Bitcoin's governance bungles stain the blockchain's reputation Civilisation is an agreement. We agree to pay our tax, obey the laws, and generally avoid berserking around the joint. Where these agreements breaks down you get riots that scale into civil wars, then collapse. That’s less of an issue so long as the problem is over there - so that when a culture soils the sheets you don’t have …
If only Gavin had made a wiser choice for a successor... Now the sole owners of the official bitcoin source on GitHub is a private company, which is only interested with increasing it's profits by stomping on Bitcoin 'til it's dead. Something that seems to happen regularly when public services are privatized...
The code is open. You, me, or anyone else could create their own version which does things differently. The rub is that the version that pleases most people is the one which takes precedence. That's just how it should be, isn't it? Whether that version has been prepared by a private company or a solitary spotty 16 year old in a bedroom somewhere makes no difference- the version which takes precedence is the one the most people like the most.
Except, when the source is forked and a new, competing implementation is released, for example Bitcoin XT, all of the new nodes are DDoS'ed out of existence by said company.
The big issue in Bitcoin isn't that *most* people see that there is an issue, and can thus move completely from the current system, but rather that there's a roughly even split among the parties, where one side argues that the blocksize cap is fine, whereas the others argue the opposite.
Bitcoin's blockchain management is failing to support the high level of transactions that the fairy money scheme has generated, and that will tend to make makers of connected abominations not look at the blockchain functionality when shoving their insecure crap on ever connection that accepts the stuff.
I don't have any Bitcoins or any other fairy money, and IoT will stop at the moat around my house, so how exactly am I concerned about all this ?
Oh, right, all the other blithering idiots who buy into this unicorn scheme will be flooding my Internet with their useless, insecure drivel in quantities that will dwarf the useless, inane drivel from Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, that'll probably bug me a bit.
Until I finally get a working flamethrower, that is.
> fairy money scheme
The Bitcoin network consists of an astonishing amount of custom hardware chips, 6000 active network nodes, and, more importantly, millions of users who generate 220,000 transactions a day. The bitcoin unit is a token marking some value being moved, in the same way a shipping label is a token marking a package being moved.
The token marks a fractional interest in the value of the network, since there is only one blockchain and all the tokens and which address controls them resides there. It doesn't have value in itself, but then neither does an entry in a spreadsheet, or in the bank's database for your account. It's what value those data entries represent and can mobilize that matters.
> Until I finally get a working flamethrower,
Amazon sells those, and you can pay for them with bitcoins :-) (via ShapeShift card)
What makes you think Satoshi Nakamoto didn't read the book or make prototypes? Bitcoin has a "testnet", which is partly intended to trial code. There's also a SegNet for trialing the Segmented Witness idea. They are quite prepare to make things and then throw them away if they don't work. However, eventually you have to deploy and use the thing, and once that point is passed, you can't throw it away without inconveniencing your users.
No, neither of those things. The issue is that Bitcoin has limited capacity, likely to be exceeded soon, and the community can't decide how (or even whether) the capacity should be increased. If nothing happens and growth continues at the current rate, then Bitcoin will start dropping transactions. That's not an error, nor does it mean the protocol can't be trusted. It remains secure. It may get more expensive to use, as you'll have to pay higher fees to get your transactions processed.
This is a problem of success. It wouldn't have got to this point if Bitcoin had suffered errors or couldn't be trusted.
> And what if the transaction does take place, but the record is lost?
The design of the blockchain prevents that.
When you create a transaction, you are saying send X amount of bitcoins from address A to address B. You sign it with your private key to address A, proving they were yours to send. It then gets broadcast to the network of 6000 nodes, each of which compares your transaction to the balance of address A, to verify you had enough to send. They also validate your signature and some other technical checks. If it passes, they add it to their pool of pending transactions. So at this point the transaction is stored in 6000 places.
Miners are also nodes, and see the transaction. They compete to find a "hash" (checksum) for a block of transactions, in order to win the block reward (currently 25 new bitcoins worth almost $10,000) plus transaction fees from the included transactions. Blocks also record the hash of the previous block, linking them in a chain (hence "blockchain"). When your transaction is included in a block, it is "confirmed", and removed by the network nodes from the pool of pending transactions. The new block is added to their copy of the growing blockchain. The transaction is still stored in 6000 places, but in the chain instead of the pending pool.
At no point can the record of the transaction be "lost", it's in too many places. It can remain pending if blocks are full and it never gets into one. If the pool of pending transactions gets too large, nodes can start dropping some to save memory space. In that case, your transaction was never completed. You can try again later, since the official blockchain shows you still have the funds in address A.
The current block size limit is 1 Megabyte, which allows about 2500 transactions per block, and blocks average one per 10 minutes. In theory that allows 360,000 per day, and lately there have been 220,000 per day getting processed. The argument is over how to increase capacity, since we are getting close to it. The simple answer is to raise the size limit, but that increases bandwidth, block transmission time, storage requirements, etc. An alternative is to move parts of transactions (the signatures) or entire swathes of transactions (side chains and such) off the main bitcoin chain, and only record the important bits. For example "this transaction on the main chain summarizes 1,024 smaller transactions on side chain Z".
Everyone involved wants bitcoin to grow, and it is obvious capacity needs to increase. They disagree on *how* to do it.
If traditional financial institutions processed transactions with that service level in my jurisdiction, I'd expect to see mile-long queues of punters at banks' doors trying to withdraw their lucre immediately. There'd be major civil unrest, panic etc ...
Filthy specie ...perhaps today the fundamentals are unappreciated but the stuff is boring, reliable, tangible and fairly well understood the world over ... just as it has been for hundreds of years.
When Blockchain (and spawn exemplified by Bitcoin) grows up and can claim a fraction of that adoption, then maybe, just maybe, it'll be accepted as a fit for purpose tool
'Everyone involved wants bitcoin to grow, and it is obvious capacity needs to increase. They disagree on *how* to do it.'
If having the system slow and unreliable increases transaction fees, how exactly does this result in everyone, including those who would prefer to be larger sharks in smaller pools, involved in wanting these limits removed ? If that were so the present incumbents wouldn't have DDOS'd the fork intended to bypass current limits.
Dont buy it. No-one seriously considering a blockchain solution will use anything from bitcoin as anything but a pattern or a prototype.
Blockchain may die on its own hype but its already independent enough from Bitcoin that BT is effectively irrelevant as anything other than a v0.1 prototype.
They are pretty closely associated tho, as can be seen in the Reg comments. If Bitcoin fails, the idiots will start shouting about how bad Bitcoin is and how the blockchain could never work and how they were all so much smarter. Then you'll have useless journalists (maybe not from El Reg, but there are plenty of 'news' outlets) who pick up unsubstantiated rumors and report them as facts, stuff gets twisted, the blockchain gets a bad public image, because of it's association to Bitcoin and when you tell your 85yr old grandma in the USA that Western Union wants to use "that newfangled internet thing" to transfer some of her money to you as a gift or something, she won't trust it, because she heard on the telly about how bad the internet is.
While your hypothetical grammy likely holds very little sway, there are *plenty* of ignorant people there and as a company, distancing yourself from a totally fine 'product' for PR reasons has happened before.
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