Bitcoin continues to move forward under the protection of conservatism

Chapter 0 Introduction

Last night, after a day of negotiations at Hong Kong Cyberport, community members, mainly representatives of the Bitcoin core development team and Chinese miners, jointly signed and reached the "Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus on Capacity Expansion" late at night and broadcast it to the community in the early morning.

It is not easy to reach a consensus. Judging from the wording, the consensus was very carefully worded. I listened to part of the live broadcast of the meeting, and the meeting was read and checked word by word. All parties were very cautious.

The Bitcoin community was initially built by geeks, and has now become an extremely complex social form. It is no longer possible for people in this organization to have an absolute common ideal, and even a completely consistent consensus on the rise in the price of the currency is impossible. The impetuousness, profit-seeking impulse and short-sightedness of all parties under the cover of utilitarianism are the real obstacles to the sustainable development of Bitcoin in the future.

This article attempts to explain that in the development of Bitcoin, the more mature approach is to stick to mature ideas and rules, not to make decisions that are not in line with common sense, and to follow the existing rules carefully until they are proven invalid.

If we have to sum it up in one short word, it would be that conservatism should dominate the development of Bitcoin.

Chapter 1 Explain the meaning of conservatism

Chinese society has undergone drastic changes over the past half century. Everyone is keen on reform and advocates overthrowing previous experience with the spirit of "revolution" and redesigning a set of mechanisms. Especially when new local officials take office, they all want to make three big moves. Leaders have been replaced one after another, and reforms have been carried out one after another. In fact, very few valuable things have been accumulated in the end. It's all "messing around".

Our culture often regards "conservatism" as a synonym for stubbornness, conservatism, pedantry, and backwardness, and regards it as the opposite of "progress". This is a misunderstanding of "conservatism".

First, conservatism does not oppose progress or exclude innovation, but emphasizes inheritance and the recognition and compliance with the inherent rules of things. Innovation is not about breaking through principles, but about the extensive application of principles.

Second, conservatism emphasizes respect for traditional wisdom and experience, and acknowledges that there are too many unknowns about the existing world, and that the unknowns far outweigh the knowns.

Third, conservatism emphasizes that not doing wrong things is as important as doing only right things.

Bitcoin itself is a brand new system architecture, and it has developed into a technology that takes over the financial system. People who work in finance are essentially operating risks and are naturally sensitive to the uncertainty of things. Bitcoin practitioners should also be conservative, advocate stability and effective checks and balances, and adhere to the bottom line and principles of decision-making thinking.

Conservatism has a rich connotation and different interpretations. I will not elaborate on it here, otherwise it will be irrelevant. If you want to know more, I recommend reading "Tea Talk in Heaven" and "Conservative Investment Philosophy". Many sentences in this article are also excerpted from these two books.

Chapter 2 Focus on Things That Are Reliable, Knowable, and Controllable

The first feasible solution proposed during this expansion process was Bitcoin XT. Gavin promoted XT after doing enough theoretical deduction and practical research. The core of XT's theory is that as the number of Bitcoin users increases, the block capacity needs to be larger and larger. He also compared Visa and Bitcoin to guide the required block capacity. Therefore, he proposed a very large final block starting from 8M, doubling every two years until it reaches 8GB.

I firmly believe in the theoretical basis of XT. For Bitcoin to achieve great development, it must have more and more supporters and a larger and larger trading volume. This basis is also widely supported in the community. This is the underlying economic understanding. The more users there are, the greater the trading volume, and the greater the value of Bitcoin. This logic is correct.

However, the setting of XT's super-large blocks requires the support of existing network technology. Broadcasting 8M, 16M, or even 32M blocks is no problem with the current network bandwidth. However, for larger blocks, the current technology may not be able to handle it, at least there are not enough successful cases. However, with the development speed of bandwidth, we are very optimistic that there will be enough bandwidth for us to broadcast large blocks in the next few years. But this is a prediction after all, even if this is the rationality and knowledge of all our computer hardware practitioners, we support that the corresponding speed can be achieved in the future. But everyone has insurmountable ignorance and insurmountable limitations. Conservatism emphasizes inheritance, and our safest approach is to build block size based on mature application technology.

After the release of XT, it was widely attacked by the community, and even various insults were thrown at Gavin. The miners with computing power almost unanimously rejected XT. The insults against Gavin were excessive, but the refusal to implement XT did reflect the conservative thinking. It is better to believe in the imperfect current mature technology and reject the immature even ideal future technology.

After XT was rejected for being too risky, and expansion was imminent, the Core team launched Segregated Witness. The main purpose of using Segregated Witness is to improve certain defects in Bitcoin's data structure, and its side effect is to bring about expansion transactions. The community is not very divided on Segregated Witness. At least there is a great consensus that Segregated Witness should be implemented. The disagreement is mainly focused on the launch schedule. One faction believes that Segregated Witness is a very complex technical change and advocates that it should be given a sufficiently long development and testing cycle to ensure security, so it is rejected as an expansion solution in the short term. The other faction believes that Segregated Witness can use a soft fork with very good compatibility to achieve expansion effects, and it can be implemented first. The two opposing factions are both based on the perspective of not being able to make mistakes. Opponents claim that risks cannot be taken, while supporters claim that this is a low-risk approach. The different starting points for the evaluation of risks by both parties caused this disagreement. Opponents believe that haste is a risk based on the difficulty of engineering, while supporters believe that good compatibility can borrow the power of time to gain consensus, without rashly requiring all computing power to switch to a mode at the same time. Both are philosophical manifestations of conservatism. There is no need for both parties to endlessly pursue each other's recognition. They can retreat to a lower level of consensus - isolated witness is an executable plan, and it is very good to do their own thing. As for the differences in time, they will be resolved on the basis of this.

After the failure of XT, Gavin advocated whether Segregated Witness was a short-term solution. When Bitcoin was currently facing the pressure of expansion, he took the lead in launching Classic and upgrading the block to 2M. At the same time, the conditions for activating Classic were set to 75% computing power support, plus a 28-day buffer period. The release of Classic once again sparked differences in the community. Supporters and opponents were clearly in opposition. Classic is obviously an emergency plan, a solution that can solve the problem in the short term when the Bitcoin network is under too much pressure. Setting 75% computing power support for activation is also based on the reason for striving for network upgrades to the greatest extent possible. This plan reflects Gavin's transformation from an idealist to a conservative. The change is not radical, and confirmation is guaranteed first. However, opponents of Classic mainly focus on the point that 75% computing power is not enough to ensure the safety upgrade of Bitcoin. They advocate 90% computing power to activate the fork. I think the dispute between 75% and 90% computing power support involves the "safety margin" advocated by conservatives.

Chapter 3: Building a Large Enough “Safety Margin”

The "safety margin" mentioned here is a borrowed financial concept. The original concept refers to the difference between a company's normal sales and its break-even point sales. It shows how much the sales volume can drop without causing losses. Companies need to expand their safety margins, that is, to make the expected sales volume exceed the break-even point as much as possible, so as to avoid accidentally losing some customers during the actual sales process and not causing losses to the company.

I use this concept to describe how much computing power is needed to support the activation of a fork safely.

Bitcoin also needs a fork that is expected to have a minimum amount of opposition computing power to support it so that it does not split into two coins. Gavin published an article titled "Minority Branch" to express his concern about the harm caused by a minority computing power executing a branch chain. In the article, he expressed that a minority branch supported by 20% computing power is not a threat. If the computing power value of this minority is 20%, which is the critical point between safety and insecurity, then if 80% computing power is used to activate the fork, the safety margin is 0. If 90% computing power is used to activate it, the safety margin is 10%. The safety margin of Classic is negative. Of course, the community does not have a consensus on how much minority computing power is considered a real threat, and the 20% that Gavin got is not even a threat.

At the same time, from the perspective of executability, if the community starts lobbying for computing power to support a hard fork, we need to measure a computing power size that does not "lose" to ensure the possibility of activating the fork upgrade, and we have another maximum "safety margin" to ensure that even if there is a temporary rebellion during the computing power voting process, the computing power size will not fail to fork. If it is set to 90% computing power activation, if the community wins 95% of the computing power ready to support during the lobbying process, its safety margin is 5% of the computing power. As long as this 5% computing power rebels in the final stage, the upgrade will fail. If 75% of the computing power is activated, if the community wins 95% of the computing power support during the lobbying process, its safety margin is 20%.

There are two safety margins here, one is to ensure that there is no split into two chains, and the other is to ensure that the fork is executable. As a result, the community split into two factions regarding Classic, one advocating to ensure that there is no split, and the other advocating that it is executable. Both parties are right, and their opinions cannot be unified. The computing power also began to vote, and a total of three blocks supporting Classic were generated in the entire network.

The party that advocates holding a larger safety margin without splitting into two coins is more conservative, and judging from the current situation, this party has won. Yesterday's meeting basically sentenced Classic to death.

Even if both proponents of the "margin of safety" are not wrong, it involves another decision-making principle of conservatives: it is equally important to ensure that you do not do wrong things and only do the right things.

Chapter 4: It is just as important not to do the wrong thing as to do only the right thing

Both sides have very good reasons for supporting Classic, and neither side can point out what mistakes the other has made. In fact, neither side knows whether the other is wrong. At this time, people who believe in rationality will advocate trial and error, but conservatives believe that it is better to do nothing than to do something wrong.

The Bitcoin community as a whole chose not to support Classic, once again reflecting its conservative style. We would rather keep the status quo, rather than do the right thing, but also keep the position of not doing the wrong thing. We would rather take the risk of potentially missing the time window than try to make possible mistakes.

The same situation applies to the deployment of Segregated Witness. The two sides of the community split are unable to point out the flaws in the other side’s logic and can only prove that their own logic is appropriate.

Faced with this situation where the entire community is caught in a "self-contradiction", Bitcoin's choice is not to pursue correctness endlessly, but to return to the existing consensus.

Since the community cannot decide whether to activate 75% or 90% of Classic, let’s return to the previous consensus - advocate consensus and eliminate the controversy over Classic first. At least everyone agrees to expand the capacity to 2M. As for which specific plan to choose, we will discuss it later.

The opposition and support of Segregated Witness are actually layered. At the bottom level, everyone supports the deployment of Segregated Witness, but they have different opinions on the deployment time. The entire Bitcoin community once again chose to take a step back and focus on supporting Segregated Witness. Everyone will do their work first, and whether the specific time is too long or too short will be decided by the entire ecosystem.

As a result, yesterday's Hong Kong meeting came up with a relatively less controversial plan, with the core development team releasing the segregated witness code in April and the hard fork to 2M code in July, and miners only starting to vote to deploy segregated witness after the hard fork code was implemented.

This is a conservative plan. The representatives of the development team and the miners yesterday were based on a common foundation, that is, they agreed to the segregated witness and the hard fork. Even if they are worried that the segregated witness is too complicated, the development team will do it first, and after the code is released, the miners will consider execution. Since everyone has a consensus on the hard fork to 2M, the code will be implemented first, and whether it will be executed or not will be decided by time.

Chapter 5 Conservatism escorts Bitcoin upgrade

I have been paying attention to the expansion of Bitcoin, and I found that the route implemented by the entire Bitcoin community is extremely conservative. Decisions are made based on reality, and they believe in mature technology, are willing to pass it on, and refuse idealism; when choosing a solution, they will choose to maximize the safety margin; when in a dilemma, they will keep a low profile and not make mistakes, rather than boldly try to make mistakes; the community will not endlessly pursue illusory correctness.

Adhere to mature ideas and rules, do not make decisions that are inconsistent with common sense, and follow the existing rules carefully until they are proven invalid.

Isn't this conservatism?

Although there are radicals and idealists in the community, there are more conservatives, and the community as a whole is completely conservative.

Thanks for reading.
If you find the article useful, please give me some Bitcoin to encourage me to continue writing.
Author: tan90d (Weibo @LightningHSL WeChat tan90d)
My BTC address: 14mhzjkJ71oMAMkKu3dy98dnUpkyQBHL1r
Source: Babbitt Information