@go1111111
Regarding OP_GROUP: Note the similarity between this disagreement and the disagreement that lead to ABC/BCH succeeding where BU failed.
Wow. I am learning a lesson on how a soundbite can compress history out of recognition.
Let's expand...
ABC's success did not come out of a vacuum, it came out of a relationship which BU had steadily forged with a number of major miners over a year and a half. BU sent separate developer delegations to China (Nov 2016 & March 2017) who met with many miners and businesses there. It is difficult because of language and cultural barriers, but we found like-minded people who shared the original Satoshi vision of p2p currency for the world enabled with onchain scaling. A collaborate effort evolved which briefly achieved over 50% of the hashing power on BTC. Sadly the poisoning of the Western ecosystem by the r/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/bitcointalk and crypto-news media capture prevented a widespread switch to large block capable non-mining full-nodes. So, our node count languished as had XT and Classic before.
@Peter R's
BUIP055 which proposed a spinoff fork was passed by the BU membership. And this was tirelessly spec'd out by
@freetrader. The New York Agreement pulled the rug from BU's effort to gain hashing power for larger blocks on Bitcoin, and we were left with planning a large block client compatible with Jeff Garzik's BTC1 or putting BUIP055 into effect and forking.
Some BU members used those pre-existing miner-developer links in mid-2017 to fast-track a fork of Bitcoin because, with the NYA, time was running out to create a version of Bitcoin without the complexity of Segwit being embedded forever, once SW outputs hit the blockchain.
Kudos to
@deadalnix and
@freetrader who were the architects ABC's success and created a organisation which quickly attracted other capable developers.
This is permissionless innovation in action.
Yes, BU should have pivoted faster on the question of Emergent Consensus. The reason we focused on that is because it is architecturally correct, removing the block limit from the protocol layer. The miners long made it clear that they wanted the 1MB resolved permanently, and didn't want the same battle at 2MB or 4MB, every time capacity became restricted. We recognized that any flexible cap, such as BIP100 was fine, as early as BUIP002. This made sense for BTC when it was obvious that hard-forks would be rare. BCH is different in that the philosophy of regular HFs allows for many protocol block limit upgrades, so a simple limit of 8MB was fine to start.
BU did not fail, it
sharded and succeeded in a way which few people expected, including many BU members, creating the environment for a viable fork. Even at the recent SV conference, I had a reminder why such a long time building the relationship ground-work was so important, when I met the Hong Kong miner who mined the very first BCH blocks, at full difficulty until the EDA kicked in. He was familiar because our delegation had met him in 2016 and already established our shared views on scaling.
It's easy to look back and criticise Xthin for having exploitable weaknesses, yet, it was the Xthin initiative in early 2016 which was essential to starting the good faith relationship with miners. Xthin testing focused on the propagation delays caused by the Great Firewall of China. Compressing blocks from 1MB to 20KB was an extremely welcome development for the miners. Core had dragged its feet in this area for years, showing no enthusiasm for thin-blocks (while bemoaning how the network couldn't remain decentralized with blocks larger than 1MB). Once BU went live with this, it was very well received by the community. Core was galvanized to create its own version: Compact Blocks. I think that Xthin is superior in its use of targeted bloom filters, yet CB was superior in being hardened against attack integral to its design. Ultimately, in an adverse environment of black-hat attacks, being hardened is more valuable than block propagation efficiency.
Without
@Peter Tschipper's Xthin there would have not been the relationship between BTC miners and developers independent of Core Dev, which had enough critical mass to support the fork initiative which created BCH. Without Xthin, all big-blockers would have been pinning their hopes on Segwit2X only to see it clusterfork to oblivion 2 blocks too early. Big-blockers would have been left choosing between sticking with Core's BTC and waiting for the 2nd-layer coming of LN, or divesting to alts such as ETH, Dash or whatever, and joining Mike Hearn in calling Bitcoin a failed experiment.
History is different. We have BItcoin Cash, and while we may debate relatively small matters of functionality (compared to on-chain vs off-chain scaling), we can still say proudly that Bitcoin is not a failed experiment!