Quote from: Samplex on January 23, 2018, 07:39:19 PM

Quote from: amishmanish on January 23, 2018, 01:58:14 PM

Sorry for that post above.
As you know the bitcoin code has been constantly updated with several improvements over the years as an open source project. There was a general agreement that scaling had to be achieved somehow. One side wanted a simple solution by increasing the block size. The other side was in opposition because the block size increase has a direct effect on the requirements to run a full-node. A full-node can validate the block-chain and accept or reject transactions depending on their validity. THIS "VALIDITY" is determined by the set of rules that transactions are following.

When you do a fork (Soft or Hard), you are making changes to these rules. The difference is subtle but very important.
In a soft-fork, Its not mandatory for EVERYONE to upgrade immediately. Because blocks produced under new rules will still be valid on old systems.
In a Hard-fork, It is mandatory for all systems to upgrade, otherwise the blocks produced under new rules will be invalid on old systems. This essentially creates two chains and opens up several possibilities discussed here.

That I think is reason enough for the core developers to not want a block size and a hard fork.
You are right, in a perfect world, everybody would have agreed that a hard-fork is risky and that solutions like SegWit and LN should be implemented first. The block size increase could wait until the ecosystem was mature enough to form consensus. (On what is the safe limit for block size to keep the network decentralised enough and whether everyone is ready for a hard fork). When such a consensus would be available, a size increase could've been incorporated.

What has happened now instead is that a few powerful individuals (2 i think) have colluded to co-opt the bitcoin and scream to the whole world that they are the original. What Roger Ver is as a person is quite clear from his "Ï am a self made millionaire", "Whats your gross annual revenue" outbursts.. He is a egoist with a lot of money and one talented but disgruntled developer to support him.
He just decided to benefit from the disgruntlement amongst the bitcoin developers and launch his own coin. That was really sad.

If SegWit and LN in general is more to "like a bank system" why do we have it even? These new addresses that starts with "3" and "bc1" what about them?? Are they not "on chain" and everything with them is done off chain??

SegWit is a soft-fork that solved many issues so that future improvements can be implemented. SegWit solves transaction malleability by segregating the signatures and implementing an increased blocksize limit of 4 MB. But remember that this is a soft-fork and it has to continue supporting old nodes. The old nodes will effectively not see the signature data leaving more space for transactions. This results in an effective increase in capacity depending on adoption.
This is where the distibuted nature of the bitcoin project as a project of the people comes to fore. If people agree that it is worth succeeding, they will adopt SegWit. Unfortunately, the biggest exchanges and merchants have seen that there is still money to be made from the blocksize debate. If they all adopt SegWit, the fees and transaction speeds will improve drastically but seeing the divide in the community, they know there is space for other things to get pumped. Thats a net positive for them. So they have been slow to adopt it.

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Raising blocksize or making blocks faster+decreasing reward should be okay solution I guess. Look at ethereum it holds much harder load in terms of speed of blockchain growth and faster blcoks etc. and I don't particulary see that theres not any problem, of course ether has some problems regarding transactions here and there.

Well, we all are divided on this. Big blockers will say things like "Hard disks and memories are cheap enough now", "Users don't need to run full nodes, only miners can do that". This second assumption is dangerous. If normal users, small businesses become unable to run nodes, we no longer have the power to stop a miner consensus from becoming a natural consensus.
Its full nodes that implement the rules. If all the users use are SPV and full nodes are run only by the miners, then there won't be any more hard forks. The miners decide to upgrade to new rules and those become the new rules because you no longer have independent, full-nodes running to invalidate those changes.
This is centralization and big-business interests.

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Could you explain why is LN like urgently needed? To my understanding people saw that scaling debate was going nowhere , you had litecoin activating SegWit??? which may pushed people towards LN even more, and said enough and they opted for SegWit while other rich dudes went for BCH. But why is LN that much advanced.

The bitcoin fees and transaction speeds are suffering because the blocks are full. LN is attempting to spread the need for on-chain transactions over multiple off-chain transactions between parties. A payment channel is just a multisig, time-locked contract between two parties that keep updating the ledger amongst them. Finally, they can settle transactions on-chain when they mutually agree or when the time expires.
Its urgently needed to ensure that micro transactions can move to LN so that there is decongestion.

Again, people are saying things like LN will result in banking hubs. What nobody wants to accept is that LN is the best way possible with very low effect on centralization in the short term and no effect on the long term. Its centralizing tendency, if any, will be much lower than that of increased block sizes that will neutralize independent user-run nodes.
There is no centralization because users are free to choose nodes with which they want to establish channels. These nodes don't hold your funds hostage and they cannot lose them like normal banks. This will evolve as more and more people connect to the network and honest, secure nodes are rewarded.

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