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Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

I thought gavin and most of the established bitcoin devs were in favor of increasing the blocksize.. so why is this "lightning" system no one has heard about suddenly the new plan for bitcoin core? Whose clout is pushing this through? I was aware of argument about the 1MB limit but I thought the voices in favor of increasing it far outweighed those against.

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Two developers, nullc and pieter are against increasing the blocksize at a reasonable rate. Gavin, Jeff Garzik and Mike Hearn wish to increase it by early next year. Following some three months of debate, an agreement could not be reached, so Gavin and Mike are forking Bitcoin to the new Bitcoin XT. The vast majority of users, businesses and miners support Gavin and his bigger blocks, but blockstream, a relativley new for profit company which employs nullc aka Gregory Maxwell and Pieter as well as some other bitcoin devs and is developind lightning and sidechains which they offer as an alternative to increasing the blocksize has managed to stall this process, thus leading to a fork.

> Two developers, nullc and pieter are against increasing the blocksize at a reasonable rate.

Careful, what is "reasonable" is what is at issue here. There are legitimate arguments being made on both sides.

One side - your side specifically maaku and that of your employer blockstream - loses complete legitimacy when they start censoring posts and spoofing Satoshi's email address.

Neither Blockstream nor any of the core developers have affiliation with r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, or bitcoin.org. By design, mind you, for the purpose of ensuring decentralization. I may have the book badge on the subreddit, but I'm as helpless about censorship as you are.

Yet you and some of your other blockstream colleagues are cheering on the censorship in r/bitcoin.

I am not and I don't know anyone at Blockstream who is. Care to back that up with a link?

Oh, please. The reddit moderators and satoshi asshat have nothing to do with Maaku or Blockstream.

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.

Sure, s/reasonable/meaningful/. It's about whether to have a notable increase right now, with very-small or not-now increases going on the 'no' side.

Lightning Network is a system that merges a collection of transactions over so called payment channels to an LN hub into one on-chain transaction. It is designed to add as few trust requirements as possible vs using standard transactions (a multisignature model is used with the hub to prevent any possibility of direct theft, as one example of a security mechanism).

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.

This is quite helpful, but it does not answer the question of why they don't switch to larger blocks now if most of the devs are in favor of it.

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?

Everyone is in favor of increasing the block size at some point. One side is simply being more conservative / less reckless and trying to make sure that the right proposal is accepted, rather than the first implemented. They are organizing a series of workshops on this topic:

http://scalingbitcoin.org/

I don't think there is any disagreement that the block size will be increased by some amount at some point. It seems to me the major disagreement is by how much and how fast to increase it.

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.

Gavin Andresen, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin project is also very outspoken about the need to remove the block size limit kludge that was originally put in by Satoshi. You can read his series of blog posts outlining the arguments here: http://gavinandresen.ninja

If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.

Wladimir is the current maintainer of Bitcoin Core.

It depends on how you define an "established" dev.

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...

That's not really true - Garzik has expressed support for a size increase, just more modest than Gavin and Jeff's. And the only other two committers are against both plans. That's hardly a "majority".

Garzik is Jeff. His name is Jeff Garzik.

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. ???

That's a typo, I meant Gavin and Mike, not Gavin and Jeff. The point still stands.

Huh?

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.

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