The Bitcoin Scaling Debate Has Gone Too Far!

It's been three years...THREE LONG YEARS since the first rumblings of scaling Bitcoin. I've pretty much stayed out of most of it, but I can't any longer. Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic were dumb ideas, so I didn't really feel any need to weigh in on them, but this time it's different. This time, my Anarchist, Free Market hackles have been raised. This time, it is more akin to being held hostage.

You see, the scaling debate isn't about scaling any longer, because we HAVE the solution ready right now. No, this time it's about greed, patented greed at that. Normally, I have no problem with greed. The greed of many men has given us the luxuries we enjoy in our modern lives. That's not what's happening in Bitcoin. The greed in Bitcoin isn't even bad. It's the patented greed, or monopoly, of one company and it's CEO.

That company is Bitmain, and that CEO is Jihan Wu. If you thought I was going to say @rogerkver and Bitcoin Unlimited, you'd be giving them too much credit. They are only pawns in Jihan's game of Monopoly. It's sad that Roger is either too stupid, or too stubborn to accept it. Jihan only cares about one thing, and that's his mining advantage. It's called ASICBOOST, and it gives his mining pool(ANTPOOL) a 20-30% advantage over every other miner on the planet. I know he said they haven't used it on Mainnet, but come on..... I was born in the dark, but it wasn't last fucking night. They own the patent, and it's made into their ASICs, but they aren't using it?! It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure this mystery out. Of course they're using it, they'd be foolish not to!

The biggest cost(and limiting factor) for miners, is electricity. Let's say: you have a mining farm that mines $1M worth of Bitcoin, but your electricity cost is $990,000. Your profit is $10,000. Now, another miner - Jihan, has a mining farm and all of his miners have ASICBOOST. This gives him a 20-30% savings on electricity cost. His costs to mine that same $1M worth of Bitcoins becomes $750,000 or so. Instead of $10,000 he profits $250,000. It's pretty easy to see why he opposes SegWit, which breaks the ability to use ASICBOOST covertly.

If they truly weren't using it, why does Jihan support BU and hard fork SegWit2Mb, but not SegWit from Core? Easy, both SegWit2Mb and BU don't break the use of COVERT ASICBOOST, and SegWit(which is a soft fork) does. This is why Jihan supports Roger Ver and Bitcoin Unlimited. Otherwise, BU would be about as big a deal as Roger's last failed attempts at forking Bitcoin(Classic and XT). If they really just thought BU was a better proposal, why would they do the exact same hostile attack on the Litecoin network? Maybe because SegWit would break covert ASICBOOST on Bitmain's L3 SCRYPT miners!

Now, here's the rub. Antpool currently has about 15-17% of the network hashrate. Without ASICBOOST, that figure would probably be more like 11%, which is more in line with Bitfury and F2Pool. Even without ASICBOOST, SegWit will not pass without Antpool on board. We simply cannot make it to 95% consensus while Jihan controls 11-17% of the hashrate.

So, we are effectively being held hostage by one company....Bitmain, Antpool, Jihan Wu, and Roger Ver with Bitcoin Unlimited. Even though the picture below shows 72% consensus(and growing) among Bitcoin businesses and exchanges. That number grows to 88% if you add the user activated soft fork(UASF) BIP 148 crowd.

So, what are we to do? Even though the SegWit support is growing, if we can't get Antpool(and to a lesser extent ViaBTC and HaoBTC) to have a change of heart, we still won't be able to get to 95% consensus. I applaud F2Pool for deciding to support SegWit, and hope others will do the same.

In the meantime, we can all run a full node for Core to show support. Ask your mining pool to signal SegWit. Check the preferences on your mining pool. A lot of them let you pick which blocks you want to mine. I know Slush's Pool does. Last I checked, 30% of the miners on Slush's Pool had no preference set.

If you're using an Antminer on Antpool, SWITCH POOLS!!!!! If we can't get to 95% by October, the UASF will gain popularity, and that has it's own risks as far as a chain split. We must do whatever we can to avoid Bitcoin forking. We can't however, let ONE mining farm and it's CEO block the progress that Bitcoin needs and so many in the community support.

We've made great progress this last month, but we must press on. SegWit support is about to overtake Bitcoin Unlimited support, which has barely moved in months and consists of two to three mining pools. The picture below shows the progress so far.

We've got a lot of ground to cover between now and November, but if there's one thing this community can do, it's pull together and surprise the whole world. Let's make it happen, folks!

Did you find this article useful? Please upvote and Resteem if you wish!

BTC: 1AbhUy1pDbrvTfMKW4uFTHRJ7gboTy3u5H

Monero: 47PwackL2h6H7myZVjMAKfGEViXEHsYgHUup28BeKtEEasYg9MxB5RtaUktb5AUK69YbQ28EYCEe1LTnYcz5AkmFRU1rPWk
Payment ID: 6d33a1871facc0fe