Gavin: Some thoughts on the Satoshi Nakamoto Roundtable

Last weekend, I attended the Satoshi Roundtable in Florida after returning from the Financial Cryptography Conference.

The roundtable was organized by Bruce Fenton (currently the Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation) and was invitation-only, but it was not a Foundation meeting, and I’ve heard that in past years it has been mostly a relaxed networking/social event.

This year, the topic of the (Bitcoin) block size limit dominated the entire weekend.

All discussions at the meeting followed the "Chatham House Rules", which state that participants are free to use information from the meeting without revealing the identity or affiliation of the speaker, or any other participants who might be shown. Therefore, for the rest of this post, I will just talk about what happened and what was said at the meeting without mentioning anyone's name or affiliation. You can see who attended the meeting here.

I remember some of the key points. Among them, everyone was asked whether they supported the previously proposed "Hong Kong Compromise" (that is, deploying segregated witness in April, writing the code for the 2MB hard fork in July 2016, and then allowing 2MB blocks at least a year later).

“Please raise your hands if you support this consensus”: About twelve people raised their hands, most of whom participated in the Hong Kong Consensus Conference.

“If you do not support this consensus, please raise your hand”: Everyone else raised their hands (forty? fifty?).

There was a lot to talk about as the 2017 date approached. In particular, the need for a 3 month grace period after 95% hashrate approval votes and 75% coin age weighted transaction volume within a certain period were also supported.

Some of them spent hours discussing the details, but no consensus was reached. 95% hashrate voting is a problem for some miners, who don’t want someone to have a veto over such an important change. The opportunity for blackmail (“vote the way I want, or I’ll DDoS you off the network”) or being blackmailed (“pay me up if you want me to vote for sure”) is too big a problem.

While the 75% coin age vote is an interesting idea, and actually having everyone agree on some of the details (is there a fixed time period when the vote happens? Will there be a sliding window with a deadline? Is it 75% of total volume or just 75% of volume that indicates a preference? Can 25% veto without requiring 75% approval? Is this meant to be a vote, or just a signal that people have upgraded?), the work of writing and reviewing the code will take several months.

After trying, failing, and reaching a reasonable compromise over the last year, it has become clear to me that some developers don’t want to see any on-chain scaling solutions in the short term. They believe that theoretically more elegant (but technically complex) off-chain solutions, such as the Lightning Network, are more long-term. And they believe that resisting a simple block cap increase will make this long-term solution a reality sooner.

They were wrong.

If the block size limit does not increase, we will see more off-chain transaction solutions. But they will not be the Lightning Network. Instead, we will see highly centralized "clearing" protocols between exchanges, miners, merchants, or transaction creators.

We can see this starting to happen, BTCC is a large exchange and mining pool, they launched the "BlockPriority" service for their customers last year. I don't blame BTCC, it makes perfect business sense.

However, this is an unhealthy symptom of a network that is becoming increasingly unreliable and more vulnerable to attack.

Brian Armstrong and Bruce Fenton also wrote articles talking about the Satoshi Roundtable.

Original article: http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts
By GAVIN ANDRESEN
Compiled by: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts ‎)