Bitcoin Forum

God damn this forums must be all newbies or what? I had to log in to make this thread to stop all the nonsense from you newbies for the past few days. Let me break it down to you what is happening, and why a fork might not be a fork!


+ You currently dont have to choose Core or XT, both are just wallet clients using the same database (blockchain)

+ You can run both wallet clients if you dont know to support blocksize increase or not

+ Gavin and Dev core using 2 clients to sort out the consensus of the network, who will support blocksize increase and who wont.

+ As the XT becomes 90% of bitcoin nodes, Gavin will implement the blocksize increase. This is like soft fork, you will know by then because i'm sure all major bitcoin services will announce they will support the blocksize increase or not.

+ The Core will be obsoleted and the bitcoin network has reached the consensus.



Here is the BS being spread around here:

- You can sell your coins of weaker chain : NO you WONT, i can tell you no exchange will support a weaker chain and risking their business
- Price will be halved because you now have doubled your coins: No it wont, because you cant sell coins on the weaker change on any exchanges. Unless you can find some retard on the forums to sell to, and if you can, you should fork your own bitcoins now and be rich.


Gavin's proposal is to increase pressure on decision making of the Core team. As at the current pace, we will not have enough time left and bitcoin network will face bottleneck. The damages might be too great then and risk all investors involved.

I think this is a brilliant idea. Everyone (bitcoiners) will learn about this and start voting. Look at how many confused members on here, i think it works already.

You should also add Gavin's actual email into the OP.

In Gavin's email, he also says how he plans on completing the fork. Once a majority of the network supports his Bitcoin XT fork with a new block version, the blockchain will soft-fork by essentially having those nodes only accept blocks with the new version but still only mine blocks that are 1 Mb or less. Then, once he has a super-majority (>90% of nodes) with the new blocks, the blockchain will hard-fork with the mining of larger blocks. This is how consensus will be achieved, and very few people will be left on the old chain, thus making the old chain weak and undesirable.

Thanks guys, there is an awful lot of FUD out there and we need more posts like this.  I was very alarmed at first but after reading more details about what is going on I have come to understand that the issue is not as nuclear as I first thought.

The poll allows for it being modified (once you vote, you can modify your vote in the future). It should run way longer tho, at least until January 2016, otherwise its doing more harm than good.

No the 21 million coins limit stays exactly the same whatever happens. Nothing's going to change that limit.

I admit I haven't been keeping up with the latest developments but from what I've read during the past month or so, this shouldn't be the case. The fork is a change in the protocol that allows for bigger blocks than the current 1 MB limit. I don't believe that the total number of coins is planned to change. Perhaps you are confusing the concept of larger blocks (measured in megabytes) with larger block rewards (which won't be affected by the fork):


Link: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-xt-pushing-ahead-bigger-blocks/

No.

And the Lord will not alter any of the ten commandments either.

Actually, the 21 million coin limit can be raised at any time, and most probably will be in the future.

It would probably only happen on Gavin's exponential growth fork once the support infrastructure is so centralized that 'consensus' will be a relatively straightforward thing and nobody will be able to do jack shit about it.  But those of us who are still using Bitcoin will have sold our Gavincoin long before that and forgotten all about this mutant evolutionary dead-end with a malignancy coded in.

Great post, thank you. Enough of FUD here and in the exchange charts ;D

Hi OP, its not really simple to find and install the Bitcoin XT, is there any plan to promote it. Maybe an official shout-out from Gavin to use Bitcoin XT as full node? Until now there is no announcement or something to use Bitcoin XT from Gavin, Hearn and c.o.

you are continuing to repeat this, , why we should raise the limit? remember that bitcoin is divisible, and rare enough as it is right now, increasing its value will only damage these aspects

not to mention that you need to redefine the controlled supply/halving table

If Bitcoin XT is launched it will become the dominant one.

No pool, no exchange, no business or no person will keep any substantial amount of coins in any wallet which is outdated.

Further more as soon as the XT client is released, there will be an immediate fear of accepting any coin that was generated "post split".


If any one large pool and I suspect most will switch, the domino effect will be fast and furious.

This argument is over as a large majority will switch to any new client that is an update and endorsed by Gavin.



~BCX~

+1. Very good idea. I hope that the bitseed/bitnodes will support and make it easy to change the client.

This. The distribution of Bitcoin nodes doesn't really reflect the distribution of the Bitcoin community since many (most?) users don't run full nodes nowadays and major exchanges and mining pools would hold most of the power in the event of a hard fork anyway.


It's not really a fair comparison, although I understand what you're saying.

Virtually nobody would support a fork that increases the total number of coins. On the other hand, increasing the maximum block size isn't a question of "if" but "when". According to Satoshi, if Bitcoin is to ever reach the transaction volume that is expected of a major currency and scale as a payment system that can rival the current alternatives out there then it will need to accommodate a blockchain expansion rate that is much greater than today (the other alternative would be to increase dependence on centralized off-chain payment processing methods for smaller transactions which brings about a whole new set of problems):


Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

Bitcoin limit should never be raised I don't understand why this keeps coming up and I think Gmaxwells alternative solution means adding in alt coins which would raise the amount which would get rid of the value by quite a bit I feel gavins approach would be the best.

I'll ber waiting for the dust to settle when this does take place that way I dont have to make a decision but keep my private keys and join the majority.

That would be a instant nail in the coffin for Gavincoin.
Look, I think we need to do something about the blocksize, and maybe unless someone comes up with something better, we'll need to modify the blocksize, but forking it to 20MB does shit nothing, we'll meet the same dead end in the future. What we need is doing something scalable. A fork for 20MB is not scalable. Staying 1MB is equally stupid.
But the total supply will always be 21, unless you want an instant dump of epic proportions.

While it could be raised, consensus would never permit it. Nobody really suffers loss by making the blocks larger. However try to find consensus when the value of everyone's Bitcoin will drastically decrease due to wanting to increase the coin limit!

damn, i want to double my coins and want to be rich....NOW!



(good thread buddy  ;) )

I agree that a variable block size limit which scales according to the needs of the network would be preferable to one that is fixed since the latter is only really a temporary fix, as you said. Problem is, that's easier said than done and the proposals that we've seen so far have been shown to be far from perfect and tend to come with a host of problems of their own (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37yrok/why_there_must_be_a_static_hard_maximum_block_size/) (e.g. miner collusion (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144895)).

Gavin also touched briefly on this subject in one of his blog posts:


Link: http://gavinandresen.ninja/bigger-blocks-another-way

Let me see if I get this. So the hard fork (actual split o the blockchain) will only happen once the nodes run in XT are 90%+? who did say 90%? Gavin? show me the quote.
In this case it would make sense, since running a XT client would be considered as 1 vote. 1 node = 1 vote. If you want to the fork, run the XT client, if you dont want the fork, run Core. It sounds cool, as soon as that majority is respected, in other words, 51% is not enough, and 90% would be obvious that a fork is preferred by people that actually care about BTC enough to run a node.

Hi, check this thread for a really good interview with Gavin.  It helps explain some things and should make people feel a little more comfortable.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1075510.0

Some good posts as well in that thread.  I think you will see that everything is ok and this is just a bump in the road.

Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT would not use the same database once the fork happened. Only the same base database. But once the fork happened all blocks will be different.

How do you know the Core will be obsoleted? Are there really so many in advantage of raising now? Gavin is so loud as if we need to do it next week, otherwise bitcoin will crash. Though we have way than enough time to act. The prediction says past 2016.

It seems you very clear believe that one chain will die. For sure, at some point. But this is not some alternative Cryptocurrency then. What if there are around 50% fans on both sides? Each side will believe that their coins will survive and that their coins will be worth the 222$ actually. They WILL sell the other coins to those fans of the other chain. And what does that mean? Right, halving of the price. Of course, if youre right and there are only a couple fans on one chain, then this wont happen.

If there's a 50/50 split, the increase in block size won't reach the required support so it won't be enacted. We will remain with the same bitcoin we always had, only with two clients. Oh wait, just like now…

If the hard fork happens only past 90% of nodes in one side as it should, then what you say it's not a problem. The real fork only happens past 90%, yes or no? thats what I read once here.

That is true. Once >90% of the last 1000 blocks mined that have been accepted by the network and are of the new version yet still conform to the old rules will the hard fork happen. Anything before that will just be two clients on the same network, mining valid blocks for everyone.

Oh, now i remember you name. And your posts often have an attacking and wording tendency.

Whatever. You dont need to explain where im wrong. Its surely better to insult others.  ::)

The fork only happens past 90%. Therefore all coins on the non-majority blockchain become automatically obsolete, and you keep your coins safe automatically in the blockchain. It's pretty smooth.

what is the progress? how many nodes are using XT?

still a few, but bears in mind that the changes are not done yet in the client, it is just pure testing, so there isn't any reason to change for now, better to wait at least the end of this year

but you can check it here https://blockchain.info/it/connected-nodes

what will happen next week? I heard that something regarding the xt fork will be done during next week.

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoinxt/commit/821e223ccc4c8ab967399371761718f1015c766b

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoinxt/commit/c81898ec46e4962daf975e352931b848026fdc34

awesome post!!!
everyone should read it ;D

Thanks. If I read correctly, it seems the XT will raise the block size to 8mb and double it up every 2 years. This seems a compromise with the Chinese miners. Is it next week the XT will be released for real? 

Not sure if joking, or serious.
At some point people WILL have to choose, so might as well be now.

Agreed; people are overreacting every bit of news bitcoin is associated with, especially over this fork

The whole point of Gavincoin is to subsidize the indigent users in order to build a 'critical mass.'  A very good follow-up to free transactions for the welfare spenders would be to produce more coins and spread the wealth around more fairly.  The idea of getting 'free money' for mining was key to popularizing Bitcoin in the first place.  If every user (who properly registered) were given some of the current inflation it would be quite effective in further popularizing the solution.

Just like it the real world, it is more politically palatable to do this re-distribution through inflation than through theft.  Theft is, however, possible as well and both will be much more practical when there is a single 'benevolent dictator' at the helm.  It is possible that 'tainted' coins (which has been something of a fixation on the part of the XT developer) could be re-distributed.  In that case there need not be inflation or theft (depending on how theft is defined.)

Exactly... your last paragraph is what i dont get in this whole discussion. Why are bitcoiners so fast in giving away "their" cryptocurrency to a private company? Its interesting to see but somehow strange when you know the libertarian ideas of bitcoin in the beginning.

How is it giving anything away? Whether it's Bitcoin Core or a fork of Bitcoin Core everyone has access to github, everyone can review the source code and any changes introduced. If BitcoinXT code ends up being more popular, do you think that the existing Bitcoin Core devs will stick to their guns and maintain a platform no one uses? No way, they'll merge the desired features into Bitcoin Core and that will be the end of the argument, back to square one again.

Really? I think the whole point of gavin extorting his will is that he can decide what will be done. So you are sure that the bitcoin xt wallet, and so the bitcoin blockchain, will not be decided by him and his friends? You know he wanted tainting and other things before, now he might see his chance to take over the development. I mean bitcoiners has chosen then. And there was a thread about his milestone plans where users wrote that they really dont like what he is planning. I didnt understand what it was about and didnt want to spend so much time in it. But i think even the way how he will switch shows what he wants.

Yes, of course people can switch back. Though im not sure what will happen if he implemented something and a couple blocks with a bad change were running. How many users will switch away from his blockchain then? I mean its a financial instrument and getting back coins you spent is nice, but not getting coins you got in these blocks is no fun.

Let me know where im wrong, its not that im a pro in that area.

Actually no and this post won't accomplish anything.
I don't think that it is incorrect. First you assume that no individuals are going to want to buy coins, secondly you just generalized something.
I've actually seen a list of businesses that reject the fork, which included an exchange or two(?).

was trying to catch up with the bitcoin core / xt situation and this blog post was a good read check it out

BitTorrent protocol creator Bram Cohen wrote in a blog post titled Bitcoin's Ironic Crisis

https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a85e39f

I share his opinion on this one.

i will quote his conclusion here -

 Conclusion
What should happen, in short, is nothing. There should be no increase to the block size limit. There should be no attempt to keep transaction fees from hitting a market rate. The block size limit is a good thing. Real transaction fees will be a good thing. Any changes to the block size limit will hurt both of those, create a significant risk of major disaster, and damage the credibility of Bitcoin as a reliable system. The best thing for everybody involved would be for the proposed changes to be simply dropped, and Bitcoin developers to get on with making proper technical solutions rather than hacky patches.

The current proposals for raising the block size are reckless, unnecessary, and potentially disastrous. Perhaps it is not nice of me to put it this way, but this is not a game. There is real money and real business on the line, and the people who are affected and have say in the matter should know what’s going on.

BitcoinXT is open source - the same as Bitcoin Core. Every change committed change is subject to review and comment, so there would be no way for a developer even if they were the sole committer to make some sort of change that would be implemented without review.

If BitcoinXT becomes the majority and then something needs to be changed, it'll take months to move between soft or hard forks. It'll be planned and we'll know the level of consensus amongst nodes months in advance.

In short, there's no easy option for bitcoin devs to just make a fickle or odd change to the network without a chance for other devs to review and users to reject.

As Far as I am aware there are only 2 developers that are giving approval to the blocksize update in XT, while at least 5 developers have to come to consensus with Bitcoin core. XT could certainly continue merging contributions made from the ~304 developers who work on core, but there would be a new precedent set that we should ignore the consensus process with BIP on core and simply fork the main repository if we cannot get agreement.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with Gavin and Hearn's ability or right to fork core as that is how open source works and ultimately the miners and full nodes will decide which fork to use. I do find it revealing that Gavin decided to discuss the XT solution to bypass consensus before he submitted a BIP proposal. He must have expected disagreement and is using XT to leverage for a change to core.

From the looks of it we may see a few developers walk away when consensus is reached which will be bad for everyone because all of them have made great contributions in the past.

I look forward to adjustments in the proposed BIP's or new ones that we all can rally behind. We need to start listening to each other a bit more and addressing each others concerns. Perhaps if Gavin's proposal could be merged with Garziks and there are other changes proposed that address some of the concerns with centralization or giving to much control to the miners.

What if XT nodes gained in support and it's approaching majority, then core devs decides to support the XT's blocksize limit and implement the proposal into core? This is what I am hoping for: new block limit from both XT and core. It would be best for the users.

Of course that would happen. It's either that or the Bitcoin Core devs get to maintain a version that no one uses - not much point in that.

That's your opinion and you're welcome to it, but that doesn't mean you can stop people from proposing a fork.  How about calling off the next general election because I disagree with a policy of one of the candidates?  How about closing a restaurant because I don't like one of the dishes on their menu?  How about we shut down the internet because I don't like a particular website?  Your opinion doesn't trump everyone else's.  It just doesn't work that way.  At the end of the day, you have to allow people to make their own choices and that's what's going to happen whether you like it or not.  



Anyone can modify Bitcoin's code without needing permission from the core devs.  It's called Open Source and it's one of the fundamental principles behind Bitcoin.  Consent comes from the users securing the network, not the developers.  If you want a closed source coin where a small number of developers make all the decisions and everyone is forced to use that code and only that code, what the hell are you even doing here?

The question is who decides which version gets published. So far i read bitcoin xt has by far not the protection that bitcoin core has. And it only makes sense that gavin is switching there when he thinks he cant get his will on bitcoin core. The only reason he would switch would be because he would know he would get his will with bitcoin xt. So all the theoretical security about bitcoin xt are only theoretical as long as the project can be decided by 2 developers. All the fans download the client and thats it.

Im still not sure what will happen when gaving and hearn would implement tainting in their client and many newbs got aware that some coins might be worth less than others. Or if bitcoin xt would really become THE chain. Would a bad thing implemented be possibly made rolled back in any circumstances without leaving bitcoin behind hurt?

Supporters of a political party usually support that political party and that's it.  Doesn't mean we shouldn't have elections.  

Either use Bitcoin and trust the majority to do what they think is best, or use a closed-source coin and trust the developers to do what they think is best.  Bitcoin is not closed source, but it sounds as though that's what you want, so those are your choices.  

How do you get that idea? The total opposite is what i described. Or did i sound like a fan of bitcoin xt to you. :) Im surely no fan of the ideas of hearn and gavin and their way of enforcing their will. :)

If Bitcoin XT gets a majority, rest assured that there will be more than 2 developers contributing and reviewing code. Even if it's solely Hearn or Gavin that get commit access, every submission will get reviewed. If something controversial is committed, rest assured there will be a migration away from Bitcoin XT.

It doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin Core or XT or some other version - you're getting the same level of review unless developers leave the project and go work on Doge or something.

I stopped reading after this


If someone, anyone, wants to be taken serious in these discussions they need to avoid slander and ad hominems.

i am not in favor of xt

read the git pull https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6341 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6341)

Peter Todd sums it up best just a few of the reasons I cannot support it.

I have a lot of respect for all the work and code Gavin has done for years.

Truly.

But not this .....please consider the long term implications.


Or maybe someone has considered the long term implications and that is coming to the surface here.

I see what you mean. Review after the release might happen. Though that might mean that already alot of people downloaded the client and made transactions on, maybe a fork. Surely they could switch away but a potential harm might be done already.

You dont fear something like that happening at all?

On top of that, what do you think if a reasonable high amount of users think the bitcoin xt bitcoins are the one with value and the rest thinks it the unforked bitcoin core? When they are not compatible then you have copied a currency and both chains fans believe their coin is the real deal. Maybe even exchanges are undecided. You simply dont copy a currency and have double the value. So what do you think will happen?

What you're describing is that you don't like individuals being able to release their own clients with modified code because apparently that's "enforcing their will".  That makes it sound like you want a single team of developers to be in total control and those developers have to agree all the time.  That's the definition of a closed source project.  You can't have it both ways.  Either anyone can release a client with whatever features they like and the users can then choose whether they run it or not, which is open source.  Or, the developers are in total control and everyone runs the same client whether they like it or not, which is closed source.  If you want open source, then you can't complain(*) about Gavin and Mike releasing their own client because they are perfectly entitled to do that, as is anyone else.  If you want closed source, go use Ripple or some other centralised crapcoin.  Again, those are your two choices.

(* well, you can complain, but it just sounds like you don't want people to be able to make their own choices)

Youre right, everyone is free to do what he wants. Though i would wish that the bitcoin blockchain and wallet development would work more like democracy. The head developer should agree to what the users want and implement that. Of course he is free to leave and behave as if bitcoin would die if we dont agree to what he wants now, instantly.

So no, i dont want closed source. I would only want that the development follows what the user wants. Ok, you might say users chose by chosing their wallet, but im not yet convinced that this behaviour might not lead to damage to bitcoin. It would be better to go the democratic way from the start. Then the current situation would not have happened.

Eew, really?  We can do so much better than democracy in its present guise.  The leader of a nation should in theory agree to do what the public want, but that's rarely the case.  Democracy at the moment is where a bunch of wealthy individuals and companies fund the election campaigns to effectively buy the policies they like best.  Everyone else gets to choose the bought puppet they detest the least.  It's just corruption by another name.  I'd personally hate to see Bitcoin work more like that.

Youre right, though what we call nowadays is not really a democracy. Demo cracy means ruling of the people and we both know our democracies "leaders" fear the will of the people.

I think when we really could come up with an idea how to ask the users of bitcoin about what has to implement which way, and we only pay for these implementations, then situations like that would not happen so easy, because we would have decided as a community. Now we have to deal with what the developers do and chose then. Possibly hurting bitcoin on the way.

Miners take months or more to upgrade and they are really the only ones who can fork the network - aka, create blocks that are rejected by other legitimate nodes. No, I'm not really concerned about the evil software upgrade that gets pushed out overnight and perhaps a few hundred users run. Hell, for a new user it takes nearly a day on modern hardware to get caught up with the full blockchain. There's very little damage that can be done short of a "steal your private keys and send them to FTP site" type of hack - and there's no fixing that. Put a gun to any of the core devs head and they'll push out a hacked version of Bitcoin Core - it's the other devs that review it, warn others and in the case of Core, roll back changes.

We're going to know long before we have a forked chain whether or not XT nodes have a clear majority. If they do, I don't imagine that the core devs are going to sit on their hands - they'll capitulate and this larger block controversy will go away. Alternatively, XT could fail to gain attraction and then it's not much of a concern.

This is a lot of handwringing over something important but that will ultimately be resolved smoothly.

We can? How?

I've been thinking about how we could build effective Bitcoin governance and the best I could come up with is the same "a bunch of wealthy individuals and companies [...] effectively buy the policies they like best".

And even that is damn difficult to implement.

--

It seems that we might go a bit different way, though, with Core and XT continue co-existing in parallel, mostly in a compatible state, out of the need that "there can be only one".

Both having the same technical protocol, but different people, structure, processes and political standing; serving as a kind of two-party system and keeping each other in check.

Their respective power will be determined by the number of Core vs XT nodes running and people/businesses on board. They will have to negotiate any significant change at the risk of yet another full fork.

And occasionally the full forks will still happen and the minority will have to concede and change their protocol to match the winning side.

Can there really be any other way for a decentralized system?   

Sigh......Ignorance is a hard thing to fight ::)

Youre right. Sounds like a big problem wont arise. Only thing that might be possible is that some people might download it and use the old blockchain as base to run the new client. They might send their coins to someone and he doesnt get it because the transaction is only on the wrong chain. Or he might send his coins from the old wallet to the new one. Which might mean having sent their real bitcoins to an address that doesnt have a corresponding on the real chain. Though it should be possible to import the keys from the altchain into the old chain :) and get the coins back as long as the private keys system wasnt changed.

Does that sound right? If im right then this might mean some bad press or people complaining but youre right, it wont be the big problem most probably.

Let's say that someone holds a gun to Hearn's head (or Vladimir for Bitcoin Core for that matter) and makes them do a commit like "reject all blocks larger than 100KB". I think that a situation like this wouldn't last even 1 hr before alarms and the community went apeshit all over reddit, twitter and this forum, but let's say that it lasts for even 24 hours before someone figures it out. At that point, perhaps 1000 users download the client.

Any new users needing to download a new chain would basically get a broken client since they probably wouldn't be able to download any blocks past sometime in 2010 once larger blocks started happening.

Users who upgrade would get a huge warning on QT wallet (or in the logs for bitcoind) telling them they are diverged more than 3 blocks from the main chain. I don't think that they'd even be able to do a successful spend, since the client wouldn't be able to find other clients with a current block.

Again, it's not a zero concern problem it's just not a credible threat short of creating nasty code that does stuff like "send via FTP wallet.dat and keylog passwords to ftp.pwned.ru" - that's a risk that we all have to deal with and only run releases that have been vetted, signed and not released < 24 hours ago.

I think you described a situation that would hinder itself. Though there might be situation where the blockchain is changed so that the downloaded wallet is working, you only cant get back anymore. Malfunctions would be something that could be avoided if the alert would be misused for a "bad plan". You want that this plan works. In order to do that you would chose a change that would make the new client work fine... but you cant switch back. In fact you always can but it might be that you always were harmed. Lets say the new client creates transactions that only verify on the new client but not on the old one. Receiving and sending coins would be no problem but when you realize you have to switch back already some bad situation might have happened. Coins you didnt receive in reality or so.

Yes, most probably the community would react fast. But i mean the weakest are the one in danger. We have enough newbies that make failure and we might have many downloads of a client when the alert is good enough. You dont check forums when it says you need to do instantly... else harm... maybe.

I agree, of course, that its a theoretical problem. Only... bitcoin and bad news is such a thing... We want it to be a trustworthy currency. Tales of vanishing coins surely will have a huge negative impact. I think its good at least to think about these things.