Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] comments on BIP 100

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:23:44 +0200

>
> One thing that is concerning is that few in industry seem inclined to
> take any development initiatives or even integrate a library.

Um, you mean except all the people who have built more scalable wallets
over the past few years, which is the only reason anyone can even use
Bitcoin from their phone? Or maybe you mean initiatives like Lightning ....
except StrawPay already developed something similar to the Lightning
network (complete with a working GUI wallet) and were ignored by
Blockstream as you prefer to write your own from scratch?

Sure, people in the industry take development initiatives. That doesn't
mean their work will be recognised on this mailing list.

> I suppose eventually that problem would self-correct as new startups would
> make a more scalable wallet and services that are layer2 aware and eat the
> lunch of the laggards.

"The laggards" being *everyone* who has already invested in building
Bitcoin software so far. Not a great way to frame things. Many of those
"laggards" have written orders of magnitude more code than you or Gregory
or Jeff, for instance.

I still think you guys don't recognise what you are actually asking for
here - scrapping virtually the entire existing investment in software,
wallets and tools.

> But it will be helpful if we expose companies to the back-pressure
> actually implied by an O(n^2) scaling protocol and don't just immediately
> increase the block-size to levels that are dangerous for decentralisation
> security

Bitcoin does not have n-squared scaling. I really don't get where this idea
comes from. Computational complexity for the entire network is O(nm) where
n=transactions and m=fully validating nodes. There is no fixed
relationships between those two variables.

"Exposing the companies to back-pressure" sounds quite nice and gentle. Let
me rephrase it to be equivalent but perhaps more direct: you mean "breaking
the current software ecosystem to force people into a new, fictional system
that bears little resemblance to the Bitcoin we use today, whether they
want that or not".

As nothing that has been proposed so far (Lightning, merge mined chains,
extension blocks etc) has much chance of actual deployment any time soon,
that leaves raising the block size limit as the only possible path left.
Which is why there will soon be a fork that does it.