Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong Seminar Presentation

The second Scaling Bitcoin seminar was held in Hong Kong on December 6-7, 2015. The two-day event was attended by many industry leaders and core development teams in the Bitcoin community. Most of the discussions at the meeting revolved around reaching a consensus on the Bitcoin scaling debate. Jeff Garzik, Peter Todd, Adam Back, Pieter Wuille and other innovators and developers shared their views on a range of topics. A highlight of the conference was the mining area special discussion, which was attended by the seven major competing mining pools in the mining area.

"Bringing people together and communicating face to face will definitely deepen mutual understanding." - ROGER VER, BITCOIN angel investor

Day 1

The first day of the Scaling Bitcoin conference started with Adam Back of Blockstream introducing the audience to the importance of Bitcoin network expansion and the discussion of fungibility. Adam Back started the discussion by talking about the properties and shortcomings of the fungibility of Bitcoin as a digital currency: "I think everyone knows what fungibility is. It means that currencies are equal and can be freely interchangeable. It is a major performance of electronic currency systems. If there is no fungibility, it will be a big problem for all Bitcoin users." Adam Back then discussed in depth various privacy protection methods such as CoinJoin and Zerocash. He believes that fungibility is "very important and a core of Bitcoin, so I think we really need to work on Bitcoin fungibility." The Blockstream president concluded the speech by answering some questions about the BIP proposal and expressing his views on how to enhance Bitcoin's near-cash performance.

The second speaker was Madars Virza, who addressed the audience on his topic of “Zero-Knowledge Proof” in relation to “Bitcoin Scalability and Future Development”. Madars Virza first gave the audience a basic understanding of the topic and then said: “I want you to know that if you really care about Bitcoin scalability, then you should also care about Zero-Knowledge Proof and keep an eye on this topic.”

The other two topics that attracted the most attention on the first day of the conference were Peter Todd's speech and the mining area seminar. Peter Todd made it clear in the discussion that we should just "等待" for the solution to appear, which attracted attention. Peter Todd emphasized that it should be left to develop naturally, or some small code changes should be implemented naturally over time. He asked the participants: "In an adversarial environment, we cannot expand through forks. What we need is better technology. What solutions do we have for this?" He believes that the Lightning Network is a very good choice and is full of confidence in this concept:

“The Lightning Network is a great example of how you can promote scalability by limiting trust. The Lightning Network system is such that if I want to make a transaction through another node, there will inevitably be trust involved, but this trust is segmented, and if the trust is broken, I can just wait for the timeout to get my money back. The entire system is not ‘infected’ by these errors, and the errors will not accumulate on each other, and you can verify the consensus blockchain at any time.”

Finally, the mining community panel discussion caused quite a stir at the conference this day, as it brought together almost 80% of the powerful people in the Bitcoin community. Sam Cole of KnCMiner, Alex Petrov of BitFury, Liu Xiangfu of Avalon, Wang Chun of F2Pool, Yao Yuan of BW, Pan Zhibiao of Bitmain, and Marshall Long of FinalHash all took the stage to discuss some BIP proposals, mining pools, and their views on the scalability discussion. Miners have made up a large part of the Bitcoin block capacity debate, and the decisions made by the Bitcoin community after consensus will depend on this group in some aspects. BIP proposals 100 and 101 were also discussed at the meeting, and industry leaders expressed their willingness to reach consensus across the community as soon as possible.

Roger Ver discussed the Hong Kong conference with us. He was excited that people were able to gather to discuss Bitcoin scaling, saying: "[The conference] brings people together, face to face, and it will definitely deepen mutual understanding. One thing to remember is that unless we first determine the end goal, we will never find a way forward. If our goal is just to achieve more transactions per second, more decentralization, faster confirmation times, or more redundancy, our methods for scaling Bitcoin will not be consistent. Unless we have a common end goal, it will be almost impossible to find a solution that satisfies everyone." When we asked which proposal he personally preferred, Roger Ver said:

"Once the goals are set, engineers should decide which solution is better. My personal goal is to expand Bitcoin users, strengthen privacy, security and fungibility, and resist government censorship and control. I support any proposal that can achieve these goals, and Bitcoin block size expansion seems to be one of them. I think the biggest news from this conference is that miners represent 90% of the power in the Bitcoin network and unanimously agree that Bitcoin capacity needs to be increased. The only question is how much capacity to increase, and according to the news I heard recently, they may reach a consensus on 2MB. These people have also asked developers to make decisions and write code to run the expanded blockchain network."

the next day

The second day of the workshop involved more discussion of Bitcoin scaling in a different way, with another core developer discussing the concept of隔离见证with Blockstream employee Pieter Wuille. This idea, if adopted, would serve as a "witness" for signed transactions within the Bitcoin network, and Pieter Wuille said: "One thing that is very important here is that we need to realize that only fully validating nodes actually need to sign." He continued: "The full node and partial full node model is more scalable and is a viable direction for our future development. It can provide secure transactions, although not everyone wants to trade in this way, but it does not affect those who do not want to adopt this method."

“Maybe in the future there will be less need to put everything on the blockchain.” — PIETER WUILLE, BITCOIN CORE DEVELOPER

One of the speakers who spoke about Bitcoin expansion proposals at the last part of the conference was Jeff Garzik, a contributor to the Bitcoin source code core development. Garzik spoke on topics such as BIP101, BIP103, and BIP106, and also focused on describing his own BIP100 proposal. Garzik believes that these proposals have sparked heated debate and should be ultimately decided by the entire community, so he chose to discuss all BIP plans in his speech, saying, "We will discuss every block expansion proposal, and my speech will be the least technical of this conference. But I will not just discuss the proposals themselves in detail, because simply changing the block capacity is too simple and can be achieved in a second. What I want to cover here is the actual algorithm adopted, the launch of the plan, and so on."

Garzik gave attendees a basic overview of each proposal and his personal understanding of it. He believes that these proposals are "a positive step forward" in the consensus debate, which has been "avoiding the problem" before. Garzik concluded: "The difficulty we face is how to find an algorithm that can neither be won by gamers nor bought, and is very sensitive to miners. Now we can only achieve two of them, but not all three."

Many attendees seemed very satisfied with the discussions that were about to begin, and developers will continue to discuss these topics in Hong Kong over the next two days, and these discussions will surely continue in the coming months.

Original link: https://news.bitcoin.com/scaling-bitcoin-workshop-hong-kong-wrap/
Author: jamieredman
Translator: ScalingBitcoin Conference Team
Editor: Meng Dada
Source: Babbitt Information