Some facts and opinions about CTOR: Not much to win, but everything to loose

This is a writeup of facts and statements about Canonical Transaction Ordering as planned by ABC for the November hardfork. I am no technical expert, but able to understand a lot of things of Blockchain. I am a member of Bitcoin Unlimited, and I oppose CTOR. This said, I tried my best to present an unbiased and rational view of the arguments for and against. If I miss / misunderstand something, just tell me, I will correct my post.

THE GOOD

• Transaction Ordering in a Block was identified as an area in block construction which could be imporoved to help longterm scalability some time ago.
• One year ago several Bitcoin Cash developers from different teams met and decided that this topic should be pushed forward during the subsequent upgrade forks.
• CTOR was the product of the cooperation of different teams, not just from ABC
• CTOR is said to improve parallelisation and sharding.
• CTOR is proven to improve graphene block-reduction from ~98% to 99.6%
• If scaling software is developed, it is good to do this with CTOR as soon and universally as possible. That's why doing it with a hard fork now has advantages.
• CTOR is supported by many technical experts, including the ABC developers, but also Chris Pacia (Open Bazaar) and others.
• Bitcoin ABC provided the code for CTOR in the agreed time (August 15th) which should leave enough time for everybody else to test and implement it for the November fork

THE NOT-SO-GOOD

• It is not exactly clear how CTOR improves longterm-scalability. Some developers like Andrew Stone or Tom Zander doubt it does significantly.
• The only proven improvement is Graphene. Graphene is a method to massively reduce traffic in block propagation. Currently it enables to save 98%, CTOR can increase this rate to 99.6%. However, developers like Andrew Stone think similar improvements can be achieved without hardforking to CTOR.
• None of CTOR's improvements which are supposed or proofed are needed or even helpful in the near or midterm future. With a current blocksize of 0.1-0.2mb Bitcoin Cash can grow for a long time without having any benefit from CTOR.
• CTOR requires not just an hardfork, but developers of several software projects to update or change their code.

THE BAD

• CTOR is said to break existing software beyond the scope of how an easy hard fork like a blocksize-increase does. It requires more code to fix than a simple upgrade.
• CTOR is criticized for not only not helping Bitcoin Cash scaling, but to harm it.
• CTOR is opposed by significant parts of Bitcoin Cash ecosystem:
• Andrew Stone (BU developer) is highly sceptical of it. BU members voted against CTOR with 24:5. This is one of the most clearest rejections a BUIP ever got.
• Tom Zander (Flowee) says it breaks his implementation, harms parallelization and UTXO-database management
• nChain and CoinGeek oppose it. You don't need to believe in our Faketoshi (I don't) to acknowledge that he and CoinGeek participate in the ecosystem by investments, media, communities, evangelization and, last but not least, by providing a significant part of the hashrate. Like it or not, but they have enough stake in the game to be considered an important voice. With their hashrate they are able to split Bitcoin Cash.
• maybe somehow affiliated / befriended with nChain and usually likeminded are: Kyuupichan (developer of ElectrumX), David Jerry (SBI) and Ryan X. Charles (Yours, MoneyButton). Their affiliation with nChain does in no way diminish what they do for Bitcoin Cash. They appear to oppose CTOR.
• NxtChain, provider of a few services for Bitcoin Cash, announced that he will stop supporting Bitcoin Cash if CTOR is activated.
• there might be more, but I stopped here.

CONCLUSION

In my opinion CTOR is not a stupid, maybe even a very clever and good change, but currently in no way needed. It adds nothing to deal with the challenges Bitcoin Cash currently faces. Technically it might even do slightly more harm than good by binding developer's time.

The significant oposition of the ecosystem makes it highly controversal and a social desaster. The activation against this oposition could result in a permanent chain-split, dismotivation of a lot of valueable members of the community(1), disadoption by services and provide food for anti-BCH-marketing like "centralized Bitmaincash shitcoin". It will weaken what Bitcoin Cash currently needs most: The spirit of the community.

It is possible that a CTOR fork kills a still infant and vulnerable ecosystem like Bitcoin Cash. There is not much to win, but everything to loose.

(1) I include myself in this list. I think I am the most prominent, visible and respected Pro-BCH part of the German Bitcoin-media-landscape. Eventually you can also include Norway, who founded the Oslo Bitcoin meetup and is by far Norway's most visible and prominent Bitcoin Cash supporter.

submitted by /u/Der_Bergmann
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/9n8ryc/some_facts_and_opinions_about_ctor_not_much_to/