Update on Bitcoin Cash(blog.coinbase.com) |
Update on Bitcoin Cash(blog.coinbase.com) |
Looks like BitConnect might need to come up with a new short-name?
"This means if there are two separate digital currencies – bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) – customers with Bitcoin stored on Coinbase will only have access to the current version of bitcoin we support (BTC). Customers will not have access to, or be able to withdraw, bitcoin cash (BCC).
Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required."
Any "calculated move" that involves repeated pleas to one's own customers to withdraw all their assets from one's platform to protect themselves from that move... well, you can characterize that as well as I can.
It does seem like they're understaffed. Maybe they were hoping the fork would wither away quickly and they wouldn't need to deal with it. As one of the largest exchanges they should have better contingency planning than that.
I hope they continue to succeed because I do like Coinbase.
One example springs to mind. I bought some ETH once they initially began supporting it, just before it shot up in value. However, the transaction just seemed to disappear and I lost out. I tried contacting support by they just kept closing my tickets without explanation. Very, very frustrating.
I know a story when someone bought some coins with Visa credit card and they had some issues with Conibase service. Same story with tickets - open only to have it closed down next day with suggestion to look into knowledge base.
Then they proceed to the bank and opened a chargeback dispute based on false advertising (legitimate reason) that Coinbase promised to help and are not.
You see - since crypto-currency is not tangible item (you can call it service, if you will), neither Visa, nor Amex or Mastercard will have issues with your dispute, because there is even no tracking to proof you received your "product". Of course once the funds are returned to your credit card and bank notifies Coinbase about the dispute, Coinbase will take your coins away from you, but that's not the point. You see -- it doesnt matter to Visa if you process $1 billion in monthly transactions - if you have too many chargebacks, they will shut you down. End of the story. You open another account - you go on the MATCH list and owner(s) SSN/IDs are on it for 5 years so bye bye processing credit card transactions.
Coinbase might not care about you (I am sure they do per se, they just cheap and won't hire enough eyeballs to answer customer support), but surely they care about their chargebacks dispute level.
That said I'm currently experiencing a problem where all emails from Coinbase to my email address are being lost and it isn't a spam filter. I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
If all they are going to do is regurgitate information from there website why do they have support people at all?
If anyone from Coinbase is reading this all email sent from Coinbase to the Purdue Alumni email forwarding service @alumni.purdue.edu is being lost or not sent or something. It may have something to do with the fact that the alumni.purdue.edu server doesn't support TLS. I don't know just a guess but I know something changed in the past couple months and I don't even get marketing emails from Coinbase any more and it is preventing me from logging into my account.
I had a similar issue. I posted a clear support ticket, heard nothing for at least a day or two (probably longer) then got boilerplate about checking the support website. I replied saying I did and that the information on the support page couldn't be used to solve the problem. Nothing from Coinbase for a week, then another bot email saying they'll close the ticket unless I reply (again!) saying my issue was not resolved. This back and forth lasted over a month.
It reflects pretty poorly on them as a company and I really can't recommend using them as a result. The underlying support issue was related to their verification software. If their verification software doesn't work for some reason and their support is isn't focused/careful, then you're out of your account for more than a month.
Don't let centralized authorities keep your private keys.
But for the average person the chances are much higher that they will get hacked or lose their keys than losing their coins on Coinbase.
There are several important differences between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. This may be the most important one to you, but it is not to everyone.
One week after contacting their support and not getting any response, I got an automated response asking if I am still interested in a follow up and if so, I should reply to this mail.
This continued for 2 months every week. I then decided to start complaining on their subreddit and twitter and coincidentally immediately got a mail helping me with my original problem and finally fixing it.
Now with the hardfork I withdrew all my funds as well and will never go back.
So I don't trust them and as soon as a viable alternative comes along I'm off Coinbase.
I work very closely with numerous crypto exchanges for a living (I write code which interfaces with them). Outside of work, I've personally chosen to open a Coinbase account and trade on GDAX.
Coinbase is, in my opinion, the most reputable exchange out there by far.
It's a form of price discrimination. Only ignorant end-consumers pay the crazy broker fees. Anyone slightly sophisticated deposits USD via ACH (nearly free) and then transfers to GDAX and does their trading there (0-0.25%).
So you don't trade on Coinbase yourself?
Edit: It's almost they have one exchange for ppl who know what they're doing, & one to fleece noobs (3.9% on BTC/USD. I think).
As in, UX, UI, Docs, APIs, service design etc. are all top notch. Which would make it probable (but not certain) that the more technical parts are well engineered too.
Coinbase is doing perhaps something similar to what Stripe did for its field of business.
It was a real problem.
I cannot warn other potential victims of Coinbase strongly enough; hopefully the chaos and incompetence around BCC will alert people more publicly about the dangers of getting entangled with them. Hold your cryptocurrency in your own wallet that you control yourself.
I personally didn't want to take on the risk of creating a paper wallet and having to move my small amount of BTC from my Coinbase vault, so this is great news for me.
There's no telling how Coinbase operates internally. You can't just assume that 1 customer == 1 permanent bitcoin address in Coinbase's backend. Perhaps they shift funds around all the time into new addresses, without keeping references/keys to the old ones. In that case, BCH balances would be lost, with no way to restore them to the 'owner' at the time of the fork.
Luckily (for would-be BCH holders) that seems to not be the case, but I think Coinbase deserves credit for going the extra mile when they could justifiably say that it is not their problem to deal with.
You are correct, but this would be a new level of stupid for a leading cyrptocurrency exchange that actually tries to build a reputation and appearance of quality, safety, compliance and being a "legit" service for financial institutions etc.
I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH? If so, why? I understand there was a fork, but I don't get why I'm entitled to the same amount of BCH... what if there are more forks in the future, I'll just keep getting more of those offshoot coins as well?
If you knew me in person you'd know the cynicism was intentional. I've got quite a bit to start with and double so when it comes to anything involving digital currencies.
> They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently?
On the contrary, I agreed with it. I said as much the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14915884
> How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
I don't think it's possible to tell after less than a day if it's a viable fork. It's way too early. That's why I'm thinking this is driven more from the perceived cost of lawsuits vs. the development cost of supporting the feature.
Since the fork didn't die immediately, they are going ahead with the "allow everyone to transfer their BCH out" plan. Had it died, they probably wouldn't bother.
Supposing BCC eventually becomes of comparable value to BTC, does this mean everyone's fortune was just doubled?
No matter which competitor "wins", your assets should keep the same total value they had before.
Bitcoin cash, at the time of writing, looks to be around the 300 USD mark, without BTC having moved much.
I wonder what implications this has to the global economy. If we continue to fork will there be a global hyperinflation?
Ah yes, keeping the sha hash vulnerability open for ASIC mining attacks is not a priority? Empty block exploits not a priority? Thousands of coins have been minted to worthless "proof of work" exploits and early adopters.
Surprised it's lasted this long.
Isn't it how it started with gold-based government currencies as well? every government created their own currency/fork of gold.
edit: typo, inflation
That's why wall street got off gold .
"Over the last several days, we’ve examined all of the relevant issues and have decided to work on adding support for bitcoin cash for Coinbase customers. We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/bitcoin-e...
It's an interesting read even if you don't care about shorts or bitcoin at all.
This really is an interesting situation. In the hours approaching the BCH fork an absolutely massive number of short positions were opened on various bitcoin exchanges, but the price remained steady. I assumed people were shorting in expectation of a crash, but the outlined scenario makes much more sense.
Similarly to the trade outlined in the article, if you already held bitcoin, you could short the equivalent amount and you would still receive bitcoin cash. This trade also had the nice side effect of your exposure to fiat currency staying flat through all the potential fluctuation.
But whoever lent the BTC would most likely want the BTC + BCC they are entitled to, even though you don't really have one to give.
Coinbase has three major advantages: (1) incredible marketing, (2) flashy and good UX, and (3) (claimed) safety via cold storage.
The first (1) is a counter argument in my book, (2) is irrelevant, and (3) only matters if you let them control your private keys, which is stupid and the antithesis to Bitcoin.
They are so going to get sued if the price of Bitcoin Cash crashes by the end of the year. Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months?
This is what lawyers call "conversion"[1]. A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person commits criminal conversion. The element of knowledge is found when the accused person engages in the conduct and he/she is aware of a high probability that he/she is doing so. An essential element of criminal conversion is that “the property must be owned by another and the conversion thereof must be without the consent and against the will of the party, to whom the property belongs, coupled with the fraudulent intent to deprive the owner of the property.”
It's legally equivalent to theft.[2] The typical example of conversion is renting something and then refusing to return it.
Coinbase execs, you really need to be talking to good securities lawyers.
[1] https://conversion.uslegal.com/criminal-conversion/ [2] https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1317-n...
Then I realized there is a little less than 5 months left of 2017... Time is fucking flying!
The issue is that BCH belongs to the original owner of the BTC it was forked from. Despite Coinbase telling people to withdraw their BTC if they wanted the BCH a lot of people no-doubt now feel aggrieved that they're unable to access the new theoretical windfall.
It costs a lot of man hours to add infrastructure work for that, and they're setting a precedent that they'll support every single fork that people speculate with.
I personally think this is lazyman bullshit where people harp about how Coinbase being amicable with the feds are bad until they want to file suit lol. People who were knowledgeable enough about the fork but too lazy to learn how to move their Bitcoin out, not have their private keys stolen/lost, and redeem the coins on two chains without fucking up feel entitled to free money that costs Coinbase man hours and technical debt. Despite all ideals about them technically controlling the BCH, they should be able to draft a legal document placing their licensing at stake that asserts they're not claiming customer BCH and get back to answering my limit increase email.
*Disclaimer: I don't work for Coinbase or a Bitcoin company
Maybe a month for rush (but tested) development. Four months means they have other plans for the money and therefore I believe either they will revise that number or there will be a very large lawsuit. Something like criminal conversion or something.
They have around 7 million customers. If the average amount of bitcoin comes out to 0.5 bitcoin (could be more, could be less, who knows?) then that is 0.5 * 375 (current BCH price) * 7 million = around 1.3 billion USD. Maybe it averages out to quite a bit more. But they are saying they need to hold on to a billion dollars worth of assets until next year for 'safe keeping' or because its technically too hard? LOL.
Ripple's XRP will win
Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on.
Years later I still have that BTC.
I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.
You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.
Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff...
In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.
Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.
The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
Long ago I tried to withdraw my BTC, but after clicking the withdrawal button the browser tab was stuck waiting for the HTTP response. So after a while I opened a second tab and tried to withdraw again. Both withdrawals went through and I ended up with a negative BTC balance on Coinbase. I sent one of the transactions back so that my balance ends up at zero again.
We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e...
If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).
if appropriate forward my LinkedIn to the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/
The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched).
To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).
No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue.
Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.
Send me an email (in my profile) and we can have someone manually resolve.
I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem.
Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.
The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
"viable alternative" seems pretty subjective.
CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e.
Choose your exchange carefully.
All they had to say was "BCC support for withdrawals will happen within 30 days if BCC trades above X% of BTC". Or basically anything to the effect of "if BCC is worth anything, we'll give it to you", thus satisfying most people without committing to handling worthless forks.
They probably could implement it much sooner, but they are waiting for 2 things (I'm speculating here).
1. Larger hashrate, which decreases likelihood of a 51% attack.
2. SegWit2x November hard fork.
> Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required.
https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...
I would suggest that neither of us have any idea how hard that would be. (Also, they gave a pretty similar announcement, minus the "we might support BCH in the future" bit.)
From my perspective, they are now going to devote a shit ton of engineering effort into supporting BCH withdrawals, which will not provide a source of recurring revenue.
Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control). That's exactly what Coinbase _didn't_ want you to do if you wanted full control over your funds.
Actually, transferring from Coinbase to an exchange was the correct move. If you transferred BTC before the fork to an exchange that quickly implemented BCH trading you would have been credited and been able to trade right away. People (like me) who did the 'correct thing' and withdrew to their own wallets now have to wait days to deposit to a BCH exchange and will likely never see $700 BCH again.
I'm so confused.
Edit: if I know my private keys for my BTC, does that mean they are the exact same for BCH? If so, how would I then "acquire" said BCH?
There can be as much copies of ledger (offshoot coins, forks) as anybody wishes, important is how it grows from there. Most probably it will just die within few mining blocks and thus will not carry any monetary value. And yes, anytime one forks USD to VSD/WSD/YSD/XSD/ZSD they are essentially copying the ledger from that snapshot, with your address having same balance as its fork-parent.
The Bitcoin/BCH thing is like this, but on a greater scale with potential risks around it (BCH had to ensure there were no replay attacks on the Bitcoin blockchain for example.) For example, Trezor recommends (and has to deliver your Bitcoin to a Bcash-specific address: https://trezor.io/claim-bch/.
By taking your BTC out of Coinbase and into a wallet you control directly (on your computer or phone) before the fork, you have the corresponding private keys during the fork, which after the fork can be used to transact the same value independently on both the BTC and BCH chains.
> I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH?
What matters is what happened at the precise moment of the fork. If at that moment your BTC was on an exchange, the corresponding BCH is at that same exchange. What happens with it depends on the exchange: some might treat it as non-existent, some might credit it to you in full (but it might or might not be possible to trade and/or take it out of the exchange), some might credit it to you partially based on a confusing formula which gets changed after the fact, and some might even take all the BCH for themselves.
When they say it will take them time to implement, it's an honest statement. They literally have to implement software, do lots of code review, check their accounting, pentesting, or at least they should be doing these things, and 5 months is an unusually short timeline. Even if they took 10% as fee to hire extra developers to work on this project, 5 months is not guaranteeable at all.
The short timelines proposed for hard-forks is one of the reasons why so many bitcoin developers have voiced caution about hard-fork proposals: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support (far right columns)
Cryptsy was quickly installing random altcoins on their servers until one of the 200 coins they installed ended up being malware (a reverse shell or whatever) and poof goes their exchange, plus or minus some other possible fraud occurring. There is value to caution and review when upgrading software systems.... much less financial systems. With backwards-compatible upgrades, you can be more certain about the net impacts. For example, if the changes were compatible with the pre-existing bitcoin rules, then none of this new coin stuff would have happened, and the whole industry could benefit from the compatible upgrades.
Animats-coin could be created and supported by 2 machines. Is Coinbase obligated to support it just because you have a couple graphics cards and forked code?
If so, there are many near-worthless bitcoin variants and forked chains they aren't supporting.
Whenever someone gets rainbows in their eyes about the magic of the blockchain, I can't help but think "you can imagine the perfect, utopian future - the same one we imagined about the internet in 1994 - but none of the unintended side effects."
Coinbase doesn't have to trade Bitcoin Cash, but they do have to deliver it to the customers they owe on demand. In the world of real securities, "failure to deliver" is a big deal. It is not at the broker's option.
Q: Do I need to withdraw my BTC from Coinbase?
... If you wish to access your coins on the UAHF
chain ... you should withdraw your BTC from Coinbase
to an external wallet address under your control by
July 31.
For multiple non-legal reasons they should, unless writing the code is too much of a burden, but there's not much justification for being picky that it takes actual dev time.
That said, I also don't care as much if those get hacked as I can recover from stolen identity, while it's impossible to get back stolen bitcoin.
Anyone who borrowed BTC may have implicitly borrowed BCH. Suppose Person A owns shares in OldCo. Person B borrows those shares and sells them short to Person C. OldCo spins out NewCo. On Thursday evening, you go to bed with 1 OldCo share in your account; Friday morning, you wake up with 1 OldCo share and 1 NewCo share.
Bought Person A and Person C own OldCo shares, and so expect to receive one NewCo share. The company provides one. Who provides the other? The short seller. Presumably by buying Person A's NewCo shares. Same thing happens with dividends.
So if you borrowed BTC pre-fork and returned it post-fork, you're may find yourself owing BCH. Shorting is complicated, which is why I'm bemused by its proliferation around a blockchain that doesn't even natively support lending or interest rates.
Yes, they are exactly the same. To "acquire" the BCH, do the following: first, as a safety measure, "spend" it all on the BTC chain, by sending them all to a new wallet you also control; after that, these private keys have no BTC, but still have all the BCH. Then, you have to find a BCH wallet software which is compatible with your private key format, and import the private keys into it. That's it.
If copy was made at block 55, 55th block is same in both branches. 56th and such blocks can be totally different. Imagine it like a literal branch of tree. Both branches share the same trunk, but are unique once seperated into unique branches.
This is wild, wild cryptoland. At the moment both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are rising - so a lot of "free" money (at least in the short term.).
For now, two coins is better than one :p
EDIT: allright, Bitcoin Cash has been declining for a few days now. However, it still has quite a bit of value that has not disappeared from Bitcoin's value.
actually gdax just announce they would support BCC
Here's Coinbase support posting a "how do I use GADX?" article: https://community.coinbase.com/t/what-is-gdax-how-do-i-use-i...
Coinbase — consumer product
GDAX — institutional/professional product
"It's not like this was some random fork by some nobody faction." That's Monday-morning quarterbacking, and in fact we have no idea whether we're at halftime or end of game for BCH. Results-oriented thinking like that is one step away from cargo-culting.
"Figuring out how to actually claim my BCC was a (figurative) eternity." Right, so imagine having to solve that same problem for a million or so users in less time than it took you for yourself.
I do work in consumer software and I stand by my recommendation. I'm pretty sure they wish they would have just done it to start with PR-wise. No doubt it will be a hassle for them but being willing to take on the right hassles is what inspires loyalty from consumers like me.
I don't understand how it's "Monday-morning quarterbacking". I mean it's not controversial to say this fork was a long time coming and had a solid bloc of support. Coinbase is basically implicitly agreeing here that they should have done this to start or at least publicly left it open to support BCC should it prove legitimate. It's almost like they came out against to try to make it go away "these aren't the droids you are looking for"-style.
Just for the record, I've enjoyed using GDAX/Coinbase thus far to trade the coins they do support.
You think "a simple ability" takes less time. I think making it simple actually takes even more time, especially when Coinbase has a history of indemnifying its customers even when it wasn't responsible for the loss (GDAX/ETH flash crash), which means that a bare-bones tool with a ton of CYA documentation isn't going to cut it for them.
You saw a "solid bloc of support." I saw a fracas of tweets, bitcoin.org posts, and /r/b* proselytizing on many sides (not just for/against BCH but also for/against the other BIPs, as well as other things unilaterally calling themselves "consensus" or "agreement"). I'm still not convinced anyone but ViaBTC is in it for real (https://www.coindesk.com/even-miners-hate-bitcoin-cash-might...).
You probably believe BCH is currently valued in the mid-$200s. I see a thin market controlled primarily by exchanges imposing extremely conservative deposit requirements (up to 20 confirmations) that happen to function nicely as supply controls as well, and while I can't predict the future, I doubt an unconstrained market would send the price upward at this point.
Remember, the point of BCH was to make day-to-day on-chain transactions a realistic, scalable proposition. We're not even close to that being a reality, even in contrived pizza-buying scenarios. I'm still concerned that this fork will make exasperated merchants nope their way out of cryptocurrencies entirely, especially when intermediaries like BitPay face the practical usability nightmare of BCH and BTC addresses being visually identical.
Bitcoin has its practical use cases that have been hard-won over nearly a decade. Ethereum's elevator pitch is ICOs. Both of them have clear reasons to exist. But Bitcoin Cash's pitch at this point is "like Bitcoin but without the network effects." I understand where it wants to go, but for now it's just a speculative vehicle, and I understand why Coinbase doesn't want to help enable that usage.
If I borrow your hen and it lays an egg and that hatches a chick, shouldn't I give you the chick back with the hen?
That being said, I think when margin trading on GADX no actual Bitcoin transactions are occurring. So, Coinbase is just doing accounting for the trades using internal assets. I think they could later on replay everything but treat all of the short positions as having exited directly at the split or something along those lines.
To me, low transaction fees is more important than even anonymity or decentralization. My understanding of the problem is that we need to somehow encourage everyone to run a full node. We've decided a transaction fee that goes to "miners" is a good way to do that.
Well, my problem is that now miners want higher transaction fees. We have inherently opposite goals and as such I cannot be allied with miners at all.
This should be a general rule for the whole internet.
By the way, why would you need to wait to sell a BCH deposit? That confirms almost immediately, right? I could understand AML/KYC on a cash withdrawal, but incoming crypto is zero risk to the exchange.
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.
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.
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:
I've linked to a better explanation down below. It does run 12 minutes but you only need to watch the first 3 minutes for a technical answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBAG2Jp4bg
[0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/65uriv/a_simplifie...