Idelto

Cryptocurrency news website

Bitcoin XT

November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV Full Node Announcement

by

November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV Announcement

Blockchain development firm Nchain has announced the company’s plans to launch a new Bitcoin Cash full node client called ‘Bitcoin SV.’ Lead developer Daniel Connolly has published the specifications for re-enabling old opcodes for the November 2018 BCH upgrade. So far the unpublished codebase has seen vocal support from the mining pool Coingeek, but right now some members of the BCH community are concerned that if no other miners switch to Bitcoin SV, the proposed upgrade could cause incompatibilities.

Also read: Fivebucks.com: Meet the Freelancer’s Marketplace Powered by Bitcoin Cash

Will Bitcoin SV’s Proposal be Compatible With Bitcoin ABC?

November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV AnnouncementOn Thursday, August 16 the firm Nchain revealed they are releasing a new BCH full node client that’s claimed to be based on Bitcoin ABC v0.17.2, but with a few different upgrade changes added. Bitcoin SV will include restoring more Satoshi opcodes, removing the opcode per script limit, and raising the block size to 128MB. Further, the leading BCH mining pool Coingeek have stated they will be backing the new client. However, since this announcement, some BCH supporters are concerned about the upgrade coming this November. Issues could occur if groups of miners choose Bitcoin SV’s finalized consensus change proposals, which could be entirely different than the finalized Bitcoin ABC 0.18.0 version. Moreover, depending on the upgrade releases stemming from Bitcoin Unlimited, and other implementations, the Bitcoin SV client could be incompatible with any one of them.

November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV AnnouncementSo far the Bitcoin ABC team hasn’t responded to the latest Nchain announcement, and the ABC client release for testing hasn’t arrived. According to the ABC roadmap, after they announced the client’s upgrade changes the codebase was supposed to be delivered by August 15. Instead, the team published an article on the benefits of canonical transaction ordering with help from articles written by the Bitcoin Cash miner Jonathan Toomim, and Joannes Vermorel’s study on the process. So at the time of writing the latest 0.18.0 Bitcoin ABC version is two days late. Furthermore, if v0.18.0 contains canonical transaction ordering, the enforcement of minimum transaction size, and the activation of OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY, it will not be compatible with SV’s framework for November.

Bitcoin SV’s Lead Developer Publishes Re-Enabling Old Opcode Specs

The Bitcoin SV client’s lead developer, Daniel Connolly, has published a document of specifications concerning the SV clients’ re-enabling old opcodes. The Bitcoin SV version 1.0 document details that in May of 2018 a few disabled opcodes were re-added to the Bitcoin Cash scripting engine, and this November SV will introduce four more opcodes.       

“The scope of that change was limited in order to focus developer attention rather than attempting to reintroduce all of the disabled opcodes at once,” explains the Bitcoin SV spec sheet published on August 17.

This specification expands upon that change by reintroducing additional opcodes — The specifications describe the opcodes that will be added in the November 2018 protocol upgrade.

The re-enabled opcodes will include:

  • OP_MUL — Multiplies two numbers
  • OP_RSHIFT — Right shift b by n bits
  • OP_LSHIFT — Left shift b by n bits
  • OP_INVERT — Bitwise NOT  

The Ultimate Decision Will Be Made With Hashpower

Essentially the ultimate decision making will be in the hands of the miners if they want to upgrade the block space to 128MB, or follow through with ABC’s plans. At the moment there are many different takes on this situation from a wide variety of BCH supporters. Some agree with Coingeek and Nchain and want to raise the space available in blocks, while others believe there isn’t a need for the increase, because current 32MB blocks are not yet being filled. Discussions concerning the matter have increased exponentially on BCH-centric Slack and Telegram channels, Twitter, and Reddit forums.

A lot of BCH supporters believe that ultimately those who have hash power will have the final say in this debate and miners will choose which client they plan to use. Some BCH proponents are not too concerned with the possibility of incompatible clients just yet, because as far as ABC v0.18.0 and SV 1.0 are concerned, neither client has finalized plans for November’s upgrade. As mentioned above the ABC code is not ready yet and the SV 1.0 codebase plans to launch this September.

November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV Announcement
A lot of BCH supporters believe ultimately it will be the decision of the miners on whether or not they support changes like canonical transaction ordering and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY, or re-enabled opcodes and a 128MB block size increase.

News.Bitcoin.com briefly spoke with Bitcoin XT developer Tom Harding about the recent Nchain announcement and he explained the XT client will follow the majority hashrate.

“XT hasn’t been a driving force behind any of the forking change proposals this time around —  We’ve been focusing on non-consensus 0-conf work,” Harding explains.

Regarding consensus changes, our intention is to support what the majority of hashpower wants to do — We’re also thinking about how best to know what BCH miners actually want.

What do you think about the Bitcoin SV client and the possibility of it being incompatible with Bitcoin ABC’s November upgrade? Which upgrade proposals would you like to see finalized? Let us know your opinion on this subject in the comment section below.  

Images via Shutterstock, Coindance, the Nchain Bitcoin SV announcement, and Bitcoin ABC logo. 

Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

The post November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV Full Node Announcement appeared first on Bitcoin News.

The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC’s Proposed Upgrade Changes

by

The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC's Proposed Upgrade Changes

On August 8, the Bitcoin ABC development team published an announcement regarding the November hard fork changes with plans to finish the latest codebase by August 15. The proposal falls in line with the ABC developer’s upgrade timeline and contains about five different changes that will soon be ready for testing.

Also read: Bitcoin Cash Acceptance Grows — Dish Network and Flow Partner With Bitpay

Bitcoin ABC Publishes Plans and Consensus Changes for the Upcoming BCH November Upgrade

The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC's Proposed Upgrade Changes The Bitcoin Cash community has plans to upgrade the network once again with consensus changes this November. Just recently, news.Bitcoin.com reported on Bitcoin ABC developers announcing they will be releasing new code on August 15th for testing. On August 8, the ABC development team revealed the changes they plan to add to the 0.18.0 codebase that includes about five new features. The ABC developers say there’s only one week left before the official code-completion date and they want to remind and update the BCH community with the latest developments.

The new changes that have been completed and will undergo testing on August 15 include:

  • Canonical transaction ordering (more info here)
  • Enforcement of minimum transaction size of 100 bytes to prevent attacks on the Merkle tree (more info)
  • Activation code and implementation for OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY (more info)
  • Make push-only mandatory for scriptsig (more info)

Another change that is currently still in progress, but expected to be ready by next week, is a modified fee structure which would allow a significant decrease in transaction fees. ABC programmers explain that a modified fee structure is not necessarily a strict consensus change, but nevertheless will be included in the 0.18.0 version. In addition to the announcement, the team also published two specifications for the overall hard fork, and for OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY.

Craig Wright: ‘If a Certain Developer Wants This, Then We Will Fund Replacement Developers’

Of course, the announcement from Bitcoin ABC sparked a bunch of controversy due to certain additions within the code changes — most notably the activation of OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY (CDSV). Adding the change could allow developers to create binary contracts using the BCH chain, and Bitcoin Unlimited’s lead developer Andrew Stone has been researching and working on implementing the opcode in order to make bitcoin scripting applications more versatile.

The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC's Proposed Upgrade Changes
Nchain’s Craig Wright opposes adding OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY to the BCH upgrade.

One of the most vocal individuals against adding the CDSV opcode is Nchain’s chief scientist, Craig Wright, who spoke out in opposition against the opcode addition right away. Wright explains to his Twitter followers that the opcode is not going to happen, while tagging Coinngeek’s Calvin Ayre and Viabtc’s Haipo Yang in the post as well.

“OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY is not happening — If a certain ABC developer wants to push this, then we will just fund replacement developers — Trust me — There are others,” Wright explains after the Bitcoin ABC code announcement.

Miners vote — Think we are not serious. Watch the Axe fall.

There’s been some opposition to Wright’s objection as he already had been arguing with developers about ideas like pre-consensus. When Wright spoke out against pre-consensus, Coingeek’s Calvin Ayre took his side and announced a day later that Coingeek would not participate in any “risky” protocol changes. Coingeek’s mining pool commands a hashrate of around 21 percent of the network over the last seven days. On Thursday, Nchain’s Wright says to his Twitter followers that just like the Nchain team, his friend Calvin Ayre will not allow developers to treat Bitcoin like a toy.     

“And like us, Calvin Ayre will not settle for a devs plaything,” Wright emphasizes.  

The original base protocol — No experiments — Unlimited unbounded scale.   

The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC's Proposed Upgrade Changes
Bitcoin Cash hashrate over the last seven days shows Coingeek’s hashrate share at 21 percent.

Will Bitcoin Cash Miners Weigh in on the CDSV Opcode Subject?

Of course, many trolls from the core camp have been trying to use the infighting to cause disruption among the BCH community. Bitcoin XT’s lead developer Tom Harding notes this observation on Thursday saying, “Underway: obvious campaign to sow discord among BCH supporters — Sorry trolls, Bitcoin is Byzantine fault tolerant.” So far there’s been a lot of debate about this subject, but at least BCH supporters know that the subjects are being discussed, rather than one side of the discussion being purposely suppressed by so-called ‘thought leaders’ and forum administrators.  

So far there hasn’t been an official response from Coingeek like the one shared the other day concerning pre-consensus changes. Moreover, Calvin Ayre has not said anything yet in regard to the CDSV opcode subject on Twitter, so people will be waiting to hear him weigh in on the CDSV topic. Viabtc’s Haipo Yang made an interesting statement on Twitter following the heated debate on Friday and said: 

We need to stop the regular hard fork of Bitcoin Cash. We need stable Bitcoin protocol specification, we need multiple implementations — There should not be dev decide but miner vote.

However, other miners have not made any statements for or against the idea of implementing CDSV. Wright says he cares deeply about the project and people better not get in his way when it comes to protecting the original Bitcoin protocol.     

“I care about making bitcoin THE global currency,” Wright details this Friday.

The original Bitcoin protocol — Not a social experiment. If you get in my way… Watch the juggernaut roll!

What do you think about the consensus changes Bitcoin ABC has proposed? What do you think about Nchain’s Craig Wright weighing in on the subject? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comment section below.

Images via Shutterstock, Bitcoin ABC logo, and Pixabay.

At Bitcoin.com there’s a bunch of free helpful services. For instance, have you seen our Tools page? You can even look up the exchange rate for a transaction in the past. Or calculate the value of your current holdings. Or create a paper wallet. And much more.

The post The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC’s Proposed Upgrade Changes appeared first on Bitcoin News.

BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps

by

BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps

The anniversary of the blockchain split that took place on August 1, 2017 is just two weeks away. Over the past few months Bitcoin Cash (BCH) infrastructure support and development has been exponential, while BCH proponents have also seen a bunch more announcements during the second week of July.

Also read: Have You Tried Blockchain 5.0 Yet? Nobody Else Has Either

The Bitcoin Cash Network Has Seen Massive Infrastructure Support and Steady Development Over the Last Year

A lot has changed since August 1, 2017, and in two weeks the Bitcoin Cash community will be celebrating the blockchain split. As of today, the BCH chain has seen over 60,000 blocks mined since the first hard fork, and since then the network has seen two more upgrades. The first upgrade changed the decentralized currency’s Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA), and the second fork upgraded the block size from 8 MB to 32 MB. Further, the BCH developers re-enabled a few Satoshi OP_Codes and increased the data carrier size which added a bunch of new features to the protocol.

BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps

The Fourth Largest Market Capitalization and the Fifth Highest Trade Volumes

Since the DAA was fixed, the BCH chain’s difficulty has been running perfectly and on July 15 the chain is operating at 12.69% of the bitcoin core’s (BTC) difficulty. Markets have done extremely well over the past year as well. BCH was averaging $300 per coin during its first week, now the token is worth $726 seeing a 142 percent increase. The digital asset commands a whopping $12.4Bn market valuation and with $320Mn traded over the past 24-hours, which puts BCH at the fifth position out of 1600+ other coins by trade volume. The top five BCH exchanges today include Coinex with $55Mn in volume, Okex with $40Mn, Binance – $33Mn, Hitbtc – $29Mn, and – Rightbtc -$24Mn. The top currencies swapped with BCH includes tether (USDT 48%) followed by bitcoin core (BTC 35%), USD (6.7%), ETH (3.7%), and KRW (2.4%). BCH markets are seeing some recovery since last week and are up 3 percent over the last 24-hours.

BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps
Bitcoin cash (BCH) markets are seeing some recovery since last week’s dip on July 15, 2018.

This Week’s Bitcoin Cash News and Developments

A lot has happened in within the BCH ecosystem this week. For instance, the highly anticipated privacy-centric BCH mixing platform Cash Shuffle has seen steady development and a stable release should be launched soon. The firm Robinhood added bitcoin cash support this week – adding another infrastructure provider to the massive list of apps that have implemented BCH. Bitcoin Cash supporters will be pleased to hear that Bitcoin XT has released its J version and OSX binaries are back. Furthermore, the developer Unwriter has launched another platform called Chaintrend.org. The app is a powerful OP_Return trend analytics engine with a simple JSON query language powered by bitdb.

BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps
The developer Unwriter launches Chaintrend.org. Demos are available for people to use to test the app.

In other news, we recently reported on a project called Bitreon that was supposed to be a Patreon-like application that uses bitcoin cash. Unfortunately, there were some discrepancies with the creator of the project and a particular donor. It seems the creator of Bitreon refuses to refund the donor’s funds and the Bitreon founder states that his platform will still launch in a couple of weeks. Even though he denies any wrongdoing the BCH community doesn’t seem too pleased with the situation and how he’s chosen to deal with the donor.  

BCH Proponents Believe the Future Looks Bright

Besides the disappointing Bitreon rumors, there have been a lot of positive things happening across the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem overall, and BCH proponents are looking forward to the upcoming anniversary. On August 15, the community will likely find out what the next upgrade will feature as the November 15th hard fork software should be completed by then. Bitcoin ABC also plans to launch the finished stable 0.18 version of the ABC-client on October 15 – which will contain the necessary code changes for the hard fork. Bitcoin cashers have a lot to look forward to over the next few months and most of the decentralized currency’s supporters are pleased with the current direction.

What do you think about the latest events and announcements taking place within the Bitcoin Cash environment? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comment section below.

Images via Pixabay, Bitcointalk.org, Chaintrend, and Satoshi Pulse. 

Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check our tools section.

The post BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation Transactions

by

Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation Transactions

Over the past few weeks, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community has been discussing the subject of merchants accepting zero confirmation BCH transactions. Lots of BCH merchants have been accepting zero confirms lately as well, making the discussion topical again as it was a few years ago.

Also read: Russian Railways Eyes Crypto for Tickets, Blockchain for Cargo

Zero Confirmation Transactions and the Bitcoin Snack Machine

Zero confirmation transactions are transactions that are broadcast to the network but have not been etched into the blockchain. People like the idea of zero confirm acceptance because the method makes fast payments desirable for both the merchant and customer. However, the topic is also controversial at times because some individuals think the concept can be risky due to double spends and because there have been a few occasions of double spends within both the Bitcoin Core (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) networks. Even with these statistics, individuals think the use of zero confirmation transactions is key to broader cryptocurrency acceptance and others have proposed solutions to the zero confirmation doubles spending.

Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation Transactions

In a discussion called the “Bitcoin Snack Machine” on the website Bitcointalk.org, Satoshi Nakamoto talked about zero confirmation acceptance back in July 2010.

“I believe it’ll be possible for a payment processing company to provide as a service the rapid distribution of transactions with good-enough checking in something like 10 seconds or less,” Nakamoto details. “The network nodes only accept the first version of a transaction they receive to incorporate into the block they’re trying to generate.”  

When you broadcast a transaction, if someone else broadcasts a double-spend at the same time, it’s a race to propagate to the most nodes first. If one has a slight head start, it’ll geometrically spread through the network faster and get most of the nodes.

Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation Transactions

Double Spend Relaying

Lots of BCH accepting merchants have been accepting zero confirmations for quite some time, now including Cryptonize.it, Bitasia Exchange, Keys4coins, Bitpay, Satoshi Dice, Mini-POS, Lieferando, and more. Furthermore, Bitcoin developers have been discussing making zero confirmations even safer on the network by using different signaling methods for years.

A while ago, back in 2015, the Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn discussed some solutions in a paper called, “Double spending in Bitcoin and how to make it harder.” In the paper, he discusses a relay method introduced into the Bitcoin Core (BTC) network that was later removed by Core developers.   

“That’s why Gavin Andresen and Tom Harding have implemented double spend relaying. This is a change to Bitcoin that makes nodes relay the first double spend of any given transaction that they see (but not others, in order to conserve bandwidth),” Hearn explains.

Both the Bitcoin Core wallet and the next release of the bitcoinj wallet know how to inform the user of conflicting unconfirmed transactions. BitcoinJ already tells you when an unconfirmed transaction is “killed” by a double spend getting confirmed, but informing the user as soon as the double spend is broadcast will go a lot further.

Because of endless arguments about the attempt to fight double spends, Bitcoin Core squashed the protocol but Hearn and Harding kept it in Bitcoin XT. Tom Harding, the Lead Developer of Bitcoin XT, has been discussing and heavily researching the topic with BCH and talked about a relay system in his presentation ‘Native Respend Resistance’ at the Satoshi Vision Conference in Tokyo.

A Mechanism to Construct Special Transaction Outputs

Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation TransactionsThere have been others who have researched other methods like the researchers at the Department of Information Engineering and Communications, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.        

“In order to discourage double-spending attacks, we propose a mechanism to construct special transaction outputs,” details the research paper called ‘Double-spending Prevention for Bitcoin Zero-Confirmation Transactions.’ “Such outputs can be spent with a single signature but have the property that if two different signatures for the same output are disclosed (for instance, in two different transactions spending the same output as a double-spending attack), the private key used to sign the transaction is revealed.”

This allows any observer to generate a third transaction spending the same output and sending the amount to an address controlled by himself.

Two Bitcoin Cash Proposals Geared Towards Double Spend Alerts and Proofs

Lastly, there are two protocol development proposals that would also bolster the use of zero confirmation transactions on the BCH chain. The Openbazaar developer Chris Pacia has written a proposal called “Double Spend Alerts” which is a BCH network message that alerts nodes when a double spend occurs on an unconfirmed transaction. However, Pacia notes the detection does not prevent all types of double spends and states “further technical advances are needed.”

Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation Transactions

The Bitcoin Unlimited team has a method under development called “Double Spend Proof Creation and Forwarding.”

“By receiving double spend proofs sellers learn about attempts to defraud them faster and can take appropriate steps — This will make a 0-conf transaction on Bitcoin Cash more safe and will give it broader acceptance,” the proposal ‘BUIP088’ reads.  

The goal of the implementation is that any node that has access to both transactions can create the proof — And that any other node (even with none of those transactions in the mempool) can validate and forward it.

So far, many Bitcoin Cash supporters are supportive of these ideas and concepts that would prevent and alert network participants of future double spends. Moreover, a lot more merchants and businesses are accepting zero confirmation BCH transactions as well by trusting the network and the low probability of double spend risks. As Satoshi once stated in 2010, the risk of double spends towards zero confirmation transactions on the Bitcoin network, would be far less than the fraud that takes place with credit cards. But at the end of the day, its the merchants’ decision whether or not they want to accept instantaneous payments or wait for a confirmation on the blockchain.

What do you think about zero confirmation transactions? Let us know your thoughts about the subject in the comment section below.

Images via Shutterstock, Pixabay, The Incredibles, and Wiki Commons. 

Get our news feed on your site. Check our widget services.

The post Bitcoin Cash Community Embraces Zero Confirmation Transactions appeared first on Bitcoin News.