Bitcoin Forum

I've been reading through the debates on these forums and other places.

I'm not sure what I'm missing but I'm confused why one of the original dev's have done this and did not simply stay with core and try and make the changes there? Was he forced out or couldn't make the changes he wanted or something else?

It seems that forking the coin in such a way is a dangerous move. The fact that it has a different name to me makes it FEEL like it is an alt-coin that's trying to take over by introducing the coin as a fork. The only difference is it has one of the original devs of bitcoin involved?

Thanks in advance to whoever can clear things up for me. :)

The debate is mainly about the future and how the increase in transactions will be handled by the network.

As blocks fill up, solutions need to be made.

Gavin wants to increase the maximum size of the blocks, to allow more transactions. Opponents don't want this, because they fear massive storage size needs and slower mining in places with high latency (china).

One important side node: The devs from the dev team that strongly oppose are heavily involved in creating a sidechain network company to fix this. It seems that financial motives play a big role too.

i think is a simple bigger block size is a problem

I guess the part I am confused about is why is why are we are seeing Gavin making an entire new fork of bitcoin away from the current devs? Why are these changes not being made to core directly by him? Did he step down all that time ago because he couldn't do what he wanted with the other devs & wanted to take control himself??

If he is successful does that mean he and his team would have basically taken over the development of bitcoin?

I am trying to understand the motives behind what’s going on here.

he probably want to gain more autorithy, by creating a version , that has his own features, and can be consider more, made by him, instead core was still considered made by satoshi

i can't see other reasons

ahh, he want something, majority of devs not, so he decided to fork the project (which is fine) and leave and continue with his ideas somewhere else (also fine)

I don't see so much drama, this is nothing new in open-source community. And actually, I'm quite happy that general consensus won over opinion of "Head of Bitcoin"..

everything bad is good for something:)

It's not as partisan as you make it out to be. While I do not support BIP 101, I do support BIP 100 and BIP 102. This is not simply about those who want bigger blocks and those who oppose. That's part of the problem of lumping us into partisan camps (like XT vs. 1MBers).

Some of us think BIP 101 is rash and lacking in foresight regarding future problems. Personally, I think it's incredibly audacious to assume that we can -- today -- plan for what real adoption will look like 20 years out and arbitrarily putting it at 8000x current capacity, with sufficient thought for hardware and bandwidth capabilities, security in the case of such a potentially bloated chain, and many heretofore unknown and unacknowledged problems that may arise. And that's whether or not Gavin, Hearn and the developers of today that audit the code have the technical foresight to understand and plan for every contingency. To be clear, that is impossible. (Nevermind that Moore's Law is an unproven theory that shouldn't be used as the basis for block size. If the predominant issue appears to be capacity -- and the extent that this matters is dependent on adoption -- why an unscientific theory about expected growth in processor capacity is applicable is beyond me.)

I think people need to lose this idea that this is the "fork to end all forks." That's not how bitcoin works.

I support BIP 100 because it takes a more conservative approach that gives us ample time to observe scalability over time, and to stay in line with real growth in transaction volume rather than some arbitrary vision of exponential adoption seen in BIP 101. I think having the miners vote among themselves as to when a limit increase should occur is a preferable approach. And 90% is a much better measure of consensus than 75% -- which to me is more like 50-60% + a lucky streak.

Consensus is paramount. I believe all of the above are good reasons why BIP 100 is far preferable to BIP 101, and why it will be easier to maintain consensus post-fork.

Because of his CIA meeting

Oh, and it's probably also important to note that the debate has been made heavily partisan by the conflation of BIP 101 with the XT client. In my case, I oppose XT by default since I oppose BIP 101. But XT contains other code that is controversial. These are my thoughts on the TOR IP address blacklist controversy:

Gavin has not been heavily involved with Bitcoin development for nearly 2 years. His opinion on the subject as a previous Lead Developer of Bitcoin has still been valued by the community though. I think he and

Mike Hearn was under the impression that they had much bigger support for their fork, when they started out with this. When the people realized what XT was really about {Their own projects and all the extras

they wanted to implement... most people backed away from it} Who wants a Government Coin full of backdoors for US spy agencies?

Luck was on their side, when they banned/censored people on XT subjects in the \r\Bitcoin sub-Reddit ... and more people got pissed off at that, and decided to side on the XT side.

The Bitcoin Core team decided to hold off on block size upgrades until it was properly tested. {Let's not forget these block sizes restrictions where implemented by Satoshi to reduce spam attacks} and also to

bring alternatives to the table, if this happens. {side chains} ...both sides imo made mistakes by bringing in their personal interest with these forks.  :(   

because he works for CIA and he has a bigger ego than carrying about btc!

I asked about the same question before, because I also find Gavins actions irritating: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1154636.0

IMHO it looks more and more like a 'power grab' for the bitcoin XT devs of Mike Hearns and Gavin to 'BE THE DEVS OF NOTE" for BTC

ie ....keys to the kingdom :) Not sure I want these two guys to be the only folk deciding on bitcoin cores fate don't ya know :)


on the other hand the core devs all they had to do to resolve this again imho was to put in a fixed timeline plan on when they planned to

increase block size (in that everyone says they agree eventually it should be done) that would have cut bitcoin xt off at the knees

they did not do so which makes me believe they are into "power keeping mode" and if they keep the keys to the kingdom they can slowly

with real effort drag their feet on any innovation on the coin less they do something to 'screw the pooch"

not sure I like the fact these guys shiver at any mention of bitcoin innovation at all due to fear again imho

anyway as I've said before ......put them in a room and they could play 'slap fight' for a way to consensus :)

Who are the opponents?
And I thought that Gavin left to work for the Bitcoin Foundation.
What happened with that?
Did that sink?

It is to simple. Other part of devs didn't want that the maximum size of the blocks to be increased to allow more transaction in less time. So were two groups with radical and unchanging point of views. Gavin had the courage to go alone in his road to realize that in which he believe is the best for bitcoin. The history will tell who was right.

Because, he want his mark on Bitcoin. A war for Liberty.

Do they have any plan to increase the block size?
                                                                                                           

No and for this Gavin is gone from the team deciding to create bitcoin XT with biggest block sizes. This was the reason of the divergences and the division.

Gavin didn't leave the Core, he is still contributing to the code.
He is just also helping other node implementations.

With the lack of consensus? No.

He is collaborating in the creations of "two typos of bitcoins"? This is the right thing to tell? Or I'm again wrong? How is possible this?

Another thread that shows all that tinfoil nutjobs.

He made some code, he felt to be important. Other Dev Core Commiters didn't want it in Bitcoin Core, so he put it into an alternative client and wanted users to decide and not just the Core Dev Team.
The End.

.. and/or his Feb 2014 weekend with the CFR..

Gavin will visit the Council on Foreign Relations --> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=412846.0

Yes, they couldn't make the changes they wanted. Why? This should clear it up...

https://medium.com/@octskyward/an-xt-faq-38e78aa32ff0

LOL!
There is so many theories to this question.
The truth is, that only Gavin can answer that question.

Why don't you ask him?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=224

Well Gavin is barely active on the forum, it seems he is more active on the mailing lists and reddit. I think what happened is clear already. There wasn't consensus and Gavin was tired of the blocksize increase (and other BIPs) being ignored so they (Mike too) went the XT route, too bad they ruined it with all the extra code, now no one wants to trust XT. Also I don't like the idea of an insanely big blocksize which is what would happen with XT or BIP101.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3hsc3f/bitcoinxt_with_just_the_patch_for_big_blocks_only/

What does Gavin mean with his sig? Core or XT or something else?

Probably just "bitcoin" as a whole.

Too bad that the devs from XT don't give a f*ck about it and you have to compile on your own or trust someone other than Gavin or Mike.

There are already the Binaries, download them from the link, or ask someone else to do it for you.
You should wait for other devs to join on XT or other forks, or pay them to get the Binaries that you want.

There aren't free lunch.

Indeed.
I too am in favor of larger blocks but not too large.
The end result according to XT will be 8GB blocks.
That means that the trustless becomes depending on trust (on third party) because I doubt that we will have anywhere near as half as nodes as we have today.
Centralization is unavoidable down that road.



He had that signature before XT, so I am guessing he is talking about the chance to be a part of Bitcoin.
However, I doubt there are second chances in this game.

Let's all hope that it all goes well and consesus is reached so we can all go back to discussing truly important things.

This has happened because there is no agreement between the bitcoin core developers

This was mostly done for a lack of consensus, but it’s also possible that this is an effort to debilitate bitcoin from the inside out.

Developers of Bitcoin Core were unable to reach consensus about increasing the blocksize limit during some 3 years of discussion. This led Gavin to make his own implementation with Mike Hearn (Bitcoin XT), which includes his improvement proposal for a hard fork (BIP 101.) Seems like the plan has worked to some extent and the blocksize debate is moving somewhere.

No one knows which BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) will be chosen by the network. Or which implementations will end up being most popular (Bitcoin XT, Jeff Garzik's still unnamed and unreleased BIP 100 implementation or something else.) However I think the ball is rolling and we'll find out. Maybe it's even possible that Bitcoin Core developers can agree to something and we get some hardfork release from them also. (raising the blocksize cap requires a hard fork.)

These forums have been full of misinformation, misunderstandings, trolling and FUD last few weeks so do your own research and take everything you read with a grain of salt.

PS. I'm unaware that Gavin would have left Bitcoin Core development (or I've missed such info if he did). He's also working with BTCD (a bitcoin implementation made in golang).

Forking is the only way these types of changes can take place. There is no other way than to fork a coin,if you want to increase block size.
Everything must done by forking. At one point there will be old and new fork present and then new will replace old fork completely.

That is not right, BitcoinXT was there long before BIP 101. Most people get this wrong ...

This argument never made sense to me.
So, we have 3000 nodes instead of 6000. How does this matter? If you use a SPV you are looking at a handful of nodes anyways.
Besides: There is no incentive to run a full node for most people.
Have you ever looked at this map: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ ?

There aren't many nodes in countries with bad bandwidth, today.
All this talk about full nodes in Africa and China has nothing to do with reality.

The truth of the matter is that you will hear much nonsense and much FUD about this topic, even in this thread. Honestly, this is the topic that has caused the most FUD that I have seen in a while. But the answer is very simple. He has pushed for the bigger blocks for a while now. The consensus couldn't be found in the community or between the devs. So he has decided to give a decision to the community and he has rolled out new client the XT, which does include couple of more modifications.

This is where he went wrong, with these little modifications, you can read about them, just type BIP101 in Google. If he has rolled out only the bigger block size, I think there would not be so much controversy.

Very well thought out reply, thanks. I find it compelling that the largest mining pools are publicly supporting BIP 100 and making it crystal clear they do not approve of Bitcoin XT. After all the mining pools will ultimately make the choice and they appear to be conservative but pressing for a solution within Bitcoin Core.

Hubris or greed or both.

He was also likely persuaded by hearn's keen sophistry and carefully framed arguments.

Gavin's blatant and defiant disregard for the opinions of the other devs, bitcoin luminaries, and uh....actual bitcoin users, is at best unprofessional and at worst dangerous, especially considering both Gavin's and Mike's amateur-level understanding of monetary science and economics.

Yet here we are.

The road up is the road down.

Of course, the big debate around scaling bitcoin in recent months has revolved around increasing the block size. When discussing the difficulties with gaining consensus among the core bitcoin development team, Andresen let it be known that he’s getting closer to scheduling a hardfork for the purpose of increasing the block size in an upcoming release of Bitcoin Core:

“I’m actually, right now, working on just getting consensus among the five, what I call, core developers — the five developers who have push access to the git code. I think I’m getting close to convincing them that we have a plan that will work. I’m probably going to have to write some more code . . . I think we have a year to eighteen months. I would love the next release of bitcoin — the next major release, which will be sometime in the June timeframe — to have a scheduled hardfork to increase the block size in it. I probably won’t get there. It’ll probably be in the release after that, but we’ll see.”

reference : http://insidebitcoins.com/news/gavin-andresen-optimistic-about-scaling-bitcoin/30652

because the other core devs for whatever reason. ...cough cough blockstream.... never agreed on how, if, or when to increase the blocksize.