Bitcoin scaling: July 2017?

[arnoudk]

According to CoinDesk, bitcoin will be scaling in July 2017 - or later.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners- ... hard-fork/

It seems as if Core developers and Bitcoin's largest group of miners, have decided this. They have released a statement as follows:

Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus

On February 21st, 2016, in Hong Kong’s Cyberport, representatives from the bitcoin industry and members of the development community have agreed on the following points:

• We understand that SegWit continues to be developed actively as a soft-fork and is likely to proceed towards release over the next two months, as originally scheduled.
• We will continue to work with the entire Bitcoin protocol development community to develop, in public, a safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit. The Bitcoin Core contributors present at the Bitcoin Roundtable will have an implementation of such a hard-fork available as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core within three months after the release of SegWit.
• This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community.
• We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core.
• We will only run Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems, eventually containing both SegWit and the hard-fork, in production, for the foreseeable future.
• We are committed to scaling technologies which use block space more efficiently, such as Schnorr multisig.

Based on the above points, the timeline will likely follow the below dates.

• SegWit is expected to be released in April 2016.
• The code for the hard-fork will therefore be available by July 2016.
• If there is strong community support, the hard-fork activation will likely happen around July 2017.

The undersigned support this roadmap.

Together, we are:

Kevin Pan
Manager
AntPool

Anatoly Legkodymov
CEO
A-XBT

Larry Salibra
Bitcoin Association Hong Kong

Leonhard Weese
Bitcoin Association Hong Kong

Cory Fields
Bitcoin Core Contributor

Johnson Lau
Bitcoin Core Contributor

Luke Dashjr
Bitcoin Core Contributor

Matt Corallo
Bitcoin Core Contributor

Peter Todd
Bitcoin Core Contributor

Kang Xie
Bitcoin Roundtable

Phil Potter
Chief Strategy Officer
Bitfinex

Valery Vavilov
CEO
BitFury

Alex Petrov
CIO
BitFury

Jihan Wu
Co-CEO
Bitmain

Micree Zhan
Co-CEO
Bitmain

James Hilliard
Pool/Farm Admin
BitmainWarranty

Yoshi Goto
CEO
BitmainWarranty

Alex Shultz
CEO
BIT-X Exchange

Han Solo
CEO
Blockcloud

Bobby Lee
CEO
BTCC

Samson Mow
COO
BTCC

Robin Yao
CTO
BW

Obi Nwosu
Managing Director
Coinfloor

Mark Lamb
Founder
Coinfloor

Wang Chun
Admin
F2Pool

Marco Streng
CEO
Genesis Mining

Marco Krohn
CFO
Genesis Mining

Wu Gang
CEO
HaoBTC

Adam Back
Individual

Eric Larchevêque
CEO
Ledger

Jack Liao
CEO
LIGHTNINGASIC & BitExchange

Jack Liu
Head of International
OKCoin

Guy Corem
CEO
Spondoolies-Tech

I'm not yet sure what this all means, so I'll just stick to posting this update here for the time being.

[arnoudk]

Brian Armstrong's response:

The Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus Proposal — Too Little, Too Late
First let me say that that I think the core devs and Samson Mow (who organized the event) are talented people with bitcoin’s best interests at heart. It is not easy to try and get so many people to agree on anything (which is part of the reason protocol development has struggled a bit lately).

I wasn’t at the event, but having read the plan, I unfortunately feel that it misses the mark.

Here’s why.

1. Prioritizing SegWit before a block size increase would be a mistake
SegWit contains several good features, but it is not a good solution to help bitcoin scale, which is the most urgent problem we need to solve.

My understanding is that Core believes SegWit contains features which are necessary to add before a hard fork can safely occur (to prevent certain attack vectors). However, I believe Classic already contains code that prevents these attack vectors (here and here). Gavin described them toward the end of this post about the upgrade to 2MB blocks.

2. July 2017 is too far away to raise the block size
If the plan is followed as written, SegWit would provide a slightly less than doubling of capacity by April 2016 (while adding some, I believe, unnecessary complexity). Then we would go another fifteen months (until July 2017) without any additional capacity increase. If bitcoin transactions per day continue to more then double annually, as they have been for the past few years, we will be in a worse position than we are today in the first half of 2017. This feels like a major oversight of the proposal.

3. We have a better option that is already available
There is a big difference between words and action. The consensus proposal is a series of words and it’s still unclear if those will be upheld. Meanwhile, another team, BitcoinClassic, has already taken action and shipped a working solution in code that we can use today.

That solution was written and reviewed by two former core devs (including the former lead of the project) so I believe it is a high quality option.

In the future, if Core ships a great improvement to the protocol (and I believe they will), I will have no problem running that software. But if they haven’t shipped that software yet, and someone else has, there is no reason to wait.

4. It perpetuates a centralized, single party system, in bitcoin
The final reason I feel this plan should be rejected is that it reinforces the idea that bitcoin protocol development should be done by a single group, regardless of how well they do the job. Bitcoin would be better off with a multi-party system, where several teams compete to add features to the protocol. Then the industry can vote on which to adopt (by encoding votes in the blockchain, seeing which node they want to run, etc). Yes, consensus rules still work in this model, which I’ve explained elsewhere.

Conclusion
The roundtable’s consensus proposal falls short in several areas, and only offers words (not working code). Luckily, we already have a working solution to solve bitcoin’s scaling challenge today: BitcoinClassic’s 2MB hard fork.

I think bitcoin will be best served by continuing on the following path:

• Over the next few weeks the industry should continue upgrading to BitcoinClassic. This will provide some immediate relief to bitcoin’s scaling problem and help restore confidence in the system. Once 75% of recent blocks mined contain a vote for Classic, there will be a 30 day waiting period during which the remaining 25% (and other actors) can upgrade. After the waiting period, the network will upgrade to 2MB blocks with 99% of the network or more (I believe) on a single chain.
• The bitcoin price will go up and confidence will be restored as we’ve bought ourselves some time on the scaling issue.
• After this, bitcoin will be in an era of multiple competing teams and nodes, which will accelerate bitcoin’s protocol development. Core, Classic, or any other team can propose upgrades to the protocol that everyone in the industry can vote on. Future protocol upgrades will be decided by consensus using the blockchain (longest valid chain wins), instead of consensus using industry meetings and letters.

If we follow this model, we can have bitcoin’s protocol upgraded to 2MB by April 2016, and keep right on moving to additional upgrades (such as Core’s excellent SegWit work).

If you are a bitcoin miner or business owner, please join the existing companies who have upgraded to BitcoinClassic to help bitcoin scale, and don’t delay based on a promise of what may come in the future. Thank you.

[CryptAxe]

I'm glad that some kind of consensus could be arrived at I predict these plans might change but at least there are plans now, and a lot of really smart people are on board this time.

[BitcoinNewsMagazine]

Regardless of what Mr. Armstrong wants I count over 80% of bitcoin mining power pledged to follow Core roadmap now. It is likely Classic will follow the trajectory of XT now.

[arnoudk]

Regardless of what Mr. Armstrong wants I count over 80% of bitcoin mining power pledged to follow Core roadmap now. It is likely Classic will follow the trajectory of XT now.

Classic is always still there, as a go-to option that is ready. It is less likely now that Classic will get adopted.

The statement is too short to really understand the details - and the details are important. From here, it seems as if the miners have chosen to accept a promise as a better solution than something that actually exists. This is a logical fallacy.

I am happy that there seems to be a solution. Although - we have heard commitments from miners before, I cannot judge if this one is any different.

I'm also sad that the message seems to be:
1. We need core developers. Bitcoin needs these INDIVIDUALS.
2. A handful of people in a room can make decisions for everyone.
Is that still decentralized?

The price has been rising for the last weeks, and it has continued to rise after the news broke. Maybe even a little faster. The market seems to be rewarding this path, or at the very least not punishing it.

[tey]

Interesting to see Adam Back on the list
closely watching this development.