Listen to the Bitcoin founder explain the reasons behind the Bitcoin split

     The original author of this article is Mike Hearn, co-founder of Bitcoin.

  As you all know, the Bitcoin community is splitting, and Bitcoin is starting to branch into two versions - not only two versions of the software, but also two blockchains. The two branches are Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT, a micro-variant based on the same program. As of August 16, Beijing time, Bitcoin XT has a complete release. Such a split has never happened before. I want to explain this from the perspective of Bitcoin XT developers: this is not an impulsive move.

    Bitcoin split, this topic may make many people curious, so this article is written for ordinary readers. It will not involve too much professional knowledge. The original version of Bitcoin was carefully designed by Satoshi Nakamoto. The main controversy about this version is still on the growth of Bitcoin. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto answered the first question about the design of Bitcoin and said:

     Visa processed 37 billion transactions in fiscal year 2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. This amount of transactions requires 100GB of bandwidth = 12 DVDs or 2 high-definition quality movies = bandwidth at the current price of about $18.

  It would take years for the Bitcoin network to reach this size, and by then, sending two high-definition movies over the Internet might not be a big deal anymore. At that time, Satoshi Nakamoto was more annoyed than any of us about the issue of Bitcoin's scalability. His plan was to make Bitcoin popular from the beginning, and he knew that such success would change the way people used the system. In 2010, he said:

  It would be good if we could keep the (blockchain) files as small as possible.

     The final solution will not care how big it (the blockchain file) gets.

  But for now, while it's still small, keep it small so that new users can grow faster. When you eventually implement client-only mode, this won't be a problem anymore.

  In 2011, I went through Satoshi’s scaling ideas in detail through a series of calculations: If Bitcoin becomes popular, will it completely replace VISA? He thought so — you wouldn’t need anything else besides a computer, even if the demand for traffic was that great. Before he left, I adopted the model he talked about.

  Satoshi's project brought us together and has changed the lives of thousands of people around the world. Some of us gave up our jobs, others dedicated their spare time to this project, some founded companies and even traveled around the world. We built this global community based on the idea of ​​everyone being able to pay each other through the blockchain.

      This is my vision, this is Gavin Andresen’s (another founder of Bitcoin) vision, this is the vision of thousands of developers, startup founders, evangelists, and users around the world.

  But now that vision is in danger. In recent months, a small group of people have had completely different plans for Bitcoin. These people never really understood Satoshi's intentions because they worry that Bitcoin will not succeed without improving the technology: What if people don't use Bitcoin on their computers? Will Bitcoin move further and further away from its goal of "decentralization"? Will Bitcoin become more and more centralized and eventually become like the current banking industry?

Now that Satoshi is gone, these people have started implementing their plans: drastically increasing transaction fees, ending support for mobile P2P wallets, abandoning unverified transactions, and other things that have never appeared in our project.

  This so-called new system that "will replace the system designed by Nakamoto" is called the "Lightning Network". The network was released at the beginning of this year and is still in internal testing. If its goal is achieved, a new system will emerge that runs counter to the existing Bitcoin system. One of the differences is that the original Bitcoin address will no longer be usable, and a replacement is currently unknown to outsiders. Will this network eventually be better than the existing network? What achievements can it ultimately achieve? At present, we still know nothing.

Can the free market decide for us?

  In theory, the existence of a new network is not a problem. The Lightning Network is built on top of the blockchain, but it requires a fairly trivial upgrade process to achieve its best function. Of course, people are willing to explore this direction, which is completely fine. If they eventually achieve success that is better than the existing network, then the market will choose their way; such competition is certainly fair. Moreover, from the current design of Bitcoin, it is unlikely to be the final version.

  But our system is still effective at the moment - it already has a complete ecosystem with developers, exchanges, wallets, ATMs, applications and a sufficient user base.

      Would people be willing to migrate to a completely different system if they had the choice?

  We don't know, and the people who are pushing this don't want to let the market decide, and that's the problem.

      A long time ago, Satoshi Nakamoto set a "temporary convention": he capped the size of each block at 1 MB. He did this to keep the blockchain small in the early days until what we now call SPV wallets (which is what Satoshi called client-only mode) appeared. As mentioned above, when the time comes, we need to adjust it, and no one said that this limit is permanent. In the end, it will not matter. I wrote the first SPV tool in 2011 with my colleague Andreas Schildbach, and together we built the first and most popular Android wallet. Since then, SPV wallets have been used on all major platforms. So Satoshi's temporary restriction was actually solved a long time ago.

     As Bitcoin continues to grow, its blocks are also getting bigger. Reasonable traffic forecasts show that blocks will reach the limits of the current system sometime in 2017 at the latest. Another bubble or stress cycle could bring this node even sooner, and then the problem will arise.

     So now is the time to raise the cap, or to not have a cap at all. That’s the plan, and here’s the problem: Those who don’t want Bitcoin to scale have decided to delay it. They think there’s a beautiful, one-shot opportunity to force Bitcoin’s intended path onto a completely different technological trajectory; they don’t know what that alternative design will be yet. But that doesn’t matter. They think that by blocking the growth of the blockchain, they can “incentivize” (i.e. force) the Bitcoin community to move to a design that better suits their personal technological tastes.

Why limit blockchain?

     So far, I have not elaborated on the views of these people and who they are. But I will not name them in this article. After all, people who care about Bitcoin know it, and it is useless to talk about it for those who don’t care.

     Suffice it to say, some of them are a very small minority of people who have access to the Bitcoin Core codebase. So we won't discuss these arguments here, there are already too many online.

     Here we can briefly summarize these arguments. The main opposing voices are as follows:

If Bitcoin splits, it could incentivize us to make something better.

The limit should be raised, but not now.

If Bitcoin scales, it will become more centralized, and then it will no longer be Bitcoin.

Of course, this is not all, there are some other ideas.

  The first point may become a reality someday, but it is certainly different from the current theory on paper. I don’t see any worthwhile alternative solution at the moment, and we won’t see it happening for a year, and by then the existing Bitcoin network may have run out of capacity.

  This is a kind of "Nirvana illusion"!

  The "Nirvana illusion" means that when people discover the shortcomings of a system or a method of solving a problem, they always imagine replacing it with another system arrangement or method, but these alternative options themselves are only imagined and do not exist in reality.

    The second objection is so vaguely outlined that it is difficult to answer. There is reason to believe that a full upgrade of every Bitcoin node could take a year, and that it would cause real damage if the Bitcoin network were overloaded. We really should be preparing for this before then. Two people on the Bitcoin development mailing list who have professional experience in capacity planning believe that this planning must begin immediately. Postponing it to an uncertain future is not a reasonable idea.

  The last opinion is also the most troublesome one and the most controversial point so far. It is based on two assumptions:

1. If Bitcoin can grow, it will grow, and it will grow faster than the cost of technology can decrease.

2. Smaller Bitcoin networks will be more “decentralized” than larger, global Bitcoin networks.

  If the Bitcoin network was perfect, then demand for it would be unlimited: I could stop improving my software, wait for the price of Bitcoin to rise, and get rich. But back to reality, Bitcoin is still in a fierce market competition. Growth does not come from God, every user needs to make an effort, and convincing more people to join takes time. Bitcoin is currently growing, but slowly. I wish I could confidently say that the cost of running a full node will increase in the future: that is, our success is beyond the entire hardware industry. In the hardware industry, a $30 smartphone now is more advanced than the $500 iPhone that came out in 2007. But it is still difficult for Bitcoin to achieve such success.

     The second assumption goes to the heart of the controversy: Should Bitcoin grow, even if that means modifying the structure of the Bitcoin network?

  In the current system, every user is a network node, but this does not mean that they are the nodes required for the system to scale up. This is like every newsgroup user running their own NNTP server. This design makes users just users.

                                                        — Satoshi Nakamoto, July 2010

  To this question, the founder of the Bitcoin project has given a clear answer - YES.

  We have been working on this project ever since. Try changing the answer to this question to NO, as it would violate not only the social contract of Bitcoin, but also the wishes of many in the community. Those who truly believe a niche currency would be better should create an altcoin with a limited blockchain size; rather than attempting to limit the growth of Bitcoin.

Everyone has their own opinion

  Why couldn’t this dispute be resolved in a more civil manner, rather than in a complete split? Simply put, the resolution of Bitcoin Core’s decision-making process has broken down.

  In theory, like all open source projects, the kernel will have "maintainers". The maintainer's job is to guide the project, what should happen and what should not happen. The maintainer is the boss. A good maintainer needs to collect feedback, weigh arguments, and then make decisions. However, the debate over the block size of Bitcoin Core has been delayed for several years.

  The problem is that any change that becomes "controversial" can be completely vetoed. Since there are five maintainers, and many other non-maintainers can also "controversy", a deadlock is created. In fact, the block    The fact that the size was never permanent is no longer important: removing the block size limit itself is what needs to be debated. It's like a committee without a chairperson; the meeting never ends. To quote one maintainer: "Bitcoin needs a leader like a fish needs a bicycle."

What do others think?

  While these core people do not listen to the opinions of the wider community, it is still necessary to point out that the proposal to increase the block size has the support of at least the following people:

  Developer of the most popular iOS and Android Bitcoin wallets, and one of the most popular web wallets with millions of users, and several of the largest Bitcoin exchanges.

The two largest third-party payment processors occupy the vast majority of the third-party payment market.

Several major mining pools, including all Chinese mining pools.

Two of the top five Bitcoin Core maintainers (Gavin and Jeff).

Polls by users of online forums showed that about 75%-80% supported capacity expansion.

This list is far from complete. Many key players in the ecosystem, who have not yet commented publicly, have expressed support for Gavin and me privately.

So there's nothing strange about what Gavin and I did. If we didn't make this change, someone else would have.

  How do those who insist on 1MB blocks respond to everyone?

  They did not respond because they were never asked to answer their opinions. To quote an influential member of the Bitcoin Core community:

    By the way, there is a risk in using a company as a sounding board: you might get a false sense of consensus.

  Companies arguably represent the most passionate, dedicated, and technical people in the Bitcoin world. They provide critical infrastructure, yet people often mistakenly assume that everyone in their company agrees.

  What about wallet developers? They are most exposed to the needs of users every day. I don’t know when they will speak up, but it doesn’t make sense, their opinions are irrelevant.

This is not surprising, as the “consensus” often mentioned in the Bitcoin Core community is actually just the opinions of a few people.  

     They don’t care what others outside the community think or do. In other words, “developer consensus” is a marketing ploy that blinds Bitcoin users.

Are they aware of the opposition from a large number of key people? No, to quote one of the maintainers again:

  Gavin is pretty much alone in the Bitcoin Core technical community on this point. There are a lot of people in my company who are concerned about the impact on Bitcoin’s viability, and they are concerned that most of these issues will only be resolved within the technical community.

However, this is only true if you classify the majority of engineers building the Bitcoin ecosystem as “non-technical”.

How should disputes be resolved?

  Clearly, the problem has gotten serious. Communication has broken down, and both sides feel they are protecting Bitcoin’s decentralization and believe they are the true vision of Bitcoin. The community has split .

  There is only one way to resolve this dispute: we can make a revised version of the software, and through the normal chain fork logic, let the miners vote on whether to upgrade. If the majority upgrades to the latest version and produces a block larger than 1MB; at the same time, the minority will reject it and put it on the parallel chain. In order to return to the rest of the sync network, they will have to accept the new branch. If the majority chooses not to upgrade, then the branch will never be produced and the 1MB limit will continue to remain.

    It seems that all participants should support this approach: it is clear that consensus can no longer be reached through normal mechanisms, so conducting a vote-like action is the best way to make progress.

     Here comes the final and most fatal source of disagreement.

    Of the five Bitcoin Core maintainers, Gavin and Jeff support the split, but the other three believe that any contentious forced fork is unthinkable, crazy and reckless and should not happen; because it would endanger Bitcoin itself. If any of them were in favor of resolving the issue by creating a new fork, we would not have seen such a dispute.

We don’t think the sky will fall if a blockchain forks. We think people on the side of the smaller blockchain will choose to upgrade and continue to work on the larger blockchain. They will have enough time to understand the change and prepare for it. Of course, this makes no difference to the Bitcoin Core developers who don’t like forks. They are always adamantly against it.

    In short, they believe that the only mechanism that limits them (referring to hashrate voting) should never be used.

  I don't think this is an accident, but it is. Their view is that anyone who opposes them, for whatever reason, should be blocked forever... and Bitcoin becomes their toy. This cannot continue. The Bitcoin Core project has shown that if you can't change it, you can only throw it away.

    This is how the Bitcoin split came about.