Bitcoin Forum

Suppose (a post 0.8.0 Bitcoin release includes a block size adjustment that some consider undesirable and) a group of enthusiasts wish to more or less just stay with the old rules.

Said group might consist of people who are attached to the thought of Bitcoin retaining a light weight and simple protocol character which might be perceived as the best way to protect against attacks, accidents, or undesirable mutation of one form or another.

Said group may have the technical skills and financial resources to keep a light-weight system operational although certain kinds of 'cheats' may be required to thwart certain forms of superior resource attacks.

My own conception is mostly just along the lines of having such a solution grind along in the background and be available if needed.  It would be worth it to me (possibly) to earmark a certain fraction of my BTC stash to such an adventure, run transfer node(s) and probably even get into mining.

Is there a no-bullshit, non-political conversation going on about the details of the general mechanics of how such a system might operate?  How value in the pre-split block-chain value might be carried forward, what kinds of blow-back might need to be considered and dealt with, etc, etc.

If such a conversation is not occurring, is anyone else interested in analyzing such a thing...hopefully with minimal discussion about the pro's and con's of blockchain bloat and that sort of thing as there is plenty of this already.

I will value a chain that is willing to change and grow way more then one that does not.

First thing to do would be apply the merged-mining patches, as bitcoin is only equipped so far to be the primary chain in a merge, not one of the secondary chains.

Then we could merge it alongside bitcoin0, namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, i0coin, ixcoin, coiledcoin and, if it is true that the net can handle extremes, even geistgeld, which has 10 second blocktimes thus could let us send up to 60 megabytes per ten minutes to really see how many megabytes makes how much problems.

60 times as many blocks per ten minutes is not quite exactly the same problems as one 60 megabyte block per ten minutes would be but still, if those who claim we can handle larger blocks cannot manage to run geistgeld credibly for any decent span of time maybe they will get an idea of the kind of problem larger blocks might present.

Firing up geistgeld now, it is worse resource hog than i0coin so I had dropped it from my merge even before dropping i0coin. Anyone wanting faster confirms and oodles more transactions per ten minutes though really should run it to find out what higher resource consumption could really do. (We'd have to actually send non-empty blocks over it of course, but even empty ones it eats a lot of resources compared to more-"normal" chains.)

I already added i0coin back into my mix so what the heck, geistgeld starting up again now...

-MarkM-

Of course.  Most people would.  That is fine.

I convinced of a situation where the 'legacy chain' considers one a value holder as long as the secret keys are not used to transfer value away on any other chain.  This would allow anyone who wished to to hedge their bets and retain the ability to use either system to do so by simply sitting on what they've got without spending it on any other fork.  Perhaps at least.  Figuring this stuff out is the goal kicking around some ideas.

oh i c.

yes, it would be cool to know exactly how that would go down.... I hear talk of being able to spend the "legacy coins" on BOTH chains, call it 'valid double spending'. I have no idea if that's right. but if it is then their would be no reason to hold your "legacy coins", just simply send them to a new address on both chains.

Hmmm....merged mining is a thought.

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Another possibility would be a if simple third-party block black-list mechanism was in place.  This would allow security with very low mining effort.

This would only work mainly under the conception that this 'legacy' line were pretty much completely mothballed and operated unprofitably by enthusiasts.

The idea (and hope) would be that Bitcoin proper thrives and none of the concerns that some of us have come to pass.  Thus, the 'legacy' chain is never really needed.

I could see a situation where all mining proceeds were issued to current value holders (rather than going to miners.)

Of course if the worst happened and 'Bitcoin proper' failed in some way bringing 'legacy' back on-line, a lot of mining power would be available to secure the system in the normal (and vastly preferable) way.

In the mean time 'legacy' could be experimented with to develop methods of covert messaging, efficiency optimizations, and support for more capable secondary systems (a-la the 'Fidelity Bank' idea.)  A switch between 'cheating' and 'real' proof-of-work should be pretty invisible.

Ya, such a thing would probably be considered a form of cheating.  I conceive of a situation where double-spends in this manner would be mined out of existence, and that might even allow the block chain to be pruned for efficiency.  As I recall, a spend on one chain can in theory be replayed on another.

If the system was run more to build credibility than to create profit (while in mothballed state at least) than all manner of things might be possible.  Another thing along these lines would be to accept a fair amount of latency which would offer the opportunity to use 'cheating' to protect against resource based attacks and deal with double-chain-spend attempts.

I'd donate and support such an adventure.

However it might be a bit too premature and cause more harm than good to consider a worst case scenario at this time...the Bitcoin community is still relatively small, so I have faith that some consensus acceptable to all can be reached on this topic.  We just need to keep patiently laying out the case to people why "bigger" is not automatically "better".

  http://www.bitcoin-legacy.org

Oh so this is serious?

Well, it takes about 5 minutes and a fraction of a BTC to set such a thing up so that does not in-and-of itself imply great seriousness...

But ya.  I'm somewhat serious about the project.  Some of the potential future directions of the Bitcoin project seem risky to me and there is no reason not to have some sort of a fall-back in case the worst happens.

The project could be relatively simple and inexpensive.  It should not rob resources from Bitcoin in a real way, and has the potential to feed back useful information and techniques to Bitcoin proper.  As much as anything it could simply be interesting and there would be a lot more flexibility to work on goals thought by the participants to be important.