Complaints from Bitcoin Users

[Fremont]

Getting back to the topic at hand, have any other posters been experiencing complaints from other Bitcoin users? Or indeed from any prospective users that have been put off by issues with slow network confirmations etc.? Personally I love to recommend Bitcoin to any businesses I purchase anything from but it's been hard to make the case to retailers that BTC is a quick, easily set up method of payment when they could be waiting over an hour for a single confirmation on my cup of coffee or sandwich.

I actually used to co-own a Mexican restaurant which accepted Bitcoin, but even with a sign in the window and some local press, we didn't see all that many Bitcoin users (this is another avenue that we could try to explore - how do we get more people using Bitcoin when the current issues are resolved?) The ones we did see were mainly folks who were looking to spend their BTC in a physical location for the novelty of it. That was great back in 2013 when transactions were quick and easy, but even as a major Bitcoin enthusiast I don't know whether I'd feel fully comfortable accepting BTC in my physical store given the current network issues. We definitely need to get Bitcoin Unlimited to the top of the food chain, in my humble opinion. Businesses are put off from accepting which actually hinders wider user adoption at the same time.

So there we go - one more complaint from a Bitcoin user!

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Complaints from users, Day 77 (26/09/2016):

Bad faith Stalling Bitcoin conference accepts Bitcoin Unlimited's money for a sponsorship,

"rejects all their presentations" - ABlockInTheChain

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All four proposed presentations were rejected:

"https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-col ... post-28825" - ABlockInTheChain

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Matt corallo (who blockstream appointed to run the conference)

"is a college kid fuck boy drunk with power." - jeanduluoz

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Any chance of withdrawing sponsorship at this stage?

"This sort of treatment deserves a public response." - LovelyDay

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Ethereum has more nodes today than Bitcoin.

"Prediction: it's lead will grow even as its blockchain size exceeds bitcoin's." - Gavin Andresen

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I remember when Gavin and Mike Hearn first started talking about block size increases that there was this massive drama where everyone was focused on their personal characters to try discredit them. Like when Mike Hearn called Bitcoin "a failed experiment" and the price dropped later that day -- many people were very angry at him for that, and people weren't exactly rational when they were calling him a "traitor" [2].

And I admit I was a part of that problem too since at the time I didn't really give a shit about the block size and mostly went along with the bandwagon. But looking back at everything that’s happened – it seems to me that both Gavin and Mike suffered from a massive amount of abuse and character assassinations compared to other developers ...

"So I decided to go back and reread some of what they wrote just in case I fell for the circle jerk and it really wasn't that controversial:

They predicted the blockchain would go to shit (this wasn't hard to do.)
They argued that there was plenty of bandwidth and hard drive space available today for it to be economically justifiable for most people to run full nodes that are able to support at least a 20 MB block size.
They carefully refuted all current arguments against increasing the block size (these were either censored or no one bothered to read them.)
Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said that he anticipated for the network to scale up in terms of bandwidth and disk usage when he first launched Bitcoin.

So yes, Bitcoin was never suppose to become this contentious clusterfuck of segregated witnesses, Lightning Channels, sidechains, drivechains, treechains, and 1337 Harry Potter Spells ... with much information manipulation and political disingenuity spread in-between. Instead, Satoshi had always intended for the blockchain to stay open and simple based on predictable advances in networking and storage capacity. Advances that are quite consistent based on things like Wright’s Law.

…. But I think even with Wright’s Law ... I argue that networks in the future are going to have even more capacity because virtual reality and augmented reality are now viable, so more and more companies are going to be delivering new content in 3D -- with a lot of early adoption fueled by porn, home cinema, gaming, and education. More HD 3D content = massive amounts of space required = increased incentive to deliver powerful gigabit+ home connections [0][1] at a cheaper price and to produce cheaper drives to store them on. .:. So full node integrity is preserved well into the future.

Tl; dr, Gavin and Mike were right about everything and the Bitcoin community persecuted them for it. I’m also taking a break from this mess for a while because its become too depressing. Stay strong /r/btc." - Uptrenda

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I want to

"cry" - HurlSly

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I was thinking I will never have to say this but, now definitely it's true - Bitcoin is failed project, with failed community and centralized mining. It's only a matter of time when Ethereum or Monero will prevail,

"if things stay like this." - trancephorm

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It started fading away when adam back

"got control" - funk-it-all

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What's the one simple thing actually holding back Bitcoin transaction growth at the moment? (blocksize limit).

"Bitcoin was always going to need to adapt and improve to stay ahead of the competition, and at this small hurdle, it has failed. This doesn't bode well for the future." - DavidMc0

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Yet no plans for a blocksize increase.

"Only softforks which centralize power with a dev team that has received $70 million from a small group of investors." - Bitcoin3000

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"The beautiful thing about Bitcoin being an open source project is anyone can contribute to the code".

"What utter bs that turned out to be." - SammieData

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I feel like the developers have cultivated an incredibly toxic environment and have taken a ‘my way or the highway’ approach. It’s very unfortunate,

"and Bitcoin has suffered greatly because of it." - Chris Pacia

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Bitcoin blocks are 10x bigger than they were just 4 years ago,

"and the ecosystem is far more censorship resistant because of it. (Photo) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtSY1P-UAAEgDEN.jpg" - MemoryDealers

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Justus Ranvier on Twitter: 51% attack

"is just another name for a malicious soft fork." - blockologist

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Totally agree, And now that we know that any change (economic too) can be pushed onto the network by soft fork,

This is very scary.

"We really are in a situation with full central banking here." - Ant-n

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Soft forks involve the addition of a new rule to the consensus protocol, making previously valid blocks invalid.

"Now consider all of the bad things we worry about an attacker with 51% of the hash power doing. He can facilitate double spend transactions. But that's simply equivalent to a soft fork that imposes the following new rule: "actually, transaction B occurred before transaction A." An attacker can also prevent transactions from confirming / blacklist certain addresses. That's equivalent to a soft fork that imposes the following new rule: "transactions from the following addresses are invalid..." An attacker can also freeze out other miners -- equivalent to a soft which adds the rule: "only the blocks that I mine are valid."" - Capt_Roger_Murdock

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Jeff Garzik on Twitter: "soft forks are not opt-in.

"Rules locked-in at miner level. Imposed on entire network." - chinawat

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referring to a long post by me, devoted exclusively to the terminology of "hard forks" versus "soft forks" - and the unfortunate historical linguistic accident where the more-dangerous kind of forks ended up with the more-safe-sounding name ("soft"):

"A heartbreaking tragedy of inertia & asymmetry in the Blockchain Rule Update Process, which makes it harder to upgrade Bitcoin: Due to a random accident of semantics, making the rules tighter (more restricted) is a "soft" change, while making the rules looser (less restricted) is a "hard" change

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4n ... mmetry_in/

Another, somewhat similar post covered the topic from a slightly different angle - this time with a bit more emphasis on the computer science behind the terminology - including a brief discussion of the concepts of "covariant" versus "contravariant" types, often encountered in functional programming languages (eg, it's mentioned in some of the documentation on languages such as C# and Scala):

The tragedy of Core/Blockstream/Theymos/Luke-Jr/AdamBack/GregMaxell is that they're too ignorant about Computer Science to understand the Robustness Principle (“Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”), and instead use meaningless terminology like “hard fork” vs “soft fork.”

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4k ... ragedy_of/

Finally, five other posts explored possible motivations (political and economic) why Core / Blockstream insidiously prefers to force the more-dangerous kind of forks on the Bitcoin community (hint: it helps Core / Blockstream's interests, which they always put before the interests of Bitcoin users):

Reminder: Previous posts showing that Blockstream's opposition to hard-forks is dangerous, obstructionist, selfish FUD. As many of us already know, the reason that Blockstream is against hard forks is simple: Hard forks are good for Bitcoin, but bad for the private company Blockstream.

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4t ... ckstreams/

"They [Core/Blockstream] fear a hard fork will remove them from their dominant position." ... "Hard forks are 'dangerous' because they put the market in charge, and the market might vote against '[the] experts' [at Core/Blockstream]" - /u/ForkiusMaximus

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43 ... ll_remove/

As Core / Blockstream collapses and Classic gains momentum, the CEO of Blockstream, Austin Hill, gets caught spreading FUD about the safety of "hard forks", falsely claiming that: "A hard-fork forced-upgrade flag day ... disenfranchises everyone who doesn't upgrade ... causes them to lose funds"

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/41 ... sic_gains/

Normal users understand that SegWit-as-a-softfork is dangerous, because it deceives non-upgraded nodes into thinking transactions are valid when actually they're not - turning those nodes into "zombie nodes". Greg Maxwell and Blockstream are jeopardizing Bitcoin - in order to stay in power.

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4m ... ftfork_is/

The real reason why Core / Blockstream always favors soft-forks over hard-forks (even though hard-forks are actually safer because hard-forks are explicit) is because soft-forks allow the "incumbent" code to quietly remain incumbent forever (and in this case, the "incumbent" code is Core)

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/40 ... am_always/" - ydtm

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Soft forks are 51% attacks.

"https://twitter.com/BlockInTheChain/sta ... 1861773312" - ABlockInTheChain

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And with centralised mining.. very few get to validate any change over the network.

"Exactly what Bitcoin was supposed to protect us from." - Ant-n

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Yep.

"For all that Core bemoan centralization, their changes require very few people playing along compared to a properly run hard-fork." - Richy_T

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Soft fork is just a

"51% attack." - deadalnix

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Dissent in Bitcoin Community Become Visible,

"NodeCounter Voices its Opinion" - knight222

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Dissent in Bitcoin Community Become Visible, NodeCounter Voices its Opinion

"NEWSBTC" - bitcoin_andylee

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Blockstream supports the people who censor other users in this community. It's unforgiveable.

"Boycott Blockstream." - fat_tony555

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Some individuals were paid to takeover Bitcoin. Now

"the people take it back and set it free." - simonbroughton

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it has come to such a disparity between userbase and the Core developers.

"Bitcoin Unlimited is the last hope for bitcoin." - Joloffe

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Issues with confirmation of transactions

"I am still waiting for 3 transactions to get confirmed. Still 0 confirms after 7 hours. Is this normal?" - Charlozzz