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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. Miu Yong Quan is the COO of BTCC, a comprehensive platform that provides Bitcoin exchanges, wallet services and mining pools. As a former director of the gaming industry with outstanding achievements, he joined his friend Li Qiyuan as a consultant last year and has been deeply involved in the company's affairs since then. The following is a record of Miu Yong Quan's interview with Bitcoin Magazine on Bitcoin block expansion. Not too long ago, you were a somewhat obscure operations executive, unknown to many in the Bitcoin industry. If nothing else, it seems that your recent bold statements on Twitter have thrust you into the spotlight. Why did you suddenly do this? Miao Yongquan: I mainly satirize the current situation on Twitter. It is a bit ridiculous that people can attribute everything to conspiracy theories and ignore everything that does not match their views. In addition to all these false information and unfounded claims, the Core development team has also received a lot of negative and malicious attacks. In the face of this situation, there is no other way but to laugh it off. You yourself have been critical of the Core development team in the past, and in our last interview you even said that if Core cannot reach consensus, stakeholders will likely implement expansion. Miao Yongquan: The key point I wanted to express at the time was that action must be taken. The entire Bitcoin community was frustrated at the time, and so was I. The last interview actually led to a 3-hour phone call with Adam Back, the president of Blockstream. Although I generally criticized Adam and the Core team on the phone, my criticism was mainly about the Core team not communicating better. Adam and the Core developers accepted my feedback and they did improve a lot in communication after that. I also learned more about how the Core developers work together and that people shouldn't be so pessimistic about Core. I realized that it's not okay to just complain to Adam and expect things to magically get better. Core is a very diverse group of individual volunteers and volunteer companies, and there are many different opinions within the group. This group can't just respond to people's feedback - there is no mechanism to do that. They are just a group of guys who want to write code for Bitcoin and solve related problems, and there is no one in charge of the whole thing. Wladimir van der Laan is in management isn't he? Miao Yongquan: Wladimir is responsible for merging code as a maintainer. But he won't make a decision on anything without a general consensus from the entire Core group. This is actually what people accuse him of, thinking he is too cautious. Because he won't make any decisions on various issues, things won't get any better. But he can decide when a rough consensus has been reached. Miao Yongquan: I don’t think he is the final decision maker, his role is actually a coordinator. If he merges the code without reaching a consensus, there probably won’t be many developers left to work on the project. The current block size limit is still 1MB. I heard that you expressed support for short-term forced expansion in December last year? Miao Yongquan: Satoshi Nakamoto originally limited the block size to 1MB to prevent junk traffic, but the block size limit also has another function: it can maintain a lower limit to ensure that anyone can run a full node, which is very conducive to promoting decentralization. As far as I know, one of the important properties of Bitcoin is decentralization. My initial preference was to do a hard fork first, but I have since learned more about Segwit and why it needs to be implemented first: to prevent certain attacks. If we don’t focus on addressing these weaknesses, we may encounter more problems in the future, such as fabricated transactions that could destabilize the entire Bitcoin network. Since Core developers want to ensure security while maintaining decentralization, they are naturally very cautious about increasing the block size set by Satoshi. With the use of Segregated Witness, Core developers are indeed increasing the actual block size. At the same time, as part of the Hong Kong Roundtable consensus, some people are already working on implementing a hard fork to prepare for the next increase. I don't think this can be called artificial control of the block size. Some believe that a small group of developers has fixed the block size limit to its current state. Miao Yongquan: If the “small group” you are referring to is the Core development team, this team has about 80 contributors, and technically speaking, they are indeed the ones who are fixing the block size limit. However, they will only do so if there is a consensus requiring them to fix the block size limit - and there is such a consensus, because it will benefit the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. If Core developers decided to increase the block size limit to 8MB today, miners would unanimously prevent this action, because it would severely harm mining. If you change your question slightly, you could say "a small group of developers are fixing the block size limit of 21 million Bitcoins." If you look at it from this perspective, you can see that the Core development team is not fixing anything. It is ridiculous to think that these people can enforce the fixed limit of 21 million Bitcoins by themselves - in fact, the entire Bitcoin system is enforcing this limit. You mentioned the Hong Kong Roundtable Agreement. Where did it originate? Miao Yongquan: It started with BitFury organizing a Bitcoin roundtable at the North American Bitcoin Conference, followed by a series of calls between many stakeholders to discuss these issues, and then a "consensus call" was issued, and then Pindar Wong, one of the organizers of the Bitcoin Scaling Workshop, provided us with a venue. Xie Kang, an active member of the Bitcoin community, played an important role in arranging the venue. The meeting itself was not well prepared, and many attendees, including myself, only confirmed their attendance a few days or less before the meeting. We initially decided to meet to discuss these issues in the hope of avoiding a contentious hard fork. It was incredible that we were able to reach a consensus and summarize it in a consensus letter. No one from the Classic team attended the meeting, was that your intention? Miao Yongquan: Our goal was to hold a small meeting with only one focus: to study how the Core team can implement a hard fork and avoid the split of the Bitcoin network. We originally hoped to limit the number of participants to 20, but there were actually 24 participants in total. We didn't want non-developers or people who wouldn't contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way to attend the meeting. After some discussion, we did extend an invitation to Classic developers Gavin Andresen, Jeff Garzik, and Jonathan Toomim. But invitations are sent only very shortly before the meeting. Miu: Yes, but it wasn’t a conference. Like I said, it was a drop-in meeting. A lot of people decided to attend at the last minute, and the Classic developers decided not to attend. I guess some of them went to the Financial Crypto conference in Barbados. Surely it was not easy to reach a consensus at the Hong Kong meeting? Miao Yongquan: It’s not easy at all. The only and biggest question that kept coming up at the meeting was how to actually expand the block size. That’s why we finally chose “around 2MB” as the goal of the consensus document. If we set the block size base at 2MB, plus using segregated witness, the effective block size will be able to reach 3.6MB, and it may reach 8MB under adversarial conditions. But we won’t know the exact number until developers and the entire mining community have further discussions. If miners and mining pools think that expanding to 2MB is okay, that would be great, but the actual number may be slightly smaller. Those who oversimplify Bitcoin would like the block size to be an easy-to-understand number, like 2. But it is not that simple. We are no longer at a point where the block size can be set to an arbitrary number - that was true in the Satoshi era. Today, the block size should be determined by technology and network limitations. Also, I think people should stop focusing only on the actual block size and pay more attention to the number of transactions per block, which is what really matters.
Still, it seems that not everyone is happy with the Hong Kong consensus results. At least two mining pool operators, Wang Chun of F2Pool and Wu Jihan of AntPool, expressed the hope that their hash power could also participate in the vote? Miao Yongquan: Everyone is a little disappointed, but they have no problem in wanting to fight for voting rights for users. F2Pool is not technically running Classic. Maybe there is some misunderstanding or a little loophole in the consensus protocol. We agreed to give Core more time. I believe everyone will keep their word and stick to the promises we made in the consensus book.
Note: Because the full text of the interview record is a bit long, we will continue to upload "BTCC Miao Yongquan talks about block expansion: Please stay calm, what we need is code (Part 2)" tomorrow, so stay tuned!
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