Hong Kong Roundtable AMA - Conversation with Wu Jihan

On February 29, 2016, after nearly ten days of debate on the Hong Kong Roundtable, an AMA was held on the 8btc forum, mainly for Chinese community users. Adam Back, Bitmain CEO Wu Jihan, and BTCC COO Miao Yongquan participated in this AMA, and patiently answered every question raised by Chinese community users for nearly 4 hours.

There were many people asking questions, and the questioning methods and questions covered a wide range. We tried our best to present the original version. Due to the length of the article, we divided the answers of the three people into three parts and presented them to you.

Thanks again to the three guests for their patience and tolerance in answering many pointed questions. The following is a record of the questions and responses to Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu in the AMA.

What is your worst-case scenario for this roundtable?

The worst estimate is that the consensus reached at the roundtable meeting does not become the actual development path of the Core development community. However, this would not be a particularly bad result, because competitive development teams are also maturing rapidly, and if the Core community abandons this consensus agreement, it will only quickly help the community reach a consensus to turn to competitive teams.

If transactions are carried out off-chain in the future, how will miners make money? If raising the handling fee can solve the miners' income problem, then does each block only need to support one transaction?

At the Hong Kong conference, the Core community representative gave the answer that in the future, the Lightning Network will be able to help Bitcoin achieve a thousand-fold expansion. Thousands of transactions in the Lightning Network only need to be settled on the main chain. Assuming that the current fee for each Bitcoin transaction is RMB 0.3, and assuming that the ratio of the number of Lightning Network transactions to the number of main chain transactions is 1000:1, then we can increase the fee for each transaction on the main chain to RMB 30 (100 times), and the cost of each transaction in the Lightning Network is only 1/10 of the current cost of each transaction, and the miners' income can be expanded 100 times.

We have already begun a technology-based analysis of whether this vision is achievable.

What do you think of the roadmap that classic just released? If it had been released before the Hong Kong meeting, would it have led to different results?

The release of this roadmap can attract more developers to join the Classic community. However, the roadmap does not seem to be the reason why Classic has not been able to receive full support immediately. The main reason is that as an emerging developer community, Classic has not been able to establish trust in development capabilities. Classic needs to continuously enrich its development strength. I believe that the release of this roadmap will help Classic enrich its code and technical strength.

Why are foreign miners more motivated to switch to Classic than domestic miners? Is it because domestic miners focus more on mining, while foreign miners focus more on applications? If the block chain is full, it will have a great impact on current Bitcoin payments. Do you consider helping them and how to help them?

Personally, I think that Chinese culture desires strong leaders, while Western culture is more accustomed to competition and game among multiple power centers, and regards the concentration of power as the biggest threat. Chinese culture tends to be hostile to opponents like Classic, while Western culture tends to sympathize with them.

The fact that the block is full seems to be an economic incentive policy that Core has intentionally adopted. For example, they have actually expressed their preference for the Lightning Network, which they believe should have been developed in 2013, but the lack of economic incentives in the entire Bitcoin community has led to the delay in the development of the Lightning Network. The importance of such economic policies is no less than that of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy, but its decision-making process obviously lacks the procedural legitimacy to match it. However, we can first build on the consensus reached in Hong Kong and move forward, go with risk, and give it a try. Bitcoin is very resilient and will not be affected by a small mistake.

KnCminer and Slush together have used Classic for about 9% of their hashrate, which will result in the Core SW soft fork failing to reach 95% hashrate activation, leading to no HF 2M and no capacity expansion. Is there any good solution to this deadlock?

The decision-making mechanism of 95% agreement is prone to deadlock. To deal with this deadlock, either strive for the minority to reach a consensus or lower the threshold.

AntPool lost nearly half of its miners within 24 hours, while F2Pool, which just announced its support for the Classic vote, saw its computing power surge from 22% to 33%. What do you think?

This statistic was greatly affected by lucky in the short term. Mining is a process that conforms to the Poisson distribution. The fluctuations observed within one day based on the hashrate estimated by the number of blocks are mostly accidental factors. The actual fluctuations are very small. In addition, f2pool has also disclosed that the hashrate that miners actually switched to the Classic node is very small.

You said before that there are many transactions now and the block is close to the upper limit. You previously supported Classic, but now you have signed a consensus with Blockstream and strongly support Core. Can you explain this?

Bitmain supports the consensus formed in Hong Kong and hopes that it will become the development path for the Core development community. We certainly hope that the hard fork expansion can happen immediately, but after evaluating various factors, we believe that the Hong Kong meeting is the best result we can achieve. We will do what we should do to promote the consensus of this meeting, that is, not to run Classic in a production environment in the foreseeable future. Regarding the expansion issue, we are certainly urgent in terms of mood, but reason tells us that we should have some patience.

As the owner of the largest mining pool, you turned a blind eye to such a one-sided consensus among the people. Have you also been bought by Blockstream?

Unfortunately, Antpool has made its own commitment at the Hong Kong meeting to only run consensus systems compatible with Core in production environments. We will not be the first party to destroy the agreement.

Miners have the right to cut their own computing power. But I call on all miners to trust our professional judgment and efforts to promote block expansion.

Currently, f2pool has a Core mining pool that provides a special version number to express support for Classic. There is also a slush mining pool that is mining Classic blocks. You can also go here to observe the proportion of Classic blocks generated. https://chain.btc.com/en/stats/block-ver

Regarding this expansion, there are two things I would like to hear your opinions on:

1. The performance of the Bitcoin blockchain cannot meet the demand. Will it inhibit future development? 2. The consensus of the Bitcoin community has been slow to be reached. Will the same scenario happen in the future?

The Bitcoin blockchain needs better technology to meet the demand for 1,000-fold expansion in the future. I have strong confidence in the development of related technologies.

However, when it comes to reaching a consensus, the current game is rather chaotic. I am concerned about whether a credible deliberative mechanism can be formed in the future.

Miners have to pay a designated fee to set the version, Haobit is 0.2BTC/year/T. Does Antpool also charge fees?

Antpool currently has no related services.

Can Antpool miners decide for themselves whether to mine on traditional core or on a specially marked version of CORE?

We are developing a custom Coinbase feature that allows each miner to express their opinion through Coinbase. The Coinbase's opinion can be clearly heard, but it will not programmatically mislead the Classic nodes in the network.

Why do you say there is no mechanism when there is clearly a computing power voting consensus mechanism designed by Satoshi?

This mechanism is very final and should be started with great caution. Bitcoin is a virtual economy with individuals all over the world, and it operates based on a consensus. If this mechanism is started too casually, it will easily cause the community to split.

Why did you sign core after testing classic? What was your preference?

I hope that the hard fork can be implemented in a safer and more secure way. It is a fact that the Core development community is still the most leading developer community. When the Core leads the hard fork, the security of the entire network is more easily guaranteed. In Hong Kong, representatives from the Core community, in their personal capacity, agreed to include the hard fork in the development roadmap and continued to push the Core community to agree to the consensus of the Hong Kong meeting. I think this is the best result achieved so far.

I still can't see why you think the hard fork led by core is safer. Is it that the threat of core to change POW is what miners are really afraid of?

At present, the vast majority of Bitcoin users still default to the binary software released by Core as the de facto standard for Bitcoin. For Bitcoiners who are particularly concerned about the expansion debate, they may be familiar with competitors such as Classic, but for others, it will be difficult to understand a new competitive development community. Discussions about Classic have also been effectively banned in communities with large traffic such as Bitcointalk and r/bitcoin. I suspect that if Classic leads the upgrade, it will be difficult for it to coordinate successfully under the condition of Core's boycott. A major domestic exchange privately expressed its concerns to me: If a hard fork led by Classic occurs, it will be difficult to explain the inquiries of the exchange's customers in a language that customers can understand.

I don’t think Core’s threat to change PoW is an effective threat. The effectiveness of this threat sounds about the same as North Korea’s remarks about preparing to nuke the United States.

I personally think that reaching a consensus through compromise is a better path. However, Bitmain is also actively paying attention to other efforts to expand the block capacity.