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The newly convened Bitcoin Roundtable finally reached a consensus on how to scale Bitcoin. The five major mining pools (Antpool, F2Pool, BTCC Pool, BW.com and Bitfury), which account for more than 75% of the computing power of the entire network, and several Bitcoin core developers reached a consensus on the Bitcoin scaling roadmap. The meeting avoided the expansion plan that Bitcoin Classic and other Bitcoin Core developers disagreed with. The Hong Kong meeting supported the Bitcoin Core developers to carry out the hard fork in July 2016, and the adoption of "Segregated Witness" in April before that. The "Segregated Witness" plan is a Bitcoin expansion plan that removes signatures from transactions to achieve the compression of transaction information in blocks. The Bitcoin Roundtable released a statement after the meeting: “The hard fork will include some of the consensus currently being discussed in the technical community, including increasing the non-witness data to approximately 2MB, with a total data size of no more than 4MB. Adoption of these proposals requires prior broad support from the Bitcoin community.” Some commentators, in response to the published proceedings, said a decentralized system had risen to the level of political checks and balances. The concept of decentralization Miao Yongquan is the COO of BTCC and co-organizer of the Bitcoin Scaling Conference. He believes that the debate between Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Core may be more about proving their own capabilities rather than the size of the block. He told the International Financial Times: "Bitcoin Classic is another fork, and people need to run that solution before it is implemented. That is to say, the Bitcoin Classic solution will fork into another software that Bitcoin Core does not support." Miao Yongquan has his own philosophical view on decentralization. He said, "First of all, decentralization has levels. You can say that the development team is centralized; you can also say that mining is centralized; you can even say that Bitcoin merchant services are centralized to BitPay or Coinbase." “But the reality is that people are free to use the services they need, miners in the mining pool are free to mine, and they are free to switch to other mining pools. I think decentralization carries too many meanings.” A recent Forbes article raises some interesting cultural questions, asking why Chinese Bitcoin holders don’t care about libertarian views that are so popular in the Western Bitcoin community. However, Miao Yongquan pointed out that the Chinese Bitcoin community is also very active and they strongly advocate decentralization, placing it on the same level as system reliability. “Decentralization means something is permanent because it can’t be destroyed easily, and people appreciate that,” he said. “It’s just that people haven’t really discussed the idea of decentralization yet because I think the word isn’t used more and people don’t use it in debates.” “Chinese culture places more emphasis on cooperation and harmony, so people work together, just like mining in the same pool. You can call it centralized, but you can also think of it as achieving a common goal through cooperation.” Miao Yongquan said that considering the fact that the initial document did not contain technical details, the upcoming "soft and hard fork" technical details will be attached to the BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal). "BIP can have a hard fork plan with no upper limit, and it needs 95% support to be implemented. Now the plan requires some voting mechanism so that Bitcoin holders can vote, but this mechanism has not been completed yet. Because we are waiting for a more complete BIP, I hope it will come in the near future." Miao Yongquan said that Classic got a lot of responses because it seemed simple: increase the block size from 1MB to 2MB. "That's how they promoted it," he said. "Classic thinks it's very simple, and the Bitcoin Core developers are all fools, and they can't simply increase it from 1 to 2. Judging from the results of the meeting, the content of the BIP will be more complicated because Segregated Witness is only the first stage of the plan." Miao Yongquan pointed out that there will be more other compression technologies, such as Schnorr multiple witnesses, and the new block size will have two parts: the witness part and the non-witness part. He said: "These two parts will be combined to give you a final block size. The meeting fell into discussing the concept of effective block size, because the meeting room was full of technical experts, and they discussed how the final result would be calculated and what the effective block size was." "That's why the document says from 2MB to 4MB, because at that point in time, we were not sure. It would be irresponsible to put a number on it without doing the math, and we don't know the full method of compression." A recent academic paper on Bitcoin expansion points out that we need to rethink a technical issue. Increasing the block capacity by 4MB means that the maximum transaction volume can only reach 27 transactions per second. “We talked a lot with developers and technical experts, and I found that most experts share the same view that Bitcoin cannot scale infinitely as it does today. We have to face the problem of network limitations,” Miao said. “A lot of the suggestions don’t take into account some of the realities of the network, like, are blocks increasing? Are there orphan blocks? Are we forcing some nodes offline because the blockchain is so large? Or are we forcing some miners off the Bitcoin network? They might be small miners or blocked by firewalls.” “It’s important to scale, but it also needs to be scaled with these limitations that we face today. So if we can go to 2MB, that’s great; if we do what the Bitcoin Roundtable is doing and implement Segregated Witness first and then do a hard fork and increase the capacity to 4MB, that’s great too. And then if Lightning comes out next year, sometime in 2017, we can use Lightning as well.” “What we need to do is implement scaling solutions that are safe and feasible, whether on-chain or off-chain. We don’t live in a world where we can choose two mutually exclusive solutions at the same time. We have to be realistic and make the best use of what we have.” Source: International Financial Times
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