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In recent months, Miu has been actively involved in resolving the block size dispute, playing a key role in facilitating the Hong Kong Bitcoin Roundtable and the consensus reached. But what made him more famous in the Bitcoin community may be a series of tweets - praised by many and criticized by some as amateurish. Continuing from the previous article, the following is the rest of the interview with Miao Yongquan about the expansion of the Bitcoin block size. The Core developers who attended the Hong Kong Roundtable signed the consensus document on their own behalf, not on Core. What happens if the time comes to launch a hard fork and there is no consensus among the Core developers? Miao Yongquan: Yes, they made the commitment in their personal capacity. As I mentioned before, Core is not a separate entity - it is not a company. The Core contributors who attended the meeting cannot speak on behalf of other contributors, just as we cannot speak on behalf of KnCMiner who did not attend the meeting. It was actually Core developer Peter Todd who took the lead in making the personal commitment. He made a bold move and expressed his willingness to work on making parts of the protocol happen. At the end of the meeting, he and AntPool's Jihan Wu both made great contributions to bringing everyone together. As for consensus among the Core development team, we will give them some time to make their own internal decisions. It will be up to them to decide what to do next. We strongly hope that they will agree with the contributors who signed the Hong Kong Agreement, some of whom, like Wladimir, have expressed support for the Hong Kong Agreement. It will be the code being written that will ultimately end this debate. Despite the important achievements of the Hong Kong Roundtable, it was only a meeting between a small group of people. What about the rest of the community? What about other companies, miners, users? Miao Yongquan: Roundtable participants are doing their best to bring more people in the Bitcoin industry together, but it is a difficult battle. For our users, we need to come up with a way to tell our users what they really want. We discussed this in the meeting when we were working on the hard fork plan - maybe there could be a way for users to vote with their Bitcoin. But these ideas have not yet taken shape. Most importantly, it is not a sure thing that the rest of the Bitcoin community will support the Hong Kong agreement. If that were the case, Bitcoin would easily change and no longer be something unique or special. At least some parts of the community are already pushing back, arguing that SegWit won’t be ready on time and that the hard fork will do too little, too late. Miao Yongquan: It is never too late. The important thing is that the Bitcoin community needs to understand that they are being manipulated. Miao Yongquan: The Classic team and their supporters. This is a trick they are playing to gain control and influence, most likely to seize the entire Bitcoin. They have turned a seemingly insignificant issue, the block size debate, into a tool to jeopardize consensus rules. This is a very obvious slippery slope fallacy and sets a very dangerous precedent. They posted a list of supporters on their website, but many people on the list did not know that their names were listed on it. Some companies, although they said they would support the 2MB expansion, did not say they would support the Classic hard fork. We also see them shouting that we are approaching the block size limit at the same time that the Bitcoin network is being attacked by heavy spam. Either they are the ones initiating these attacks, or they are unaware that the Bitcoin network is being attacked - either way, it doesn’t work in their favor. Then they shift the blame to the Core developers, while presenting themselves as the saviors. Bitcoin is not an easy thing to understand - even some of the executives of major Bitcoin companies do not fully understand how Bitcoin works. Therefore, if these people oversimplify the scaling issue and describe it as just going from 1MB to 2MB, it will not make people understand Bitcoin better, but will cause the majority of the community to follow their ideas. It is always easier to become outraged than to stay rational. The block chain was indeed somewhat congested for a while, but who can prove which ones were junk traffic attacks and which ones were legitimate uses of the blockchain? Miao Yongquan: If an individual or group deliberately operates with the purpose of interrupting network services, this is an attack. We will see wallets constantly sending coins to themselves, repeatedly spending unconfirmed transactions, sending a large number of low-cost transactions, and constantly making requests for large blocks, which will explode the bandwidth. Sure you could say these aren't attacks, and we should allow anyone to use Bitcoin however they see fit. But let's take a simpler example. If someone took away all the toilet paper in a public restroom, would that be a bad thing? To solve this problem, should we double the amount of toilet paper in public restrooms every day? Even without attacks, block size is a finite resource. Increasing the block size to 2MB does not solve anything. As long as attackers are willing to pay, they will always find ways to attack transactions with junk traffic. We need to find smarter ways to filter out irregular operations that are smart about estimating fees, but fees will always and must be a factor in block transactions. Are you saying that on-chain transactions should be charged a fee? Miao Yongquan: If Satoshi intended that all transactions would always be on-chain, there would be no block reward halving. A better term to describe block rewards is "block subsidy". Currently everyone can pay lower fees because their transactions are funded by block rewards. Since block capacity is a limited resource, people must be willing to pay for it - this is a basic concept of economics: supply and demand. If people insist that all transactions must be done on-chain and always be free, we welcome them to provide this service to the community - they can invest millions of dollars to build a data center, purchase mining equipment, and then start mining as a public service to provide low-fee transactions to everyone. Your company introduced a service called "BlockPriority", which guarantees that transactions conducted through BTCC will be conducted in the first block mined by the BTCC mining pool. Classic developer Gavin Andresen pointed out that this is not a healthy network service and will become increasingly unstable and vulnerable to attacks. Miao Yongquan: "Priority blocks" do not indicate anything about the health of the Bitcoin network. "Priority blocks" do indicate unpatched spam attack vectors in the system, the need for better fee estimation methods, and the need for Bitcoin businesses to adopt SegWit to increase the Bitcoin block size. Ideally, we wouldn't try to do anything about block size, but I guess if you have nothing but a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Apparently some people do think that the solution Bitcoin needs right now is to increase the block size limit. Classic could provide a viable alternative to that. What’s wrong with that? Miao Yongquan: Classic sold their hard fork to the public as a consensus, but consensus only requires a hard fork, but not their hard fork. The Classic hard fork was an attack on the Bitcoin network and was controversial in its own right. Some say it doesn’t solve the attack vector, which Segregated Witness does. Some people don’t have confidence in the team behind the Classic project, which has been in flux for weeks. Some people think Classic has no real solution and their roadmap lacks substance. Others, myself included, think the 75% threshold for activation is too low and the 28-day grace period is irresponsibly short to allow people to upgrade the system. In addition, Core developers have said they won’t do anything for Bitcoin if a small minority can take over the entire Bitcoin project by simply changing the consensus rules and talking about it. Classic represents a small minority? Miao Yongquan: Yes. The Hong Kong consensus has shown that the Core team’s efforts to develop a hard fork have received widespread support. But Classic has also gathered a lot of support. Gavin Andresen has even led the Bitcoin project for many years. Are you sure you are not questioning his professional ability? Miao Yongquan: In fact, I do question his professional ability since BIP 101 and Bitcoin XT. If the Bitcoin network adopts these projects, it will be a disaster. The block size increase he proposed is likely to destroy the entire network. In fact, even the initial proposal to force the block size to 8MB would be too much for the Bitcoin network, but this plan was sold to everyone as a safe scaling solution. Gavin played a very important role in the formative years of Bitcoin. However, he stopped being a network maintainer mid-term and has made few contributions to the network since then. Many new people have joined in to actively solve Bitcoin security issues, and even more have brought their own solutions to help Bitcoin develop to layer 1. In my opinion, Gavin nursed Bitcoin through its infancy, and I think we are all very grateful for that. But now we have other people teaching this baby physics and chemistry, and the Bitcoin generation script has been largely rewritten. We are working on more advanced features, and will need to work on many other features in the future to ensure it grows - we can't just look to previous contributors for guidance. So who should we turn to for guidance in this chaos of the block size debate? Miao Yongquan: We need to seek guidance from those who actively contribute to the Bitcoin network by writing code, donating time, funding development, etc. We need to seek guidance from those who are focused on solving complex technical problems. We need to seek guidance from those who are developing new technologies like the Lightning Network. More importantly, we need to seek guidance from those who are working to collaborate and generate income. I believe that reason will prevail. There is a small but vocal minority trying to stir up trouble right now, but if the community can see through the game, stay calm, and keep writing code, we can move forward!
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