "You're only telling Mike's story, not anyone else's."

Maxwell’s answer was incredible: he flatly denied that he used the excuse of reaching a consensus as an excuse not to expand the block size, and said that I made up this statement.

What is the truth: In May of this year, Gregory Maxwell himself said in an email to Matt Corallo (another Blockstream employee) that “the hard fork must be conducted after everyone is almost completely free of controversy.” Matt’s email said:

“In a technical community like Bitcoin, consensus is the most basic requirement for any major decision such as block size increase.”

In May, Pieter Wiulle (another of the five people who can modify the Bitcoin Core code) said: "I don't think we can do a contentious hard fork." In August he said again: "The consensus provisions of Bitcoin refer to a system where decisions are made by consensus, not a democracy where the majority decides. You need to find a solution that everyone agrees on, or don't do it."

Adam Back, president of Blockstream and owner of Maxwell, told IEEE Spectrum magazine, “Everyone needs to be on the same page and do it in a coordinated way.”
Crucially, van der Laan, a Bitcoin Core maintainer, said in June:

“…anything controversial needs to be done with caution. If I suddenly start changing the code without consensus, please revoke my access to the Bitcoin Core repository immediately.”

So, the statement that Bitcoin Core maintainers require consensus to modify the code did not originate from me, but from the guys in charge of the Bitcoin project themselves.

So why did Gregory Maxwell suddenly do a 180-degree turn?

It's simple: a change he wants to make has suddenly become controversial, and others disagree with his idea, so he wants to abolish the rule that requires consensus to make changes. What better way to do that than to claim that the rule never existed in the first place?
By the way, there will no doubt be people who claim that there are two types of changes (soft forks and hard forks), and only hard forks require full consensus. Don't be fooled by this claim: any change to the code is submitted by the same people in the same way. Defining a class of technical changes that only includes changing the block size, and then claiming that such changes require everyone's consent to make them, is just another way of telling people in the community not to mention scaling anymore.

Why December won't bring any changes

When talking to Bitcoin miners and companies, I have heard more than once: “We are waiting for the second meeting on block size increase in December. If there is no progress by then, we will switch to BIP 101”.

It seems that too many people in the community believe that we will have a solution by the December meeting. At the first meeting, Gavin made a clear promise that progress would be made:

“I gave Gregory/Pieter/Wladimir a few weeks to do what they said they were going to do in Montreal, which was to come up with a plan that everyone could live with, even if it wasn’t satisfactory.”

If you still don't believe this, consider that it's been a month since the Montreal meeting and nothing has happened: the topic hasn't even been mentioned in their weekly meetings. There are only six weeks until the Hong Kong meeting, and even if it starts tomorrow, they only have six weeks to deliver on their promise and find a solution that "everyone can live with."

It was a bold prediction: they would not honor their promise to Gavin and would go to the meeting empty-handed.

People keep asking me if I plan to go to the Hong Kong meeting, I don’t, and neither will Gavin. If it takes two meetings and 10 months for the Bitcoin Core and Blockstream guys to decide how to change a single number, that’s their problem: Gavin, I, and others did the talking, the decision, the testing, the review, and delivered a working version months ago.

in conclusion

I understand that people in the Bitcoin community are afraid of arguments and conflicts. Miners who have invested a lot of money are worried that a controversial change will cause the price of Bitcoin to drop, causing them to lose money.

But every Bitcoin user, miner, and investor faces a stark choice:

1. Bitcoin Core: The two people operating this version have clearly shown that they don’t care about the future development of the blockchain. One of them is employed by a company that makes more money the worse the state of the blockchain is. There is no greater conflict of interest than this.

2. Bitcoin XT: The two people running this version have delivered a compromise that reflects the needs of miners, users, and companies.

Decentralization is not some vaguely defined set of development process specifications that can be ignored if it goes against Blockstream’s interests. It is the ability of people to choose a version of the software that aligns with their beliefs after being given all the information they need, and it always has been.

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Original article: https://medium.com/@octskyward/%E6%AF%94%E7%89%B9%E5%B8%81%E5%8C%BA%E5%9D%97%E5%A4%A7%E5%B0%8F%E7%9A%84%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98-a4a25d30485f
By Mike Hearn