Bitcoin Forum

There was part of the discussion with Mike Hearn on Epicenter Bitcoin last week that I haven't seen discussed. I cut out the relevant 2 or 3 minutes:

https://youtu.be/DB9goUDBAR0 (https://youtu.be/DB9goUDBAR0)

Here is part of what he said:


I keep reading that the fork wouldn't take place until "90%" of nodes and/or miners have upgraded, but that doesn't sound like what Hearn is describing at all.

I'm not against lifting the hard block size limit from 1MB to 20MB (or some compromise like 8MB), but trying to do it without the miners in China sounds like a disaster. I'm strongly against putting checkpoints into the code to "ignore the longest chain." It's scary to think the idea even sounds reasonable.

Jeez I'm glad to see at least one person paying some attention.

I would have thought that at this point Hearn's best strategy would be to bluster over this issue.  Perhaps he felt constrained by some of the interviews with the miners.

The idea of how to subvert the 'longest chain' is not new.  It would be needed in some cases to overcome a 51% attack, and more recently in the context of a fork war which is basically the same principle.  A guy who wins control of the MultiBitch client fleet has a leg-up on his competition, and I've for years felt that this was the driving force behind developing such a fleet.

In my own musings about the problem, I assumed that the chain I favored would not be the longest.  Mike's admission that he may have the same problem is very heartening since it means that my favored chain might actually not have it!

One of the most interesting take-aways is that Mike anticipates the need for continuous checkpoints.  What I read into this is that he (like myself) is not anticipating a single chain as the competition but a stream of them.  (The world will look morphologicaly more like a hydra than it does a slingshot.)  If it were a simple 'Y' shape then a single blacklisting of a block in the 'wrong' chain would be sufficient to identify it.

Wow. I was just thinking about a simple 'Y' fork. What you're describing ... well, at least it would be interesting to watch.

The more I think about what Mike Hearn is saying in this clip, the more I'm inclined to switch sides. I was basically passively OK with 20MB, but I'm definitely not OK with a Bitcoin with centralized checkpoints. I'll be surprised if a majority of the Bitcoin community is OK with that.

This is really disturbing. I might just forget about bitcoin for awhile.

Yep, increase the block size is an obvious yes. Hostile fork to achieve it? Nope. Especially not if any possibility for tragic outcomes for both forks exists at all.

(it also possibly needs some mechanism to smooth the transition to bigger blocks, and/or a target size with incentives to stay on target etc)

but he is not the only person who will read and test the code. lets see what other devs say about that.

This doesn't really sound good indeed... But fortunately it's the worst case scenario, and an improbable one.No miner will want things to get ruined ;)

Be careful about this.  Anyone sitting on multiple millions of dollars worth of hardware is under threat.  Miners will make the best choices for themselves in any particular scenario and that may or may not correspond to the long-term health of Bitcoin proper.

Bitcoin as a blockchain with embedded value is probably around for the duration baring some fundamental and unknown (to me) weakness in certain of the cryptography.  Bitcoin as a viable method of wealth protection and transfer is subject to periods of hiatus.  I'd actually be quite surprised to see it be healthy and accessible in a time of economic crisis impacting the USD.  As a corollary, I'd be surprised if all of the factors used to simulate Bitcoin's natural collapse (absent a bloatfork) were equally communicated.

I think Hearn is the only person who decides what code is included in XT. I don't even think Gavin Andresen has commit access to XT.

They are obviously under threat, that's why it's in their best interest to keep Bitcoin running smoothly and do everything for it's success... If Bitcoin is in good standing, so the miners are, I think. I'm not really seeing a situation where, for example, miners win and merchants loose. If merchants loose, miners will too in the long term, because Bitcoin will suffer... And it will suffer in price, and miners won't enjoy that, obviously :)

But I may be wrong. What kind of best choice for miners are you thinking in that doesn't correspond to the long term health of Bitcoin?

Hearn has a solution for all the Chinese miners stuck on the old chain, they can develop their own Chinese-specific altcoin.  :D


http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34162353/

A hostile chain will never work.  The main exchange established for carries the value, someone would need to persuade them to adopt the hostile chain to have any real effect.

Miners mine to make money, so they will do what the exchanges do.

I am and have been a very strong supporter of increasing the blocksize limit and making the blocksize limit to increase with time to allow for the growth of Bitcoin; however a hostile chain is not the way to go about this. One can argue for a lower threshold to tigger the fork, say 70% of the hashpower; however this means that the longest chain is still supporting the fork.

Wow. Bitcoin XT is now an altcoin?  ???

Sounds like a bad idea to just cast a big part of the community out, because... uhm well, their internet sucks. Id rather see O(1) block propagation with the increased block size among some other changes. I dont think this problem can be solved by just changing one screw and hope for the best. We need bigger blocks in order for bitcoin to keep growing. We need O(1) propagation to keep miners on board with the bigger blocks. We need elastic blocksize limits to discourage spam blocks as well as a good algorithm to determine blocksize growth. Both is needed to keep a fee market. The substitution will end some day, lets not forget that. We also need pruning to keep non mining nodes cheap. There are possibly other things Im missing, but this is a big step and most current solutions I see are basically kicking the can down the road or forget/ignore part of the network.

Thats what i wonder too. Why is this thread in Altcoin Discussion. I think it should be moved to Bitcoin Discussion. It doesnt have to do anything with altcoins.

Im not a fan of Bitcoin XT, its not why i write this, the simply risks of "our" coin becoming the coin of a company is not for me. Though i think this discussion should be discussed in the correct place.

I originally posted it in Bitcoin Discussion. I guess a mod moved it to Altcoin Discussion. I don't mind though. I laughed when I saw it'd been moved here.

I see Theymos has the same XT policy here as he does on r/bitcoin  ::)

Man, this is getting more and more ridiculous! Freaking checkpoints now! I am just waiting to see what will I read next tomorrow when I wake up!

When XT is finished getting #rekt, I'm going to miss Heam.  He's one of the most productive lolcows of all time!

I trust Gavin has collected enough genetic samples to keep the line going if we want more.   :D

Altcoin Discussion is the proper place to discuss XT.  Theymos is very generous to make such an allowance on his private server.

If I were him, XT and Gavinistas would be given the Bitcoin-scrypt treatment (IE disappeared like pinkos in Pinochet's Chile).

The logic is simple enough:

So we will have bitcoin 1.0 (Core) and Bitcoin 2.0 (XT) soon. I hope Hearn will realize that this bullshit will hurt bitcoin more than anything before.
It pains me to see that it will be not attack from the outside but instead internal bitcoin war that eventually destroy the dream.
But until then XT is a soft fork of Bitcoin so I think Bitcoin Discussion is a proper place for this kind of thread.

Runnin' my node, doin' my part.

agreed that would be being constant, and this XT alt is way worse as bitcoin scrypt wasn't trying to be bitcoin nor was it an attack on btc.

Coblee, the creator of Litecoin (and Coinbase hotshot), gives Heam's checkpoints a big fat NACK.


You know who else used checkpoints?

Stalin.

As much as I am against the XT fork, the above is not true. There are several with commit access to XT including:

- Hearn (obviously)
- Gavin Andresen
- Jeff Garzik
- Jonas Schnelli
- Wladimir J Van Der Laan
- Jorge Timon
- Cory Fields
- Suhas Daftuar
- Pieter Wuille

I can go further back, but this should give you an idea. The above people have made a commit to bitcoinXT since May 12th 2015. Since July 2015 the only person making commits has been Hearn.

I appreciate the fact that they introduced a voting model for the fork. This way it's not going to happen if it's largely opposed. The sad part is that only miners can effectively vote. So what happens if many users support XT without having the necessary hashrate they'd have to own in order to trigger the fork they support? Will the rules to trigger a fork become more flexible? Will they start ignorin the longest blockchain and push for a fork anyway?

None of those two seem realistic to me, the second could be catastrophic for the new and smaller chain.

I know what you mean and i agree to a certain degree. For now i see the chance that bitcoin xt MIGHT become the real bitcoin. I doubt it but the chance is there. Then it would not be correct to discuss bitcoin xt in altcoin. Bitcoin xt should be discussed as bitcoin until it shows that it is an altcoin only. I mean when bitcoin core is forking then it is not the original bitcoin anymore too. And we don't switch to altcoin section then too.

In fact theymos really wanted to do it that way. See my question and his answers:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1090801.0

I was aware on this, the fact they wanted centralized checkpoints and tor ip lists that get block is further proof we are talking about none other than NSA coin in the makings. Avoid like the plague my friends.

I like the voting too. We can have some quantitive results from the miners. The community is still split, but I am beginning to see a move towards resolution. The big players are miner, exchanges and dev. Get consensus from all miners first, then gather support from exchanges (where the real value is).

We will have to how the voting goes. If BIP100 have good support, then we will never have to decide between Core and XT.

Mike Hearn has received a lot of backlash for saying this already. But I find the document where bitcoin company CEOs signed to show support towards BIP101 worrying. It's almost like Mike pushed it's publishing to try and make his view seems more rational. It was just days after this document (http://blog.blockchain.com/2015/08/24/industry-endorses-bigger-blocks-and-bip101/)'s release that BIP100 support became so rampant by big pools.

Mike's argument that the economic majority of bitcoin isn't opposing his approach for bigger blocks is in fact baseless. You can't simply exclude miners from something referred to as bitcoin's economic majority. Miners are a huge part of bitcoin's ecosystem, they allow manufacturers of mining equipment to be viable by creating demand, they trade bitcoin on a daily basis. Miners are in fact a huge portion of bitcoin's economic majority and play a role in most sectors of the industry.

I'm glad that the overwhelming majority shows no sign of wanting to embrace Mike and Gavin's BIP101. BIP100 support could probably be interpreted as a vote specifically against bitcoinXT and BIP101. And that's perfectly justified. Mike Hearn shows absolutely no remorse about his statements against China. He was making such statements at a time that Chinese pools and ventures operated more than 50% of the total hashrate. BIP100 seems like a very modest proposal when compared to the radicality of Mike Hearn's and gavin Andresen's work. Furthermore, Jeff Garzik seems like a very rational individual and has shown no signs of inability to reason so far.

This whole drama is saddening. I mean we have the choice between pest and cholera.

What we can say is that the hashpower is in favor of a blocksize raise. I believe we are at around 75% of the hashpower wanting an increase. So it will come.

But supporting hearn with his dangerous plans is as dangerous as supporting developers that want to make the bitcoin network less attractive, with high fees and unconfirmed transactions only to push their own altcoin.

I really can't see this anymore. It's like politicians. ::)

Give me control over a coin's checkpoints and I care not who mines its blocks. 

All of this irrational fear mongering is completely out of hand. Please fellow Bitcoiners be rational.

"The worst case scenario is the majority ... the economic majority ... is in favor but the hash power, the mining majority is not. That would be a very messy situation for bitcoin."

He is describing a worst case scenario, what he is saying here is not unreasonable under these circumstances.

Everyone should remember that Bitcoin XT only implements BIP101 and nothing else, everything else within Bitcoin XT is optional. Since only the block size increase is fundamental to the protocol in terms of it causing a hard fork, this is what makes these other changes within XT optional. Since anyone can create their own client and make it behave in any way would want as long as it is consistent with the fundamental rules of the protocol, the only fundamental rule that is changed within XT is the increase of the block size. You can turn off, any of the extra patches contained within Bitcoin XT inside of the client itself. There is even an alternative version of XT that does not include any of these other changes and only increases the block size. You could even run a patched version of Core that implements BIP101, which would then be compatible with XT after the fork if the miners reach consensus.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1164464.msg12267335#msg12267335 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1164464.msg12267335#msg12267335)

You do realised that even by this utopic view, the logic behind this is very flawed. It's completely ignoring miners, refusing to acknowledge that they are a significant chunk of 'the economic majority'. And aside of that, Mike Hearn has numerous times proven that he simply doesn't care about the neutrality of bitcoin as a developer. He's implied that getting rid of the Chinese miners is a reasonable plan to enforce if they disagree with him.

He did not say that he would get rid of the Chinese miners if they disagreed with him. He was instead referring to a situation where the majority of users and financial powers mainly in the west came to a disagreement about a fundamental issue with the miners in the east. Remember this is a hypothetical worst case scenario. What if the majority of the miners decided to increase the block limit? However the majority of the users and financial powers are against the change, that might be a situation where us Bitcoiners would go against the majority of the mining power and cause a fork. Under this worst case scenario what Mike Hearn is suggesting is actually reasonable. I do not believe this could ever happen as described since miners would never be incentivized to do such a thing. Keep in mind that Hearn even said that this would wreck Bitcoin so it is not like he takes this lightly. He would also require the consent of the economic majority anyway in order to even do such a thing. It is however a very controversial thing to say, I will not deny that.

+1  Bingo!


That is the ONLY reason I am not completely convinced that he is a Western Intel sponsored mole.

Small wonder Mike's co-conspirators at Circle are among the XT assclowns.  When Hearn@sigint.google.mil says "jump" the MBA frat boys of SandHillRoad ask "how high?"

Bitcoin is not going to be designed, much less governed, by VC ratfuckers looking for a shiny new centralized payment rail to replace supplant PaypalVisaSquare.

It's so precious Heam thinks Bitcoin's compliance-mongering wanna-be gatekeepers (*cough* CoinBase/Circle/Etc *cough*) are in any way related to our socioeconomic majority.

The question was "XT?"

The answer from the miners is "NACK."  That's why BIP100 is already >50%.  Even vaporware is better than Heam's checkpoint dictatorship.

The answer from the market is "NACK."  That's why the price is down ~$100.

The only thing more hilarious than how Fukkin Rekt^® XT has gotten is the denial of its loyalist dead-ender Gavinista fanboys!   ;D

Watching them bitterly cling to the remnants of their failed governance coup is the funniest thing I've seen since the days of the "XT Manifesto" (*snicker*).

The thing is no matter what we do, we will never satisfy everyone.... if that is the case, we would have had consensus already. Why any of the parties thought they could get

away with promoting the BIP, bearing in mind that their change would benefit their own projects... is really mind baffling. You will always have opposing sides with different

hidden interest... The 3rd party payment processors have their agenda and the miners have their own agenda. Which of these sides do we need the most? The miners fuel the

network... The payment processors and the exchanges fuel the market for Bitcoin. Should we not support the side with no personal interest? Where is the 3rd alternative?

An amicable fork of the code AND of the blockchain.  Just let both (or all) sides move into the future and riding on their own 'longest valid chain' and the strength of their ideas, participants, and philosophies.

Yes, people who already had a footprint in the pre-fork chain 'win second prize in the beauty contest' (https://www.google.com/search?q=second+prize+in+a+beauty+contest&safe=off&biw=1378&bih=825&site=webhp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0CB0QsARqFQoTCMG4wJGj0ccCFZQ1iAodSbQLaA&dpr=1), but it's not like early-birds never catch a break.  No harm done to those who come later...they simply have more choices in the market and can choose a philosophy which is succeeding at giving them what they want.

Yep. I second this. I think it's the best alternative at this point.

Sig worthy.

IMO this is the most probable end game scenario. I would be curious of your definition of an "amicable" fork though.

Simple agreement not to have Miners on one chain attack the other.  A set of parameters that will allow the less "powered" chain to reach a correct level of difficulty.  Then let basic free market forces play out.

Obvious problem with this scenario is that one one side will be Fiat.  And on the Fiat side is the power to regulate.  Go ask the American Indian how well those treaties held up :)

I just mean agreed to and transparently communicated to the userbase.

 - Mike and Gavin state their case and their vision and their plans.

 - Other players (esp, so-called 'core') do likewise.

 - All sides agree not to attack one another, at least during a choreographed disengagement.

This would allow a framework upon which tertiary players (on-line wallets, miners, vendors, etc) could formulate and communicate their own strategies with minimal harm done to the userbases.  It would also lesson the problem we will certainly be having with scammers and others trying to exploit a messy situation.  Such attacks will target innocent end-users since they are the least able to defend themselves.

Maybe someone should write a BSP (Bitcoin Separation Proposal) for this.

I like the direction you're going with this.
Would you mind clarifying what it would mean "not to attack one another" or at least how you see it? It seems self-explanatory, but I'm trying to envision what it would mean in practice, for terms of an armistice are sometimes rather thorny.

It may be naïve to hope for a truce, however most everyone would prefer a truce of some kind than further coercion, sophistry, and divisiveness culminating in a Bitcoin Pyrrhic victory.

Ach!  You're making me have to think a little.

Basically the same thing as agreeing not to punch on the break during a boxing match.  I'm thinking mostly of deferring from egregious attempts to mess up the other party like the NoBitcoinXT mock-nodes (which is an idea that I take some (potentially undeserved) credit for, BTW)

It is to be expected that there would be plenty of independent operators who would throw various sticks into the works for one reason or another.  If the primary movers and shakers at least did not advocate and promote such behavior, that would go some distance toward muting such attacks I would suppose.  To re-visit the boxing analogy, the basic rule would be to protect yourself at all times.


The BSD split after 386BSD went dark was slightly before my time but from what I know of it it was extraordinarily acrimonious.  Ultimately three main forks emerged.  FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.  The currently all live on working on their areas of focus.  They all borrow code from one another when they can.  Many users choose some combination of them depending on the needs of the day.  Probably the world is better off for this split at the time it happened.

Ah. Interesting to bring up the BSDs. There are many strong personalities that have emerged in OS development over the decades. Linus, Theo de Raadt, Stallman, Gates, etc. Perhaps we are seeing something similar in cryptocurrencies. Often there is cooperation and mutual respect (Posix standards, BSD ports), sometimes enmity or crankiness (many things GNU and Windows, proprietary drivers), and sometimes internecine conflict (systemd vs. anti-systemd). And sometimes surprises (GNU emacs running on Windows10)! The various factions and their respective design and development philosophies are based as much on personality differences and financial interests as they are on specific technical ideals.

Thank you for explaining. That sounds in fact way more reasonable than the Checkpoints accusation. I can follow him here though i guess it is a very theoretical thing only. I mean it already starts with "who is the majority of users"? He can't determine that i think.