循环人生

Today I couldn't sleep, tossing and turning, and I felt I had to write something. The story tonight is not complicated; Cobra from the Bitcoin Core group (also one of the administrators of http://bitcoin.org and http://bitcointalk.org) issued an open letter: he wants to change Bitcoin's PoW algorithm. The original text is as follows (I summarized it below; if you don't want to read the English original, just skip it): The brief translation is as follows: One of the reasons many of you entered Bitcoin is because it is decentralized. But did you know that this is slowly changing? An increasing amount of network hash power is being concentrated in the hands of one person and his company. The security of our network largely depends on whether their behavior is honorable, and we can only respond to them. And they get stronger every day. Based on Bitmain's 75% gross margin and 65% operating profit margin, Bernstein analysts conservatively estimated that Bitmain in Beijing had an operating profit of $3 billion to $4 billion in 2017. As long as they control most of the hash power, the only way to keep the Bitcoin network secure is to threaten them with a hard fork using a new PoW, but on the condition that there is still overwhelming recognition within the community for a decentralized Bitcoin. In a decentralized system, we should not rely on a centralized node for self-restraint. People talk about the 'new entrants' in mining, but no one can catch up with Bitmain's dominance in Bitcoin mining. They have a bright future. This $4 billion profit will be used to build better hardware, enabling them to further dominate the mining industry in the foreseeable future and possibly buy shares of competitors. Hash power has been abused to provide political support for reckless and dangerous hard fork attempts. Their loyalty to Bitcoin is questionable, and they seem more interested in supporting Bitcoin Cash. More dangerously, their headquarters are in China, a country with a long history of human rights violations, censorship, and various evils. The Chinese authorities could confiscate miners' equipment at any time if Bitcoin grows enough for them to leverage their control of hash power to push China's geopolitical agenda; they would definitely do so. The faster Bitcoin grows, the harder it is to fork. If the situation is bad now, it could be worse in a few years, but by then it will be too late. We don't want our transactions to be decided by the Chinese government. The solution is to adopt a new hybrid PoW system, possibly combined with PoS, and to choose very easy and simple algorithms to build ASICs. We should reopen an era where everyone can mine and organize it in a way that makes it difficult for a single entity to control Bitcoin. The fact is, if PoW is not effectively distributed among multiple independent participants, the security provided by PoW is very low. This is historically why mining pools have been very careful to avoid accumulating too much hash power. But now we have a situation: one person controls most of the hash power and can only rely on his self-restraint. Imagine if someone had a gun to your head, but you thought it was okay just because 'he doesn't have to kill me because of the threat of prison'; people would think you are foolish and crazy, but it seems this is okay when it comes to Bitcoin. Economic incentives only work when they are widely applied to many participants. If mining is distributed among 100 independent miners, each having 1% of the hash power, spread across the globe, you can believe that the economic incentive mechanism can work perfectly. The likelihood of this happening is much smaller, like controlling 51 miners. However, if you have three important miners, two-thirds of whom are in one country, these incentives will fail. Perhaps their government takes away their equipment, or they go crazy, or they are just evil. This mining issue is the root cause of all Bitcoin problems. Miners support every hostile attempt to take over the Bitcoin network. It is miners who often block various new features of Bitcoin just because of certain special political views. These are miners who support the destruction of Bitcoin and support altcoins. We need to get rid of them as soon as possible; they are no longer a useful part of our community. Hard forks are terrifying, but when we can all see the problems in front of us, we should not be afraid to at least try to build consensus. Wu Jihan replied under this tweet: Today I was busy with other things all day; in the evening, I saw the company's news public account, Coin Circle Bond, pushed a news about Wu Jihan and the Core group on Twitter. Suddenly, a feeling of sadness surged in my heart. My followers may know that I have always been averse to Wu Jihan and Bitcoin Cash, often jokingly calling them Wu Cold and Bcash. I usually firmly stand on the Core side, often debating with BCH supporters on forums, defending the Core group. But this does not mean I oppose everything Bitmain does, nor does it mean I support changing the PoW algorithm. The following line chart, can you guess what it is? Data source: feixiaohao.com The answer is revealed: this is the market capitalization ranking of Bitcoin, which has always been number one. So, it's a straight line. (I really hope that one day in the future, this curve suddenly shows a decline. Although I greatly admire Vitalik and Ethereum.) The following chart is the market capitalization ranking of Litecoin: Data source: feixiaohao.com In summary, the only one whose market capitalization ranking has never changed is Bitcoin. So what is the reason Bitcoin has maintained its number one market capitalization? Before mid-2017, Bitcoin's market capitalization had never been below 50% of the total market capitalization of all virtual currencies, and even before 2016, Bitcoin accounted for over 90% of the total market capitalization. This is also why Wu Jihan, the Core group, and these old-timers in the crypto space are so concerned about Bitcoin's market capitalization percentage. Although I am very averse to Wu Jihan, this time Cobra also acted like a clown seeking attention. Why has Bitcoin's market capitalization declined repeatedly? Doesn't Cobra have a clue? Is the decline in Bitcoin's market capitalization really due to miners having hash power? Isn't the decline in Bitcoin's market capitalization because blockchain projects are blooming everywhere? Bitcoin accounts for 40% of the total market capitalization of virtual currencies, Ethereum accounts for 20%, and Bitcoin Cash accounts for 5%. I don't believe that without Bitmain, without miners, the Bitcoin system could support smart contracts. After all, the Core group doesn't even dare to expand to 2M. Without smart contracts, the market capitalization has been encroached upon by Ethereum. You ask me if Bitcoin + smart contracts are feasible? I tell you, absolutely feasible; just take a right turn to Quantum Chain. Quantum Chain is a fusion of Bitcoin and smart contracts. Although Quantum Chain doesn't seem to be doing well now, at least this thing is feasible. I have studied hundreds of white papers, and aside from PoW, various consensus mechanisms exist. PoS, DPoS, which are considered better; besides, there are PoA, PoB, PoC, PoDefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz... all 26 letters of the alphabet are included, and every project initiator intends to create a super awesome new consensus mechanism to challenge the old era. But unfortunately, so far, I have not seen a consensus mechanism as secure as PoW. Under PoW, the security of the system is maintained by energy. Every Bitcoin you hold is backed by hydropower stations in Sichuan and wind power stations in Inner Mongolia. This is also the foundation of Bitcoin's perfect operation over the past nine years. I admit PoW is not energy-efficient enough; it may indeed face electricity issues in the future, but PoW is certainly more robust than EOS's 21 DPoS nodes and more reasonable than the PoS mechanisms of Dogecoin and Futurecoin. The reason Bitcoin has not experienced a single 51% attack in nine years is precisely because of Bitmain and the countless mining pools operating 24 hours a day. There have been many altcoins that have experienced 51% attacks in history, such as Feathercoin, Peercoin, Worldcoin, etc. If you are interested, you can learn about them. According to Cobra's meaning in the text, it seems he wants to turn Bitcoin into PoW + PoS. So, seeing Ethereum trying to implement the Casper consensus mechanism (similar to PoW + PoS), is the Core group planning to imitate it? Sigh! Is Bitcoin trying to imitate Ethereum? I sincerely hope Satoshi Nakamoto will return or replace Cobra. Let’s briefly discuss my understanding of the PoW + PoS mechanism. Under this mechanism, someone needs to stake a certain amount of tokens to become a witness. Then miners are responsible for using hash power to collide hashes to produce the next block. When a fork occurs, witnesses need to vote to select the reasonable chain. The majority opinion of the witnesses prevails, and witnesses who choose the wrong chain will lose their staked tokens. Correct witnesses earn token rewards. In the traditional PoW mechanism, when a fork occurs, miners need to vote with hash power. Therefore, PoW + PoS is mainly to prevent miners from malicious forking, with very limited performance improvement. I have prepared the money to bottom out; are you telling me this? Is the Core group just eating dry rice every day, not thinking about how to optimize Bitcoin's performance, adding some sharding technology, implementing some lightning networks, and instead thinking about how to deal with miners? Engaging in political movements. Over the years, they have only produced one SegWit and multi-signature, which indeed only scratches the surface. Miners have also supported it; some exchanges are also deploying it. Moreover, I will not mention the attacks on China in the text. This, according to the saying on Zhihu, falls under anti-intellectual behavior. Attacking people instead of issues. To criticize Bitmain, first drag the whole of China down. I’m afraid China in Cobra's mind is just a terrifying country. The viewpoint in the text is also very extreme. He constantly blames Bitmain for monopolizing the market. But the problem is, has Bitmain stopped you from mining? Did Bitmain hold a gun to your head and say you can't mine? It's simply that others are unwilling to mine. During the two years when Bitcoin's price was at its lowest and in a long bear market, 2014 and 2015, Bitmain insisted on developing mining machines. What about others? Cat miners disappeared, and other mining pools saw Bitcoin drop from 8000 to 6000, then to 4000, and then to 2000, all running away. Only Bitmain persisted. If Bitmain had not persisted during those years, would Bitcoin have faced a 51% attack? It's uncertain. Elon Musk, one of the people I admire, can even build rockets. I don't believe that in this world, aside from Bitmain, there is no one who can produce mining machines comparable to the Antminer S9. To be more extreme, if one day China intends to confiscate Bitmain's equipment, people from other countries can quickly unite to create several large mining pools to counter it. It’s just that no one is doing it now. Bitmain's annual revenue of 4 billion USD is unstoppable? I tell you, the rise of the TRON that has been harvesting leeks for 12 months has already exceeded 4 billion USD. (As of today, not counting the peak). It's really stoppable. Therefore, there is no reason to blame Bitmain for monopolizing. Of course, I still reiterate my point. BCH is not a perfect solution either. The fact that BCH's hash power is more concentrated is an indisputable fact. The decentralized BCH indeed has a CEO, and that is Wu Jihan. This is very wrong. In addition, BCH expanding the block size to 8M actually also undermines decentralization. A block size of 1M means Bitcoin's current full nodes are nearing 200G. Expanding to 2M is still barely acceptable. However, if the subsequent block sizes are all 8M, the size of BCH's ledger will quickly increase to 1T. In a future where blockchain is more deeply ingrained in people's hearts, it will also be a more congested future; does BCH intend to expand to 32M? As the size of the ledger increases, the number of copies of the ledger will decrease. If one day, it dwindles to only a few hundred copies worldwide, what difference does that have with DPoS? Expanding the block size is just a short-term solution, addressing the symptoms but not the root cause. There needs to be a mechanism to fundamentally solve Bitcoin's performance issues. What Bitcoin needs to do now is really to improve performance, address congestion and transaction fee issues, rather than engage in political games, nor is it a short-term solution, and definitely not to resolve factional conflicts. The most urgent contradiction right now is not the conflict between mining giants and users. It is the conflict between Bitcoin and all other competing coins. Litecoin, Dash, and even Martian's braised pork have better transfer fees and transfer times than Bitcoin. As a staunch supporter of Bitcoin, I hope the Core group can step up, recognize the current main contradiction, think about the future of Bitcoin, come up with more strategies, and find better ideas. I also hope Boss Wu can find his way back and return to the Bitcoin community. I hope the Core group, mining pools, and Bitcoin holders can jointly discuss a new mechanism that is optimal for Bitcoin's development. 3 AM, Shenma Shanghai (Original title: (Sorry, I want to take a stand, regarding tonight's debate between the Core group and Wu Jihan on Twitter))