Vitalik Buterin: Segregated Verification Consensus was Achieved Through Political Means

Segregated Verification (Segwit) is one of the solutions to the Bitcoin block capacity dispute. Its perfection has reached 99%. Although it has not yet been released, there are many doubts.

Many people expect that segregated verification will increase transaction volume without changing block size. This approach will eventually trigger a soft fork, when most nodes will be upgraded to adapt to the old software.

As Segwit has grown, some have publicly accused it of being political, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Advantages of Segregated Witness

Unlike other solutions, segregated verification only requires a soft fork of the network, so bitcoin software users do not have to upgrade their clients to a consistent version. Soft fork supporters say this approach can reduce the risk of a split in the bitcoin blockchain.

However, some observers, including Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, believe that soft forks are not a good option. Garzik once said that soft forks only represent the recognition of a small number of miners and developers on the economic changes of Bitcoin, while hard forks are the recognition of such changes by the entire network.

Blockstream said that increasing the block capacity in a short period of time will only bring more security issues and centralization risks. Some people believe that Blockstream has some vested interests in limiting the capacity of Bitcoin because some transactions will be transferred to the side chain they developed.

Blockstream co-founder Gregory Maxwell responded that their Bitcoin is temporarily locked and can only be used at a certain point in time. Bitcoin is in a long-term positive state, and this part of the funds is a bonus for Blockstream employees.

Segregated verification consensus challenged

As Segregated Witness is about to launch, some Reddit posts have begun to question its consensus.

Some posts have suggested that a limited supply would affect the long-term security of the Bitcoin blockchain, since inflation and transaction fees are necessary for security.

In addition, some people also compared it to Monero. One post said that Monero, which has no limited issuance, often has inflation.

Vitalik Buterin joins

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote that there is nothing inherently political about Segwit:

It’s just a bunch of fancy technical code changes and transaction verification data reorganization of merkle trees (binary hash trees). But Segwit reached consensus through political means.

Buterin said that the Ethereum hard fork was also achieved through political means, but no one expressed opposition.

He also mentioned that the anonymous digital currency project Zcash has made greater changes than isolated verification and contains important innovations. He believes that innovators with significant contributions should specifically initiate proposals because it is too arrogant to want to use soft forks to develop cryptocurrencies.

He said Zcash founder and CEO Zooko is working with Ethereum to write ZK-SNARK opcodes into Ethereum.

Buterin accused Bitcoin developer Peter Todd of advocating a “coercive soft fork” and using political means rather than market choice to make decisions.

Peter Todd: The Zcash standard would be much simpler if it were incorporated into a Bitcoin (or even Litecoin) soft fork.

Vitalik Buterin: That’s right. Proposing a proposal is much more noble than doing actual things.

Peter Todd: You missed the point, I meant a complete proposal, the kind with complete code.

Peter Todd: It's the same as my CheckLockTimeVerify (CLTV), except that Isolate Verification has not yet been formally proposed and has not yet been formally accepted.

Peter Todd: The level of perfection of isolated verification has reached 99%, and some activation details are still missing.

BUTERIN: So essentially you prefer politics over market choices. Got your point.

Peter Todd responds

Todd said Buterin missed the point, he was talking about the code being 99% complete, and Segregated Verification is almost done, with some activation details still to be done.

There were also some tweets directed at Ethereum, accusing it of hard forking to cater to the interests of a small group of DAO investors.

Necessary conditions for Bitcoin forks

According to a post on GitHub, the Bitcoin fork will occur after the activation of segregated verification (75% consensus) or after reaching a certain block height. After the activation of segregated verification, blocks with segregated verification transactions will be created in the network, requiring clients to process blocks according to the segregated verification rules.

The post also states that Satoshi Nakamoto described performing a hard fork at a predetermined block height as a reasonable mechanism for creating larger blocks in the future.

In addition, the post mentioned that Satoshi Nakamoto set the 1MB block capacity limit to prevent fraud, not to limit the development of Bitcoin.