Bitcoin XT 0.11A
lists.linuxfoundation.org
lists.linuxfoundation.org
If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants." https://bitcoinxt.software/
What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet".
I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it.
Interesting times.
Let's be precise: it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet.
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-...
Even though the other stakeholders will certainly be able to make their preferences known to the miners, any effect the other stakeholders will have on the success or failure of the fork will be through the miners, which IMHO makes my statement "it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet" correct, at least for a sufficiently narrow definition of "vote".
Even when we consider the situation more broadly, none of the other stakeholders have (as far as I can tell) as much at stake as the miners. The miners for example might be hoping that if the 1-meg limit remains in place, transaction fees will become a significant fraction of mining rewards, which would increase the total income of mining (income being essentially the built-in rewards, which are not affected by the fork plus the transaction fees). Holders of large positions in Bitcoin on the other hand -- what is their reason for preferring one fork or the other? Ditto merchants who accept a lot of Bitcoin transactions.
ADDED. As far as I can tell, the designers Bitcoin XT sofware have done what they can to minimize the distruptiveness of the fork on the lives of the other stakeholders -- by, e.g., refraining from doing anything to affect anyone but the miners till 2 weeks after a full 75% of miners (or 75% of hashing power -- not sure which) are running the XT software.
ADDED. Yes, I realize that any additional income gained by the miners will be paid by Bitcoin senders (e.g., people using Bitcoin to pay for things), so in that sense Bitcoin senders have just as much at stake as the miners do, but transaction fees will always be a very small fraction of the costs (considered collectively) of the senders of Bitcoin, so this is another instance of the very common situation where a large number of people are affected in some very small way by some policy decision whereas a smaller number of people are affected in a more significant and material way, and we know (from experience with democratic governments) that what usually happens in that situation is that the smaller group (whose interests are "concentrated") has a much larger influence on the decision than the larger group (whose interests are "diffuse").
It's also the payment processors, the wallets, and everyone else who connects to the network who needs to validate the larger blocks.
Mike Hearn who seems to be the strongest proponent of the XT 'we need larger blocks asap' philosophy and the person who wrote the blog post referenced in the OP is _not_ a core dev as far as I can tell.
I've seen comments to the effect that he has repeatedly tried to gain more influence in Bitcoins direction over several years and some people posit that this is him attempting to do more of the same by forking and taking the majority with him leaving him with a lot more power over 'new' XT core's development. Hard to say how much if any truth there is to that. The things Mike says make a lot of sense to me.
If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.
The idea is that your wallet commits a number of coins to a payment channel at one hub, and then payments to and from other LN users are routed along payment channels across hubs. This means less blockchain bloat, faster verification (you trust the hub to not sign conflicting transactions, because doing so is proud of fraud valid in court and kills their reputation in 5 seconds) and cheap transactions.
It still needs larger blocks, because adding funds to payment channels and taking funds out of then requires on-chain transactions. With millions of users, 1MB isn't enough.
You also have to get the users to switch, in particular miners and exchanges, so therein may lie part of the answer. But I suspect those people will generally follow what the devs recommend. I thought some of the big Chinese miners had said they would accept switching to 8MB blocks. So why hasn't the switch been made?
Careful, what is "reasonable" is what is at issue here. There are legitimate arguments being made on both sides.
Andrew, your logic is slimy. You are trying to associate Maaku and Blockstream with something they are not. You didn't respond to Maaku's point at all. You're being such an asshole!
This debate needs to chill out.
The majority of developers of wallets, for instance, are for the blocksize increase.
But the majority of bitcoin-core developers are against it. Gavin and Jeff are the only bitcoin-core committers in favor.
This is explained in Mike Hearn's blog post, as linked in his email on this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d64731...
These are not two people.
I think you just counted the same person twice because you don't realize he has a first and a last name. ???
1. Mike is not a committer. The list of committers is here: https://bitcoin.org/en/development (Wlad, Gavin, Jeff, Greg, and Pieter.)
2. Your point is that Jeff "also" is for the blocksize increase? But... but... that's what I said: "Gavin and Jeff are the only two committers in favor."
So... what's your point? What's your math? Your problems go far beyond typos.
I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either.
While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.
Gavin is still a core developer. He stepped down from his Leadership position to become "just" a regular core developer.
(I know that Maaku knows this. Just clarifying for the crowd.)
There are very few changes that Gavin has contributed back to Bitcoin Core since he handed most of the day-to-day repo management over the Wladimir.
I honestly don't know what you are referring to, unless it is the small patches here and there of similar size and importance to things we receive on a daily basis from dozens of people. Gavin pretty much disappeared from core development when he stepped down 2 years ago.
More specifically, the number of his recent commits (or other contributions) does not speak to (1) the length of time he has been a member of Bitcoin, (2) whether he has been in "good standing", or (3) whether there are obvious reasons to doubt him.
It appears, rather, that you have some ill feelings towards Gavin, and are letting these feelings leak into your thoughts by belittling Gavin's contributions to Bitcoin.
A better way to address this point, while still expressing your feelings, would be to say "Gavin is not in good standing with me. I think he's an asshole for going around our consensus process. Fuck him. I disagree that he is in good standing, and I doubt his leadership."
It was you who first mentioned him leading Bitcoin when you said "Gavin stepped down 2 years ago." Now you are just arguing with yourself. You came into this conversation, imagined people talking about him leading Bitcoin, and then tried to do some "corrections" to the claims that you hallucinated.
Gavin stepped down as lead developer on April 7, 2014. [1]
Most people would call that a year ago, or maybe one and a half years ago (rounding up from one year and four months). You purport to be “simply doing fact corrections” elsewhere in this thread. Misreporting basic periods of time does not jibe well with that assertion.
I would not normally be so pointed in my criticism but there is a strong disinformation and censorship campaign going on around this development fork. While that is happening you would do well to be very careful in what statements and ‘corrections’ you make.
[1] http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-steps-bitcoins-lead-d...
As in, actual censorship about all blocksize discussion, or just about XT?
The justification for the removal is that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin, and altcoin discussion is not allowed. [2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...
Bitcoin is designed to be fought over and amended, it's built into it. Software is never complete and XT is not an altcoin.
In practice, this fork only happens if >75% of miners switch to the new software, and I suspect the whole community would quickly abandon the other fork.
Practically speaking if you own Bitcoin prior to the fork I believe it means you will then be able to use your coins on both post 'fork' versions. Once the fork happens you will have to decide which version you want to transact on when you receive new coins.
It remains to be seen which version will survive, or if perhaps both versions will.
Some people want to change the rules. But some other people don't want them changed. So now we have two sets of people, the Changers (XT) and the Don't-Changers (Core) who will be following different sets of rules.
So their softwares won't play together in places their rules disagree. This will create a "fork" in the ledger histories. If your coins existed before the fork, everyone will see them. But if you transact them in a way that's incompatible with one set of rules, the transaction will only exist on one side of the fork.
So the public will then have to choose which side of the fork to live on. They will probably want to live on the dominant side. Then the losing side will give up and switch!
Bitcoin-XT actually has a few built-in mechanisms to make this transition graceful. It will only deploy the incompatible rules once it has a 75% majority vote, and is thus confident of success.
Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.
The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.