I am Andrew Stone (theZerg) of Bitcoin Unlimited, AMA -- STARTS TUES DEC 8, 10AM

[AndrewStone]

Elsewhere Andreas wrote this:

I am not at all concerned about fragmentation of value. The market for digital currencies follows a power-law distribution (also known as a long-tail). Most of the value (90%) will be in 2-3 coins, with the other 10% divided among hundreds or thousands of coins.

In fact, alt-coins benefit bitcoin. Bitcoin is the primary reserve currency that supports all alt-coins. Want to buy an alt-coin? You have to spend bitcoin! All this ends up creating more liquidity and investment in bitcoin, as much as it fragments the value.

If BU exceeds regular Bitcoin in censorship resistance, I would hope that BU becomes the 'primary reserve currency'; otherwise, people will have to first interface with a possibly centralized cryptocurrency (settlement layers, etc) before interacting with the BU ecosystem.

Given these assumptions, how would you envision the BU ecosystem scaling in such a way to facilitate the transfer of wealth from a more centralized system to one which is free and censorship resistant - the ideal to which I presume BU aspires?

Thank you!

Bitcoin Unlimited is not an altcoin or a fork; its a bitcoin client like XT and Core. The difference is that it tracks the most-work blockchain regardless of block size. So if bitcoin forks, BU will follow the fork with the mining majority. That could be the < 1MB core fork, or it could be some > 1MB fork. It does this because we agree with Satoshi that the consensus algorithm appropriate for the blockchain is also appropriate for consensus on these issues. The final sentence of the Bitcoin white paper states:

They [nodes/miners] vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism. (emphasis added)

So unless an altcoin overtakes bitcoin, the Bitcoin Unlimited client will likely be on the Blockchain that today's Bitcoin exchanges are using.

Now to answer you scaling question, I believe that Bitcoin should scale in multiple dimensions to achieve its maximum potential. This includes BIP101 style scaling, and it includes optimizations like IBLT or thin blocks.

Today Gregory Maxwell said in his "Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system" posting to bitcoin-dev:

Since Bitcoin is an electronic cash, it _isn't_ a generic database;
the demand for cheap highly-replicated perpetual storage is unbounded,
and Bitcoin cannot and will not satisfy that demand for non-ecash
(non-Bitcoin) usage, and there is no shame in that. Fortunately, Bitcoin
can interoperate with other systems that address other applications,
and--with luck and hard work--the Bitcoin system can and will satisfy
the world's demand for electronic cash.

I believe that the market should be making the decision of what should be on the Blockchain based on transaction fee, not Gregory Maxwell.
I believe that the market should be making the decision of how big blocks should be, not Gregory Maxwell.

I believe that this comment of his should be a wake-up call for every company who plans to provide a non-cash service on top of Bitcoin -- and I think this is a LOT of companies given how "hot" "Blockchain" is right now. If you want your service to use the Bitcoin blockchain you need to start talking to each other, purchasing mining capacity, and planning in other ways for that to happen. The Bitcoin Unlimited project has a carefully designed organization Articles that will allow you to present ideas to the community, before spending a lot of money developing them. If they are accepted your organization can then write and contribute the code.

[ronnieb]

@Andrew, thanks for all you are doing in the space...

So, I think we have a few core clients now; Bitcoin Core, BitcoinXT, Bitcore, LibBitcoin, BitcoinJ... is that about right? and so now we have Bitcoin Unlimited (thanks to you!!).

Questions:

So how many clients would you like to see out there?

If I were to write a full authoritative node, what language would you suggest?

Is it worth developing another client or should efforts be focused on light weight clients?

How long did the fork take?

What was the biggest hurdle(s)?

[AndrewStone]

@Andrew, thanks for all you are doing in the space...

So, I think we have a few core clients now; Bitcoin Core, BitcoinXT, Bitcore, LibBitcoin, BitcoinJ... is that about right? and so now we have Bitcoin Unlimited (thanks to you!!).

Questions:

So how many clients would you like to see out there?

I haven't thought about it; don't really think it matters so long as it is > a half dozen or so.

If I were to write a full authoritative node, what language would you suggest?

The choice of language should emerge from your goal in writing a new node. Performance? Serving web clients? Blockchain analysis? Its easier to accomplish different tasks with different languages.

Is it worth developing another client or should efforts be focused on light weight clients?

This is an interesting question. I would say both. What I mean is that I feel like the "wallet" functionality of full node clients is not so important any more. However I would love to see a full node and lightweight client co-developed... the lightweight client is essentially the "wallet" for the full node, but can fall back on standard SPV protocols in a pinch. With such an architecture you could do a lot of interesting things and add node -> client features rapidly. I think the mycelium client is FOSS so I would start there.

How long did the fork take?

We are currently carefully limiting the feature set to Bitcoin Core + unlimited blocks & optional traffic shaping. So it hasn't taken long. The organizational stuff took longer. We are just getting started.

What was the biggest hurdle(s)?

The client has code AcceptBlock that returns True/False. The biggest trick was expanding that to return True/False/Maybe and dealing with the effects of blocks that are not yet accepted but also not rejected.

[dgenr8]

...even if they were included in in the active chain they will consume resources that result in smaller subsequent blocks, resulting in a maximum network-wide average txn throughput via a process I will describe in a forthcoming paper.

That's what an engineer who is not used to thinking adversarially might say.

This line of reasoning assumes that an attack block will never be produced. An attack block would contain a large number of txes that pay miner himself, just to make the block difficult for the network to swallow. Then the attacker would do it again with a slightly larger block that became difficult for the remaining nodes, etc.

This is a real attack that could push many nodes offline.

[steash]

Regarding the recent fork of Bitcoin.

I understand that the devs and such are always caught up in the tech side of things, but the majority of us invest simply because we have faith in decentralized currency, we really do keep the whole thing alive.

So considering the low tech investors like myself make up the bulk of investors it really s&$t's me that the guys up the top don't give us a thought.

Not one page explaining how to get BCC when we hold Bitcoin in a Bitcoin Core Wallet.

This is really weak considering this is early days in crypto and we all need to encourage others to get involved.

Please, sometimes, just sometimes, get off your thrones and help us out.

Not one page telling us what to do, not one youtube vid.......nothing.

Are we really that minuscule in your plans. So please stop giving yourselves medals and help us to help you.

Im sure some low tech person like myself will soon work it out for themselves and post something.

At the moment thanks for nothing

[CryptoToTrade]

So cool. That is awesome project

[CryptoCoinTrade]

Amazing thank you