Bitcoin Forum

Hard forks are good.  Stop crying.  They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best.  Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain.  On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains.  Make good decisions thereafter.  No harm, no foul.  

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Rawdog, you are soo raw!

I see your point though. Explore all the options and pick the best... you're right.

I am always right.  I thought I made a mistake once, but it turned out to be correct.  

it would be unfair for those devs actually, imagine the very thing you worked all your life and all of a sudden being copied by someone just because we have the rights and we all call it opensource. like they said there's always a fine line to distinguish them whatever we call it these days whether hackers and idiots.

the reason people say no to a hard fork is because of the requirement of a high amount of people running the hard fork to ensure miners block solutions dont orphan..

guess what.. cores softfork wants a high acceptance rate too before they activate.. soo.. logically..
pt the hardfork code in with the softfork stuff and then when the magical acceptance level is reached we can have actual real capacity (not the smidgen of core softfork) along with the other features the softfork meant to offer too..

inshort: 2 birds-one stone

here.. ill do it using numbers
HF=2mb for 2x capacity
SF=4mb for 1.8x capacity

HF+SF= 4mb for (4x but probably end up) ~3x capacity

it just makes logical sense.

oh and dont forget to keep the activation mechanism to allow the amounts to increase simple by users independently desiring it in their settings(flag), as oppose to waiting and praying to devs to lead and control decisions

Core's conservative view on hard forks is what has made Bitcoin survive for 7+ years. Look at the ETH/ETC disaster. We must not hard fork unless we have like 99% of support.

Who cares about the price?  Why is it an objective to 'get the price up'?  Very stupid.  Let's get the functionality up.  

Let's fork it two times - or three times.  Everyone will have the same tokens on each chain to start with.  Then, one chain will prove to be more reliable and higher performing that the others.  Then Greg Maxwell can go take his Blockstream shitchain with Lightning Liquid side crap to hell where it belongs.  Blockstream wants to own Bitcoin.  I say fork it and let them have their silly side chain project.  The 'other' chain with 8MB will take off and on chain scaling will live forever after.

Only Blockstream gets hurt by a fork.  Fork it!

If I were to make a crap post like this, it would be moved to the Bitcointalk graveyard (The off-topic section) no doubt. Rank privilege is a real thing here unfortunately.

What is kinds of coins who will be hard fork? Do you mean will be hard fork for bitcoin? Should you write the coin, it will make nice understanding for every users who has read your statement.

i think there will some scammers make a new coin called bitcoin classic like etc to eth, unhealthy to the community.

Yeah great idea, lets take Bitcoin which has billions of $ investment and split it in two and see what works.  like seriously did you go to school?   ::)

When you have fuckall coins, it is easy to make reckless statements like this. The Core developers have ALL the risk on them, if this fails.

They have to consider every little thing, to make sure a hard fork will not cause some vulnerability. We have seen what happened to other

Alt coins, when Air heads decide to hard fork for stupid reasons. We {holders of coins} are happy with slow progress, if it secure our coins.

already happened
NXT was bitcoin 2.0
Monero wants to be BitcoinB(sidechain)
Liquid wants to be Bitcoin X (central exchange reserve coin)

seems people are still smoking the contention pipe.

in a consensual fork. there is no second chain.. it dies in the land of orphans.. and only one chain remains which the majority have agreed to before the rules even updated so no one suffers as the decision was made before activation..

once you wake up that no one has proposed a contentious hard fork and that core is trying to cause contention by refusing to add consensual hard fork code.. then you will see passed the haze and the clarity of day

As we've observed with ETH, hard forks can go terribly wrong when rushed. A minority is enough to keep another chain alive. This sets a very bad precedent, both by forking without consensus/reverting events and by rushing a HF. In addition to that, a rushed HF would render a LOT of custom implementations invalid pretty quickly. Do you even realize how 'long' it takes for companies to both update, test and deploy new software to their whole infrastructure.

---

I'm not saying I'm anti-HF in general, however I'm against irrational decision making with a very limited view point. I think that a HF, with a grace period of 6 months may be plausible and would likely not be against it (dependent on the change-set of course).

A fork would drive 95% of the people away because thy don't know how to handle that situation.
After the way the ether fork turnd out, even a lot of the smaller traders would resign from the cryptomarket.
You would create a few whales with lots of coins that nobody wants anymore.
I think if sombody wants to seriously harm bitcoin, a hard fork is most likely the best way to achieve that.

though it seems lauda is waking up.. things need to be pointed out

a consensual hardfork (95%) is where 95% have already said yes, already reviewed the code.. meaning there is no shock, no surprise, meaning the movement across after activation is simple

i like how he tries to push that hard forks are bad.. but he slips in the little things subtly, although they are important..
eg "without consensus/reverting events"

this is because even in a surprising controversial fork. orphans will make the weaker minority die off. bitcoin is a big industry and any delays to block solving due to lack of hashpower, which leads to a fee war to get first place in next block, make it unaffordable to use aswell as slow, which renders businesses inefficient if they continue to use the weak chain.. will make decisions to move to the stronger chain real simple and fast.
alot faster than ethereum

again reviewing the code can be done pre-fork. many implementations have had hard fork code released for the last year... and a fork hasn't even happened yet. so in a concensual hard fork. the code is pre-reviewed and 95% are ready and waiting for the move.

but if the controversial fork added code to block the orphan events, and was an entirely new rule no one reviewed, and had things that ensured the weaker fork survived by auto blocking stronger fork nodes by default and tweaking difficulty (as lauda hinted removing the reverting events by forcing them not to talk to each other to not revert to a single chain). then even now bitcoiners would still make an easy decision to go with one direction. simply because bitcoin is actually useful

if merchants dont accept it, it theres a fee war and if the difficulty is tweaked to be at risk of 51% attack.. people wont use it. the minority would move quickly..

ethereum is not a good comparison because ethereum is useless in the real world.
so there is no clear choice which is better because both Ether's are useless.

WOW, you just called Satoshi a bitch...that's blasphemous!


Not true, most people using bitcoin use a service like Coinbase so the transition would be seamless. So much negativity!

"We'll do it live!!!"

How could we ever know that we have 99% support behind a fork? There's no way to measure it. No amount of node voting, coin voting or miner voting can establish that. More to the point, if we are talking about processing power, hash rate of ETH:ETC was 99:1 at one point. Still, the network split. People really underestimate the risks. There is literally no way to ever know how a hard fork will resolve. It's impossible to know.

Hard forks only work when a majority of the community is willing to change over to whichever chain they agree to use; if they don't agree on using the same one then everyone just gets confused and it is more detrimental than beneficial if everyone is splintered across multiple chains.

If the miners and devs can reach a consensus then we can switch, but until then there isn't much that can be done.

To be clear, the issue is not consensus of miners and devs. The issue is consensus of all Bitcoin users, which includes miners and presumably also includes devs. But the stakeholders in a hard fork are much more diverse than simply miners and devs. Miners ought to be following users out of rational incentive to mine the most highly valued chain. Miners shouldn't be provoking a hard fork themselves -- this is seen by many as an attack on users (attempting to leverage hash power to force users to migrate networks).

and now you know why im sick of devs flatly refusing to even code anything for core (well luckily luke is/should be doing it)  and try their best to throw anything not core (many different implementations) off the bus (now it seems blockstream employee are trying to throw luke off the bus too). because that is a route to centralize users, by only having one implementation.. which then has a ripple effect of only one implementation for miners and merchants.

meaning devs becoming the controllers of consensus and everyone has to bow to their wishes

Yes, it's about all bitcoin users, but the majority of Bitcoin users will follow that chain which has the greatest consensus among developers and miners. So the argument is to some degree redirected to its starting point. In fact a "provocation" of a hardfork is only seen as a provocation if it proposed by a minority without consensus among the other miners and developers. Clearly it's rational for miners (and even more so for pool operators) to seek consensus on a sustainable solution. It makes no sense to mine on a minority chain.

In my opinion it's very important to have broad consensus (90% or more) when a hardfork occurs. Controversial hardforks have significant destructive potential not only by splitting up the community and thereby the wealth allocation on each coin but especially by undermining trust in future developments. So the psychological effect is even more far-reaching. Without unity, Bitcoin might quickly loose its perception of being a safe haven. People might feel that it's unsafe to store their funds with the currency, because another fork (with further value depreciation) might be just around the corner.

ya.ya.yo!

Exactly! This is easy to say when you have 100k market cap but if you really switch things on their head and you affect $10b worth of assets in the world you're going to pay for it. I can just see the headlines: WWIII because of bitcoin hard fork. Maybe a bit dramatic but we'd talking about people's livelihoods at this point. It's not just a random shitcoin.

With bitcoin not being forked I'm starting to lose all the confidence I once had in crypto and BTC as the original crypto coin, now talking about forking and making decisions about the E-cryptosystem which revolves around BTC.
We should even make the decision making procedure a consensus operation.

FTFY. That's the point -- a miner-induced hard fork is leveraging users' fear of being on the "minority chain." It leverages an apparent monopoly on hashpower (confirmed transactions) to make users' decision for them. Users will migrate whether or not they agree to the changes out of fear of economic loss.

The only ethical way to hard fork is to allow support to amass organically. That means forking without miner coordination. If users truly do consent to the fork changes, they will migrate to the new system. Miners will follow based on rational incentive.

But using miners to provoke the fork in the first place turns Bitcoin's incentives on its head. Hash power follow users. Not the other way around.

Do you think the hard fork will go smoothly? I assume your argument is about the XT hard form scenario unless I'm mistaken. But in my opinion it would be better to be cautious and prudent before making major changes in Bitcoin. Look at what happened with Ethereum. What if the same thing will happen again with Bitcoin's hard fork. Then what is supposed to be a champion of cryptocurrencies would now become a failed experiment in consensus. It will be laughable. The core development team should not risk anything that will destroy Bitcoin.

Exactly. It seems that there is no rush from the devs to do anything, and the fact that Blockstream would be hurt by the fork (probably) would definitely present some kind of correlation going on between them and the devs. There is just no reason why the devs shouldn't be worried about the functionality of bitcoin and to improve it as much as possible, rather than worried about politics, miner threats, and so on.

Honestly, who gives a flying fuck about Ethereum?  Ethereum has a totally different protocol and shouldn't be compared to what the Bitcoin devs are doing, or proposing they should do, with an upcoming hard fork.

To be clear, by holding back the fork, Core is preventing the vote.  If we fork, then the true voting can occur. 

Not forking - is the problem. 

In Satoshi's view, a fork is very readily available everyday.  Anyone can fork and forking is good.  Now, the fork action is prevented because of collusion of miners and Core.  With no fork, no consensus. 

So you get what we have right here.  I don't like it any more than you do.  But, that's the way Maxwell wants it, so he gets it. 

Hard forks are necessary and good and they operate to permit everyone to vote on a best system.  Avoiding forks destroys Bitcoin.   

Fork the son-of-a-bitch. 

The only way Maxwell can keep control despite the very large number of people that want large blocks is by preventing the fork by spreading forking FUD and convincing the miners to stay.  He was successful.  Now, we have a system where Maxwell rules - not consensus rules.  It's not Bitcoin any longer.  It's MaxwellCoin

It seems that it may be the right time to ignore this user before someone starts accepting some of this obviously misleading and false information. Nobody is preventing anything, nor is this bullshit true:

There are several HF proposals, the problem is that nobody wants that crap. Forks are very dangerous for a widely developed system if not properly planned and deployed.

Don't feed the troll. It's obvious, just look at his avatar, it's the angry "Bitcoin scam" guy. Find him by Googling "Bald guy mad about Bitcoin", that's how I found him

Go ahead, bury your head in the sand.  That is the normal response from morons who don't want to see anything other than their own stupid ideas on matters.

Fork is not dangerous.  Fork is good.

Fork is an opportunity for everyone to vote.  

Preventing a fork is Greg Maxwell's way to assure Blockstream will soon be forcing everyone to pay 'sidechain fees'.  Preventing a fork assures that Greg Maxwell can continue making all decisions as he likes without regard for the opinions of others.

False. I'm very open to ideas, this one is just idiotic. It is you who's the ignorant fool trying to push through a catastrophic ideology.

So breaking the whole network infrastructure is good? Sure, let's all vote today and fork it in 28 days. If you can't update your custom implementations in that time-frame, you shouldn't even be a part of the ecosystem. All praise the amazing fork! ::)

Again, there are several proposals. The problem is that nobody sane wants them.

This is just pure bullshit. Nobody will be forced to pay "sidechain fees".

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Isn't it interesting how people would sacrifice the intrinsic blockchain values inherent to Bitcoin, just in an attempt to gain a wider user-base, i.e. bigger market capitalization, i.e. more money?

Moron.  Unmitigated, complete moron.  

Actually, satoshi said that after version 0.1 or so, the software would start becoming solidified and any alternatives to the "official software" would be a disaster, so it means that if satoshi was around he would be working on Core and rejecting hard fork attempts such as XT, Classic or whatever else is there.

Core is doing a good job, staying conservative is key. The 2MB block size will eventually come when it's the right time.

You have it backwards. Forking is fine -- but only if there is organic support for a fork. What the XT and Classic camps promoted was collusion by miners to force users to migrate. That's the opposite of how Bitcoin's incentives work. If you want to fork the protocol, go ahead and fork it. If users support it, they can migrate to the forked network. Then -- out of Bitcoin's rational mining incentive -- miners will follow, should there be sufficient user support to justify mining expenditure. Using miners to leverage hash rate against Bitcoin users is very unethical. I would oppose any fork (like XT or Classic) on those grounds.


How do you quantify those people? I can just as easily say a "very large number of people don't want large blocks." Including me. You can opt of the Bitcoin network and fork at any time. If users agree, they can follow. But don't try to leverage miners against us. That's a variant of a 51% attack.

seems lauda has closed his eyes and put on his blockstream nightcap again..
its not about a bigger market capitalization..
its not about more money.

its about increasing the usability.
EG reducing the fee war
EG increasing ability to spend within ~20 minutes without having to fight for priority
EG not treating third world currency weekly wages as 'spam'
EG not treating a transaction fee as 'cheap', when it amounts to more than an hours labour in third world countries
EG not tweaking bitcoin to be reliant on third party management
EG not tweaking bitcoin to not be transparent and independently checkable
EG not scaring people into false doomsdays purely to push users offchain
EG no 2mb doomsdays, then suddenly say 4mb ok.
EG no 4mb is ok but only 1.8x capacity.. because 4x capacity needs to be ignored

Fact check, Ethereum is doing just fine, it has not even lost value for investors, especially if you take the value of ETC into account as well. It even still has a decent amount of volume, so these claims about ETH and ETC are false.

I disagree, I do not think anything went terribly wrong with the ETH hard fork. I even think that it sets a positive precedent. It gives people more freedom of choice, I can not see anything wrong with that.

These type of splits do in effect enable the core principles of volunteerism within Bitcoin. Everyone can have the Ethereum they want, whether they agreed with the fork or not. I think the same solution is actually ideal for Bitcoin right now, that way these split communities and ideologies can go their own way in freedom.

I think that Bitcoin will split multiple times, within the next six months. Nobody can really stop it, that is a beautiful thing. I suppose somebody could create a "genesis fork" with a six month grace period, it would most likely not be the first chain to split off the Bitcoin network and gain a significant market share.

This is exactly why a hard fork is the best way to resolve such a dispute, since after the split and over the next few years we will see exactly how much demand there really is for such an alternative chain.

they way you see a fork is an intentional split.(controversial). and keeping both side alive..

to me i would call that a controversial fork where a clear defined single direction cannot be established and so extra code is added so the 2 decisions do not rule each other out(blacklisting opposing user agents/flags), which allows both decisions to survive.

a consensual fork is when there is adequate demand and utility that the rules can change without causing a second chain, where the natural consensus mechanism of orphans that would kill off a minority and everyone continues in a single direction of new rules..

in the last year of debate.. the conclusion is that all software implementations should have released a fork code with a consensual activation mechanism. meaning if a high majority desire shows, it activates and then orphans take care of the minority until the minority move over. leading to a single chain.
emphasis high majority desire to move in a single direction

i do not favour controversial forks that add code to force the minority chain to survive. (clams), but that said i also do not favour a certain dev team to veto even releasing code out of fear that everyone would actually show a high desire for it. so abusing the consensus mechanism by not allow users to choose, thus not even giving any new rules a chance.

core fans scream doomsdays of controversial hard forks. but dont realise that core is preventing consensual forks by vetoing a release to ensure the community never get to a healthy majority. thus causing the controversy

so here is the thing.
if cores only worry is a healthy majority.
how about include the hardfork in their softfork code as both require high majority activation parameters. thus when it activates there is no harm because of the consensus mechanism is there to resolve it.

Anyone is free to choose. Why don't you fork the code and promote it? See if users actually support your fork? Why do people insist on leveraging hash rate to provoke users to change networks?

Just leave miners out of it. If forkers had support, they would fork, and the community would follow. That they refuse to fork and instead lobby miners to pressure the rest of us to fork is very telling.

the code of a 2mb block is not the problem.. even core agree 4mb is fine..

but there is drama and doomsday scenarios that stop a consensual fork.. not related to code.
but related to actually making implementations have the same rules so that no one has control and freedom of choice to use different implementations.

core want to take bitcoin offchain and away from the original idea, and they will do this without nodes needing to vote. they want full control
there have already been 6 attempts to offer an onchain solution. but the debate has not been about code logic. but social illogics.

even now.. Luke JR is starting to receive the R3kt campaign experience of social illogics, because luke wants to release a consensual hardfork using cores code.(meaning a safe option)

again its not about code. but they want to attack the social illogics because the code allows true capacity growth safely. the activation parameters offers hassle free rule changes.. but because it puts a dent into the plan of moving users offchain and into sidechains, the social debate begins trying to kill off freedom of choice by using false doomsdays and personality attacks.

in short core want to be the sole decision makers. and even if one of their own wants freedom of choice, they will throw them under the bus

to answer your question directly..
anyone can make the most majestic code ever that does exactly as expected. but it would get wrecked in the social drama of going against cores corporate plan of offchain middlemen controls

You completely avoided what I asked. "Why don't you fork the code and promote it? See if users actually support your fork? Why do people insist on leveraging hash rate to provoke users to change networks?"

Instead you troll these forums day in, day out, talking shit about Core. What's the point? If people support the rule changes you propose, they will migrate to your fork. Endlessly insulting Core doesn't give merit to your fork.

look at the propaganda
to change networks
migrate to your fork

seems you have not understood the difference of consensual and controversial. and you think that a hard fork is only controversial.
trying to scare everyone by saying a fork is not bitcoin by using propaganda buzzwords like "changing networks" or "migrating"

please learn consensual vs controversial

Propaganda? ???

By definition a hard fork creates a new network. This a matter of fact, not opinion.

What I said didn't contemplate whether a hard fork is controversial. What I said was, why don't you fork the code? Why do you need miners to pressure users to switch clients?

It seems the answer you buried in your long-winded posts was "nobody would support my fork." Okay then. There's your answer.

I entirely agree.

This is a good point, we can always say that we have alternatives, like Classic and Unlimited for example but you are right in that this is what causes the controversy in the first place.

I agree entirely, if only Core actually did such a thing, I might even support it. Chances are that this will not happen, which is why splitting the chain might be the next best solution, it does not actually matter what we think about it, I am confident it will happen regardless there are already enough motivated people working on it. The only way I see this not happening would be if Core compromises in their position and includes a hard fork for increasing the blocksize limit in one of their following releases.

The beautiful thing is that nobody has to follow, as a holder of Bitcoin you will have the same share of Bitcoins in both chains. You can just sell the "big block" coins and ignore that chain and just continue as if nothing has changed. I would advise holding coins on both chains after a split, better to hedge our bets.

You asked for promotion: https://www.reddit.com/r/btcfork/ ;)

This is how I learned to stop worrying and love the fork. ;D

again your only seeing a hard fork through the eyes of controversial.

EG if core released
0.14A(just segwit)
0.14B(segwit+ hardfork)

and other implementations also done the same
bitcoin knots, airbitz, BU, classix, XT, and all the others
XA traditional
XB hardfork

then there is a fully open choice. even the core fanboys dont have to defect away from their religion(core) if they secretly want more real onchain capacity growth because every version in existance has a agreed consensus change, including core.
making EVERYONE on the same level playing field

but by core not even trying to make it (lets hope luke releases it before getting thrown out) then there will never be a healthy majority, due to
the loyal flock wanting core to dominate(even if the flock dont understand the route core prefers) and make decisions for them (centrally)

so yea bitcoin knots, airbitz and others can have perfect code.. but core fanboys will doomsday call anything not core.. purely because core doesnt want a consensual fork(real onchain capacity).. they want to lead and control decisions. not allow an open decentralized free choice.

the funny thing is. core can easily release 0.14B(segwit+ hardfork) and then just see if people download A or B.
and if 95% have not downloaded version B of their favourite. then it will not activate and nothing is lost.
but by core vetoing any chance of a core version B. they are not even allowing users a free choice, even amungst their own flock

its like having 12 jurers where it requires unanimous favour of one decision to get a perfect conviction.
core are telling just 1 jurers to not vote at all, neither innocent or guilty.. purely to cause controversy and not have a consensual judgement.

Nonsense. The people who are primarily pushing for ridiculous block sizes are the ones crying out that we need more users. It's obviously about money. If it wasn't about money, you'd be taking a safe path with scaling as there is zero need to risk anything. As I've previously stated, I'm not anti-HF as in consensual upgrades, not controversial splits.

Just by saying that splitting up the userbase, infrastructure and network as a whole is a "beautiful thing" makes me question the sanity of some people. Nothing good can nor will come out of that. Just confusion that will generally have negative side-effects.

No, Core isn't prevent anything. You're free to write a HF proposal as a BIP and see whether it gains attraction.

I am going to walk on the safe path, and go with the direction these Core guys are going. Why do we need to change anything if it is working? The big blockers were creating Apocalyptic scenarios since this debate has started many moons ago, and guess what, nothing happened.

We have seen strange stress tests being done, to make people believe that bigger blocks are necessary, but the network came through with flying colors and these people lost money. Let's just take hands, smoke some weed and sing Bitcoin songs. ^smile^ After all, people are saying we are a bunch of perverted drug heads, so just make the best of it.   :o 

ridiculous blocksizes??

sorry but segwit is 4mb.. i proven that in a different topic and even supplied you a link.
so how is 2mb ridiculous??

i actually agree with lauda's sentiment..

submit a bip to.............. ?
go on.. say it
CORE
well there already has been logical bips submitted, and the decision against implementing it was not vetoed out due to code, or logic or real reason. but due to false doomsdays and fake stats.. mainly illogical scare stories

which from reading your little awakening in another topic, you are beginning to see

Yes, I'm talking about ridiculous block sizes. Examples of those being suggested by irrational people: 8 MB, 20 MB (remember 2015 20 MB now or doomsday?), unlimited. 2 MB should be fine after validation time is linear and not quadratic.

Additionally, I strongly believe that any controversial fork is an altcoin in a sense where a very small minority split away from the majority. We define pretty much any coin that does this as an altcoin; the primary difference is that they: 1) Change some specifications; 2) Don't retain the current blockchain information but rather start 'fresh'.

You can't get something merged into Core without consensus. What you could do is: Write a BIP -> provide the code for it -> if it gets rejected, then provide your own implementation for it. I'm also not aware of any "false doomsdays or fake stats" that were used as arguments against any of those BIPs.

sorry to tell you this but 2mb is actually healthy right now..
libsecp256k1 alone (released ages ago) has actually made enough efficiency boost to make 2mb blocks healthily able to run on a raspberry pi.

the debate about linear validation. is absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin right now. absolutely nothing about a 2mb block of traditional bitcoin transaction, but only a worry in regards to when lightning network is active, which is not any time soon.

ill emphasise it again, linear signatures only really see a benefit in regards to multisigs which will gain dominance when lightning network is activated, but offers little to no noticeable difference to.... wait.. you may pick up your own rhetoric here... "median" size transactions(226byte), or as i say average transactions(~450byte)

(and im being subtle, but hopefully previous conversations give you enough of a hint)
so try not to back track on average/median transaction sizes to now argue about large 1kbyte multisigs being a big deal right now

No, that's not right (if it was right, there would be no need for sigops limitations in Bitcoin Classic). I've addressed this issue about 6 months ago already:
I don't know why you keep persisting that it doesn't. You should run a benchmark on that raspberry PI and validate only the block full of spam that was mined by F2Pool back in 2015 or 2014 (it was mentioned in the conference).

i was gonna waffle but..

block: 364292 (https://blockchain.info/block-height/364292) validated in 2 seconds..
as oppose to pre libsecp256k1 optimisation, which took far far far longer.

other standard blocks 0-400,000 validated in under 6 hours (18 blocks per second)
which took far far longer pre libsecp256k1 optimisation

yes pre-libsecp256k1 estimated 11 minutes for an 8mb block(without the antispam sigops/hash limits)..
but due to the antispam limits, the only way to fill an 8mb block with spam is as 8x 1mb transactions..
which libsecp256k1 optimisations would bring about ~16 seconds validation time for 8mb (1mb processing repeated 8 times)
but we all know that for the last year, 8mb-20mb was not rational and 2mb was rational and overall approved. your buddy carlton approved it and even today your saying 2mb is ok...

so based on 2mb blocks of spam would require tweaking out some of the antispam limits to perform the test based on old metrics. but lets say with the anti-spam limits inplace it was treated as block364292 repeated twice (the only way to get 2mb of spam is to do 2 transactions to stay under the sigop/hash limits).

which would result in a 4second validation time.

so its not exactly killing a raspberry pi.. compared to the non antispam, non optimised doomsday pitch you and your cohorts of last year were crying by saying 11minutes+..

i do agree that linear would make a 4second spam block into a 10milisecond validation time just like any non spam transaction block.

but 4 seconds for the rare occassion is not killing bitcoin
and is definitely not anywear near a doomsday pitch "more than 10 minutes of DDoS via spam" Armageddon war-cry

Median is still 226 bytes, as shown on this website (https://bitcoinfees.21.co/).

No, neither one holds true. Nobody ever claimed that the quadratic scaling is problematic with normal transactions. It is just an attack vector that could be abused by a malicious miner. "Could be" doesn't mean that it "will be" though.

Where is the source of this result ("2 seconds")?

That doesn't matter. As previously stated, while libsecp256k1 improves validation time significantly it does not mitigate the attack vector at 2 MB (Gavin even confirmed this somewhere).

i even bothered to check a few websites to see several benchmarks to to make sure its not a fluke..
but heres one.. which also covers the bits about 8mb too
https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=515

seems rusty can get better than 2 seconds, but im guessing from reading it he was using a i3 laptop.
there were other sites and benchmarks saying increasing the dbcache also improved things too, but yea that digresses off the point

basically 2mb spam tx is not a bottleneck of doom 11minute scare story.. but a 4 second validation time
by the way google and a thing called research is your friend.

Initially I've asked you to provide your own benchmarks on a raspberry PI. These are not your results.

Increasing the dbcache does speed up overall time, but that's not what we're trying to accomplish. I'm talking about default settings, and raspberry PI (since you've mentioned it).

That's not correct.

You've made claims, ergo you should back them up with sources. I'm not going to do the homework for you.

Hey Lauda, do you take drugs?

Planned, well executed, not rushed hard fork for the sake of achieving  better performance, stability, speed -  pushing evolution in general is welcomed and needed.
The problem is that some users are scared/don't know what forking is about and I'm afraid that forking will always cause problems and panic - at least initially.

Because it is not working as intended, a congested network leads to longer and more unreliable confirmation times and higher fees. This is not good for Bitcoin adoption, much has happened over the last year in this debate including Bitcoin continuously losing more of its market share to its competitors. Keeping this limit in place restricts the amount of people that can use Bitcoin regardless of the fee that is payed. This one simple parameter is hurting the adoption and growth of Bitcoin which is critical over the long term for its decentralization and expansion. Here is proof that this is occurring:


https://i.imgur.com/Xaf6rD8.png

It is fine and makes sense as long as everyone knows the deal.  There are a lot of people that have a wallet and use it on occasion, but do not follow the Bitcoin news and what not. 

lots of people have done benchmarks and deemed 4mb raspberry pi safe.
but here is lauda being ignorant and now avoiding other bench tests just to provoke an argument that i didnt do as he said.

ill repeat what he and his immature friends say when i ask them to research something
"dont tell me what to do unless your paying me"

so if he wants to ignore the many many benchmarks that google can supply him. then its obvious he doesnt care about actual statistics.
and even if i did spoonfeed him. i predict he would just say i made it up (yes he is that predictable)

anyway using todays settings 2mb spam is 4 seconds.. not a 11 minute bottleneck

have a nice day

I really don't think a hard fork is a good move.
Maybe a side-chain or something like that.

And well, we have a lot of good alts over there, bitcoin is not unanimous anymore.

^ this here is the mindset of why bitcoin could lose utility.
yes thats right im talking about function, im talking about using actual bitcoin to buy actual products

in short they dont want to expand bitcoin, instead use an altcoin that has the desired capacity and make bitcoin no longer a functional currency and just an investment

we all know gmaxwell and lauda+chums want monero to rule supreme

and its funnier that they say its us wanting capacity growth purely for the value increase
while they are trying to get monero value to increase by baiting people over to it and turn bitcoin into just an pump and dump reserve.

(every doomsday and argument they can shout out about others is usually exactly what they want themselves)
EG
"big blockers" has been proven to now be the term for the core team, 4mb bigger then 2mb afterall

No, I am not. This has nothing to do with controversy. A hard fork, by definition, entails creating a new network that is incompatible with the old one. The intention of a hard fork is for users of the old network to migrate to the forked network. There is no propaganda in that, whatsoever.


You're blaming the community for supporting the reference implementation. Take it up with the community. Supporting Core's conservative method of rigorous analysis and testing, or their overall roadmap, or simply supporting an implementation that retains Bitcoin's consensus rules, is not anything you can blame Core for. You can blame the lack of convincing arguments by fork proponents for the lack of support to fork. You could also probably blame Ethereum, which has likely scared much of the community away from the risks of hard forks.


"Consensual [hard] fork" is a strange term. Consent flows from users opting into a network. Anyone is free to opt out of the Bitcoin network and consent to a new hard fork. But that doesn't imply at all that all users of the Bitcoin network consent to a hard fork. Knowing that every user consents is not possible in any way, shape or form -- and even if it were, we could only know after the fork had occurred, after which users actually migrate and affirmatively consent to the hard fork's new rules.


Core has no obligation to attempt to break the consensus rules. I don't know where you get the impression that they do. Anyone is free to fork Core's code and try to convince the community to join them. However, I urge everyone to oppose any fork that attempts to leverage miners against users. That raises serious ethical concerns about whether migrating users actually consent, or whether they felt forced by colluding miners (who have an apparent monopoly on hash rate and thus, confirmations for transactions).

1. hardfork code has been publicly available since last year, meaning core is not conservative. because they ignore code available for over a year to quickly push something only finalised a few weeks ago..
2. core is not retaining consensus rules.. old nodes cant validate segwit, so old nodes are not part of the consensus. they are just blindly confused into not caring what the data is by using the flag that tells them to ignore it.
3. core is not retaining consensus rules.. 4mb blockweight is a total different rule than maxblocksize.. but again by disabling consensus(consent) they are changing rules without needing consent.
4. the road map belongs to core, the segwit code is a core feature and core are avoiding accepting hard fork code so much they are throwing devs out of the core group

the REKT and fake doomsdays stories to sway people started way before ethereum

see there you go again "opt out of bitcoin network".. more subtly propaganda that if its not the core way then its not bitcoin..
yet core are changing the rules without needing users consent for the new direction core want to go.



"anyone is free to fork cores code"
hmm there you go again. subtle propaganda saying bitcoin is core and core is bitcoin, meaning anything not core, is not bitcoin.. seems you actually want core to be king and own bitcoin and make decisions without users consent, and you want anyone revolting away from your ideology to be classed as a alternative network/coin.

but here is the thing that will trip you up..
orphans are the mechanism.. and orphans happen daily. meaning bitcoin is suppose to change but only in a direction the majority agree on.
so a true consensual fork is the same as the daily orphans.. the chain CONTINUES in the direction of the majority..

if someone makes a rule change by submitting a block with odd data using the real consensual mechanism, but doesnt have majority, it gets orphaned
every day there are decisions being made for which direction the majority should move.
so by your failed definition of the consensus mechanism.. the majority of users are moving to a different network every time there is a fork(orphan)..

a controversial fork still gets orphaned off..
but.. only when intentionally blacklisting certain nodes to prevent the orphaning mechanism from taking care of the situation is where a realistic and continual split occur.

the community on the whole dont want a intentional split by adding in code to bypass the natural orphaning mechanism, all that is being said is a consensual fork for true capacity growth

which wont happen if core prevent a healthy majority by doing all this propaganda crap to keep their sheep inline to veto a change. and blindly allow another change by not telling their sheep its not requiring their consent for that route either

think long and hard about what i have just said.. and dont reply just with waffle to defend cores control

Franky, you're spreading a lot of misinformation. I won't go so far as to call it disinformation, but I'm not sure that your intentions here are honorable. I can't keep responding to you because every time I address your points, you repeat the same falsities that I've already shown to be false.


Segwit has been worked on since late last year. It's been rigorously tested for many months. Simply stating that "hard fork code has been publicly available since last year" is meaningless. That doesn't suggest that the hard fork code is sensible, optimal nor rigorously tested. Rather, peer review and testing has been minimal.


Please point to the consensus rules being broken by Segwit. You can't, because there are none. This is why Segwit is backward compatible.

Old nodes certainly can validate Segwit transactions against the consensus rules. And they will. You seem disturbed by the idea of forward compatibility (https://www.google.com/search?q=forward+compatibility+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8), but it's really quite elegant and appropriate. See Satoshi's thoughts on forward compatible soft forks:



Again: Please point to the consensus rules being broken by Segwit. You can't, because there are none. Maxblocksize is a consensus rule. It is not broken by Segwit. Segregating the witness data doesn't affect validity. It's really quite a clever way to optimize transactions size while permitting features which require non-malleability.


Anyone is free to contribute to Core. Anyone is also free to develop other clients. Being a small, vocal minority should not enable someone to steamroll the rest of the project contributors into merging code they disagree with. You have no authority to say what Core should or should not do. You are free to contribute to other projects. Go ahead.


Indeed, anti-fork sentiment existed long before the Ethereum network split. But the failed hard fork scared a lot of people into recognizing that Core's position has been reasonable and thoughtful, while the Ethereum Foundation has clearly been reckless and disdainful towards their userbase and custodians.


No, it's not propaganda at all. You either fundamentally misunderstand what a hard fork entails, or you yourself are attempting to spread lies to further your agenda.

Are you suggesting that the Bitcoin network doesn't exist? Because if the Bitcoin network exists, a hard fork of Bitcoin's consensus protocol will create an additional network that is incompatible with Bitcoin. It's curious that you don't deny this, yet you continue to try to deceive people into thinking that a hard fork is merely a software change that is compatible with Bitcoin. It is not. It splits the network into 2 or more incompatible networks.


I didn't say "Bitcoin is Core and Core is Bitcoin." But it's the reference implementation. Why do you think XT, Classic and Unlimited are all forks of Core? What else would you expect people to fork, if not Core's repository? Feel free to code a new implementation from scratch, if you'd prefer.


"Orphans" refer to valid blocks that don't have a known parent in the longest block chain. They don't refer to invalid blocks that aren't part of the Bitcoin network.

Also, you're only addressing processing power (miners). You're not addressing users at all. What gives miners power over the software that users decide to run? Nothing.


No, an orphan doesn't imply a new network at all. Orphans are valid blocks, so they are compatible with the original network. Miners are simply agreeing on which valid chain has the most cumulative work.

It seems you need a reminder of how this works:
http://cointimes.tech/2016/08/hard-forks-and-consensus-networks-meta-questions-and-limitations/
http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~ler/docencia/rcs1314/papers/P2P2013_041.pdf


A fork that breaks the consensus rules doesn't get orphaned. It gets ignored. Saying that it is "orphaned" suggests it is valid according to the network. It isn't.


Core doesn't have any control. Please come to terms with the fact that most of the community supports Core's maintenance of the Bitcoin code. You may disagree with their views -- it's only natural in such a diverse ecosystem that not every participant sees eye to eye. But I'm becoming more and more confused as to what you are even arguing for.

Anyone is free to opt out of the network and run an incompatible node. Anyone is free to contribute to projects other than Bitcoin Core. Please feel free to support such efforts.

I only ask that people try to understand that leveraging miners against users to try to force a network migration (as XT and Classic attempted to do) is unethical, and I ask that people reflect on whether it is right for miners to provoke users into removing consensus rules. Hard forks are a matter of user consent, not miner consent. Miner consent only establishes the longest valid chain (so, it enables soft forks). It has nothing to do with the consensus rules that every node on the network enforces.

Many of us view the block size limit as a moral issue -- key to allowing Bitcoin to remain peer-to-peer and sufficiently decentralized to prevent attacks -- and further, that consensus rules must be safe from tyranny of the majority. For miners to leverage "fear of being on the weaker chain" against users to remove the block size limit, for me, is not very different from miners doing so to remove the 21M supply limit. This idea that consensus rules are subject to democratic vote is extremely dangerous, and I oppose it unequivocally.

And frankly, I don't think that you are convincing anyone here of anything -- your understanding of the protocol is clearly lacking and you are clearly very angry, which obviously gets in the way of your message.

cores softfork does not need user consent at actual code requirement level. (as part of the real consensus mechanism).
absolutely no nodes needs to upgrade to make a softfork possible.
but a mining pool DOES need to upgrade to be able to validate signatures of a segwit transaction to include them in blocks.
yes mining pools actually validate data to ensure it doesnt orphan.. so miners are not there just to decide blockheight..

seriously im starting to think im talking to a noob right now

core adding in an activation mechanism. is not due to consensus rules requiring it, but because they have bypassed the consensus mechanism to be able to change the rules without using the consensus mechanism and as an afterthought putting in a social activation mechanism to pretend its the same thing as consensus mechanism
but fundamentally not required.

old nodes are not forward compatible in the sense of being able to validate signatures of a segwit transaction. they are tricked into just passing on the data unchecked. this is not ensuring an old node remains a full validation node.. but just a blind participant in a game of pass the parcel

you say that segwit has been around for months.. on other networks, not bitcoin.
there are many BITCOIN implementations that have code for a hardfork that have been around since last year.. core have only achieved having the code IN BITCOIN a few weeks ago.

your rebuttal is like saying bitcoin has had ~2.5 minute blocks for 5 years because there is code being tested on a different network.
(segnet does not have 7 years of bitcoin data and is not talking to 6000 bitcoin nodes.. much like litecoin isnt)

but i will just laugh at your other false assumptions because its obvious no matter what core does, they are your king.. you have lost full understanding of decentralization and have been fooled into blindly following the centralization of false choice

by the way. if you have not already been indoctrinated to start favouring monero (the usual path of those wanting to keep bitcoin down) you soon will be. much like all the other core fanboys.

i have seen it happen many times, you probably are not going to be immune to it, because you are already repeating the standard spoonfed false rhetoric and hypocrisy

so the day you start thinking monero is the future, at this point realise that someone had warned you that your 'friends' have been tweaking at your mind to move you to favour monero with all the spoon fed false scripts. slap yourself and wake up

...
but here is the mind blowing part.
because core (didnt have to) but are putting in an activation mechanism where 95% of nodes need to use a piece of software..
guess what.
put the real capacity block buffer increase (meaning 2mb baseblock and 4mb segwit blockweight) so that when it activates the network CONTINUES to add new blocks onto the chain. and the minority get orphaned (via consensus mechanism)
after all there is no point running a full node if your not going to be validating transactions and just blindly passing on data you cant check.

killing 2 birds within one stone(mechanism/oppertunity)

and dont reply with the fake rhetoric of split coins, which can only occur by blacklisting nodes to by pass the orphan mechanism

That is the nature of the game therefore we have no choice but play with it, so far in my opinion ETH is the best investment as I can easily read the movement of the market and I make consistent money trading it.

Tl;dr; I would sacrifice decentralization for money.  ::)

No. You're the one that mentioned validation time on a Pi in this thread. I asked YOU to run YOUR own benchmarks, not pull stuff from the internet to back it up.

I'm not going to waste my time researching for someone who thinks that libsecp256k1 mitigates the quadratic validation time problem.

Of course you'd likely make it up since you can't even properly document your testing methodology.

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Is this Franky guy just a total troll? I'm feeling like I've been trolled. Can't believe I took like 45 minutes to write that post, only to have him ignore every single point, yet again. And here he is, foaming at the mouth, babbling incoherently about "core fanboys" and "monero is the future."

What a fucking mouth breather.

I'm not going to waste time responding to your garbage post, Franky. This is the only thing of note that you said:


Not sure where you think code should be tested, if not on a testnet. Also, Segnet has been live for many months prior to Segwit's introduction to the testnet. You realize that forks like Unlimited and Classic have only been run on testnet, right? Fun testnet fact: Recently, Roger Ver's pool -- marking blocks as BIP 109 on Classic's testnet -- mined BIP 109 violating transactions (did not enforce sigop limit). This caused a fork; Classic nodes correctly rejected the longer invalid chain. The fork continued for a month (it may still be ongoing, not sure); no one bothered to notice or care. To allow something like this to happen to the Classic testnet for more than a month is beyond embarrassing -- it's fucking pathetic. That's got to make you question both the BU and Classic teams (and idiots like Roger Ver). This shows the idiocy of BU not enforcing sig op limits while flagging support for BIP 109. The forkers are cannibalizing each other. :D
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4zqd7g/roger_ver_does_your_bitcoin_classic_pool_on/

And stop spreading lies about non-updated nodes "not validating." They validate everything according to the consensus rules. To reiterate Satoshi (emphasis mine):


Bitcoin is clearly not for you, Franky, since you apparently believe that miners mining the longest valid chain = "bypassing the consensus mechanism." It's painfully obvious that you have some deep misunderstandings of the protocol. Or perhaps you really do intend to deceive people.

Actually, it could occur in multiple situations.

One would be a bilateral fork, where the fork intends to ensure the viability of all networks. For example, blacklisting blockchains that do not contain the fork block, or otherwise changing some consensus-critical factor to ensure a split. This is beyond the scope of "longest chain".

Another would be something like the DAO fork. ETH had nearly 100% of the hash rate at some point. But since the original network will always reject the hard fork blockchain, anyone can return to mining the old chain at any time, and there will be a network split.

You would only know after the fact if there was "consensus" in a hard fork. If there was not, users remain on the original chain....and miners will come.

are you even reading your own words..

old nodes do not validate signatures of segwit.
the quote you made about satoshi is where he is saying he envisions a time in the future where instead of downloading a whole new client. users can download a 'patch' (template) that makes old nodes recognise new transaction types.

but here is the thing.. core didnt insert that template feature into their code to allow users to patch core without needing a full upgrade. so when segwit activates, old nodes dont see a segwit transaction as segwit and have a template to be able to validate signatures of segwit.. what old nodes see is an "anyone can spend" which is the trick where its telling old nodes there is no signature, but blindly pass it on anyway.

i dare you to show me where a users of version 0.3-0.12 can simply patch their old version to not treat segwit as a "anyone can spend" and instead actually sees and validates signatures.

as for your other waffle, about the test net stuff.. what may work in a secondary environment may not work in bitcoin.
hard fork implementations have actual code running on bitcoin, relaying data to other bitcoin implementations. segwit however has not had this finalised code included in a BITCOIN node untill a few weeks ago. and before that the code on the testnets was completely different.
you mentioned segwit has been around for months.. so show the finalised code 3 weeks ago. then show the same code, from any other time you have pretended that segwit was part of bitcoin.. go on
show me code from 2 months ago where they match up.
show me code from 4-6 months ago where they match up.

screw it.. ill do it for you.. blockweight was not even a variable in bitcoin or testnet or segnet's consensus.h until only a few weeks ago

as for the stuff about bip109. read it. maxwell was making blind assumptions,
but later admitted he didnt know what code the nodes were running or why. meaning he had no clue,(he even says it was just a hypoethis)

and knowing he lost the argument because he didnt know how or why, he then started to talk about rogers investment amounts as a subtle way to drop the subject without having to actually say he was wrong by making assumptions.

anyway you have meandered these posts off topic to avoid the question.

using the CONSENSUS mechanism where there is no intentional split(no blacklisting) and because the remaining 5% gets rejected/orphaned to keep the chain going in a single direction the majority is agreeing to.
again emphasis using the same consensus mechanism that takes care of bitcoin every single day.
again not meandering down your false doomsday of intentional splits

where is the problem?
remember people running full nodes want to remain full nodes, they dont want to be blinded. so ofcourse the minority that didnt upgrade will upgrade, to avoid seeing orphans and avoid other issues, and remain full nodes.

full nodes want to be full nodes for good practical reasons of decentralization, security to protect bitcoins immutability, etc etc
if they wanted to be a blind node they might aswell run multibit
there would be no logical reason for a full node to choose to run as a blind node where they are not validating all the data they receive
there would be no logical reason for a full node to choose to run as a blind node where they are wasting bandwidth on orphans
there would be no logical reason for a full node to choose to run as a blind node where they they cant trust 0-1 confirms due to orphans

again reply in context of a consensus.. not your dooms day intentional split controversial rhetoric

I know the idea of a hard fork scares people. Its fucking scary.
I honestly don't know how I feel about it, myself.
I've been watching the Etherium fork to see what will happen, but I think I still need more time to make my mind up.

Confirmation time is a big deal.
You are never going to get a physical store to accept a payment that takes close to an hour to confirm.
This means we are limiting Bitcoin to an online payment system. If that is what is intended, maybe its okay.
But if we want to move the system forward, maybe its time to discuss these other options.

If bitcoin doesn't evolve, it will go the way of the dinosaur.
I'm going to start investing a little bit of money in some of these other coins like Monero in case they end up being the next big thing, I guess....

consensual forks are not scary. orphans take over the minority, and thats the point. thats what the consensus mechanism is all about.
its the doomsday of intentional splits (like ethereum intentionally split) which is a separate thing, called controversial, which are scary.

no one is saying we should logically do a controversial split. apart from the core fanboys who veto a consensual agreement, and by this are saying the only way to increase the capacity buffer is to split.. simply with their veto power

all because they dont want increased capacity, and are telling people how scary controversial splits are because they themselves fear consensual capacity increases as it will de-incentivise the (heavily invested corporate) need to go offchain

Those people will by default fall onto the preexisting blockchain and if the other flies and that gets left behind and scuttled, they would have no idea until it is too late. 

Several people have given them more than plenty of chances here, but they usually just seem to write up huge posts of flawed nonsense. They're very persistent with their flawed understanding of the underlying protocol, in addition to trolling members with high knowledge (e.g. DannyHamilton). Basically if you do not want what they want, you are one of the following or more (according to them:
1) A Core fanboy living in a delusion.
2) Blockstream shill.
3) Monero shill.

We've already discussed the on-chain capabilities of Bitcoin, which currently are far from what certain groups are advertising for.

Wait a second. I read the whole thread. Ver's answer is kinda bullshit. If you read the thread and look at his pool's blocks, he was flagging blocks as BIP 109 compatible. He was also mining on Bitcoin Classic's testnet. But he was really running BU. So he forked the testnet (he had the most hash power but was mining an invalid chain).

I would echo Greg here: What exactly was he testing?---That he could break everything by flagging support for BIP 109 but not enforcing its rules? ;D

Oh, that's because he was running BU. ;D Now you see why BU flagging support for protocols it does not support is dangerous. But hey, if Classic/BU can break Classic testnet, why not put it on mainnet, right?

::)

If you are interested about bitcoin forks, we have created a telegram group: https://telegram.me/BTCFork join us :).

Ethereum did not intentionally split. Vitalik and his chronies intentionally hard forked, but they assumed that by having the support of the major mining pool administrators and client/wallet developers (IOW, a dozen or two people), that the original chain would just die. But of course it didn't. Users remained, speculators speculated, miners returned to the original chain. It was not intentional. That's why the Ethereum Foundation told exchanges to ignore the original chain and ignore replay attacks. They planned on the original chain just dying. Silly, especially in a case where the hard fork rewrites history.


Hmmm. No thanks. Good luck.

put it this way. if ethereum just done a roll back.. the 'hacked' ether transactions would have got orphaned and everyone would make new blocks ontop of the backdated chain

but instead vatelik actually added a bit more code to intentionally black list nodes against each other to cause a split (controversial fork)

that oppose dao fork. is the flag to cause an intentional split by bypassing the standard orphaning mechanism by not letting the nodes talk to each other to come to a consensus.

so ethereum was an intentional split. rather then changing the rules for everyone to head in a single direction and let orphans take care of the minorty.

That doesn't mean it was intended to split the network. They intended for everyone to update to the fork. That code was included in case not enough hashpower updated before the DAO attacker could move his funds. This is similar to Mike Hearn's "checkpointing" in XT -- in case XT became the minority chain, keep the rules intact.

Are you saying consensus rule changes should be decided by "orphaning"? How would that even work? The reason a network split occurs in a hard fork is because users haven't updated, and so some miners return to that chain. Those users won't even see the rule-breaking chain no matter how long it is.

"Those users won't even see the rule-breaking chain no matter how long it is. "
because they blacklist the nodes transmitting the changed rule.. to not even get that changed rule block

without blacklisting rule changed nodes. then "those users" will see the rule changed block but will orphan off the rule changed blocks, because that is how the consensus mechanism works. if a block is seen that doesnt match the rules, its orphaned.

separately if a node blacklists rule changed nodes.. then they wont even talk to each other to use the orphan consensus mechanism.. meaning that both sides are not orphaning each other and instead working as independent chains.

again it requires blacklisting opposing nodes to avoid the consensus mechanism to keep a minority chain alive. other wise orphaning will take care of the "battle" in a thunderdome scenario(2 enter 1 leave). which is exactly how the consensus mechanism works.
its been working every day, an average of 2 blocks a day occur due to them not fitting the rules of the majority

It is like saying that every one that shows up and votes gets to pick a president and all those that don't vote automatically vote for candidate 1. Hard forking the coin is like this example

No, it's not because they blacklisted anybody. It's because those nodes broke the rules, transmitting invalid blocks. Like Satoshi said in the whitepaper, nodes "reject invalid blocks by refusing to work on them". This is true for any rule violation -- it's nothing to do with blacklisting, but the rules in the Bitcoin software. Blacklisting means "targeted". But the software's rules apply to everybody, no matter what. It doesn't matter why the block is invalid -- could be that it includes double spends, doesn't matter. The point is that nodes ignore invalid blocks.

I would argue if peer review and testing has been minimal then it has not been finalised, it has not even been finished.

I think you are playing semantic games here and skirting around the issue, I am not saying that you are not being sincere however. "Consensus" is the term we give to the governance mechanism in the Bitcoin protocol, there is also a technical feature in the Bitcoin protocol that is also called "consensus". To make this even more confusing the term "consensus" can not even be taken literally except for in the technical sense, however the rules of the protocol can still be changed through the governance mechanisms of Bitcoin, therefore even the technical understanding of "consensus" can not be taken completely literally. That is in the literal sense of the word "consensus".

I recently explained my theory on Bitcoin governance and what I think is the present state of affairs here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1612347.0

I perceive hard forks to be a critical feature of the Bitcoin governance mechanism. Soft forks in some cases can contribute to circumventing this governance mechanism, since it makes splitting away more difficult, it makes it more difficult to protest in other words, which actually makes it easier to change the protocol through soft forks. Which is not necessarily a good thing from a humanist perspective.

Almost any change can be introduced as a soft fork, we could even increase the blocksize with a soft fork, there are multiple ways in which to do this. Whether something is a hard fork or a soft fork does not actually matter in terms of whether it should be implemented or not, what matters is the content of that change itself.

I suppose you know my view on soft forks, consensus and segwit by now. Segwit does not fix malleability last I checked, that particular feature has not been introduced, I am not sure whether it will be finished by the time Core wants segwit to go onto the main net.

It also makes Bitcoin less "scalable" that is in the IT/Engineering sense of the word, again a word that carries different meanings within different fields of knowledge. Since segwit transactions are still slightly larger then normal transactions, making them less efficient. Segwit actually also makes Bitcoin less expensive to attack because segwit allows an attacker to fill up the witness data at a rate 1/4 of the normal fee price, which means spam attacks on the network become easier, by flooding the network with these spam transactions an attacker can fill up the blocks preventing other people from being able to transact, actually exploiting the existence of the blocksize limit which was first introduced as a temporary anti spam fix, ironically. This reduced fee is actually for a specific type of transaction that the lighting network relies on. I do not support this type of economic favoritism, it is one of the many reasons why I do not like this version of Segwit that Core is planning to release. I would not be against Segwit if it came out as a hard fork with a few minor changes, it actually would make segwit transactions more efficient then normal transactions, such a hard fork could also fix malleability. Such a hardfork version of segwit would also introduce a lot less technical debt.

I actually agree with you on this, except for that anyone is free to contribute to Core, you can not have it both ways, which is why there have to be multiple viable implementations of Bitcoin, otherwise the governance mechanism would just not work since people would not have the freedom of choice between these implementations, since you have already said that Core should not provide that choice within their organization and implementation. This is in part why I consider Core to be the biggest point of centralization within Bitcoin right now, even the name we use "Core" is inappropriate for a decentralized protocol.

That is an opinion, and the facts do not back up this sentiment at all. Ethereum investors have not even lost money especially if you include their holdings in ETC. The two networks are doing just fine, especially ETH. The sky has not fallen after the hard fork, the recent Ethereum split proves that such hard forks are viable and they are not the "disasters" that some people claimed it would be. It is actually a good thing, a graceful solution to an age old problem.

I think the same will happen to Bitcoin within the next six months, whether we like it or not. I am an advocate of this action if that has not been made clear already, unless "consensus" is found within the Bitcoin network, the network will split. Allowing both sides of this debate to have the Bitcoin they want, true freedom of choice.

I think I actually agree with you here exstasie and not franky1. Though I also think that you two are having a misunderstanding, franky1 is very clearly referring to the case where "consensus" is reached and the network does not split, like XT, Classic and maybe Unlimited for example, or even if Core released a hard fork with a simple blocksize limit increase, that might be a better example since there is less chance to this leading to a split.

I do not think this will happen though which is why I think that actually splitting the chain is now a better option for users who are not happy with the direction that Core is taking Bitcoin into.

But you are correct extasie in that you can never be sure whether a split will occur, since it only takes a small minority to decide to stay behind, I consider this to be a good thing however, not something to be feared. This governance structure protects everyone and even protects people against the tyranny of the majority and minority.

You are again jumbling the meaning of words, since they mean different things within different fields. Technically XT, Classic and Unlimited are forks of Core, since they have taken Core code and have made slight changes. However when I run a Bitcoin Unlimited node for example I am running it on the Bitcoin protocol and I am compatible with the Bitcoin protocol and I am not forking the network at all, the same is true for XT or Classic. Do you see the subtle difference in meanings that exist in these words, by using this type of language you are drumming up fear, one of the very defining features of propaganda as is commonly understood.

It is strange for you to say that any fork attempts to leverage miners is against users. That is not in theory how this is supposed to work, the miners are supposed to follow what they think the users want, however by promoting such an ideology we are making the miners more conservative against any change, especially if a considerable amount of the user base have such beliefs, this is in part why I think that Bitcoin is becoming stagnant and losing its competitive edge, much of that energy is now spilling over into the alternatives.

You are indeed tripping up here exstasie, not all orphans are in fact invalid blocks, most orphans are actually valid blocks that where found at a similar time by different pools, they are only considered invalid after they are rejected only because the same block already exists and just got propagated faster. It is one of the fundamental aspects of how Bitcoin works, franky1 one is correct in pointing out the importance of this feature since it also allows for there to be no blocksize limit at all since the pools themselves can best determine their own technological limits, instead of this arbitrary limit being centrally controlled by the "reference implementation".

Miners do indeed have power over the "consensus" of the Bitcoin network, however because they have so much at stake they have a strong game theory incentives to do what is best for the network, this is how Bitcoin works, I realize that some people are not comfortable with this, but it is how Bitcoin actually functions. I even think some of the Core developers are skeptics of this idea, as technologists it might be hard for them to see the virtue in a system that relies on the economic self interest of the masses to govern the network. Ideas of immutability and an unchanging network where we are governed by machines taking human beings out of the picture completely ending politics might seem like a romantic idea but it is just not the reality of how these cryptocurrencies actually function.

Bitcoin is more like a cyborg, human beings are part of the machine and are actually one of the key components that allow it to function successfully in our world. Which means that politics are part of the equation here and the mechanism is that miners do have the vote, because their incentives are best aligned, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It can almost be seen as a form or representative democracy, however where the incentives of the representatives are not perverted unlike what we often see in state democracies. In this case the users have all the power, since that is where the value comes from, splitting Bitcoin will allow users to better express this choice when there are strong diverting ideologies within a single protocol, like what we are seeing today within Bitcoin. Which is why a split could also be such a positive thing, both sides would be more likely to be able to innovate much faster when there is a greater general agreement on what Bitcoin is and where it should go. Splitting the network would allow for a more cohesive and less toxic community, while also allowing for greater freedom of choice for Bitcoin users.

Technically you are correct here exstasie, strictly speaking that is. But the idea that Bitcoin actually splits every day, in some cases even for several blocks is at least poetically interesting, since when Bitcoin splits it would not be that different to an orphan initially, it is just that we will give the orphan life and extend that chain where otherwise it would have just died. You have to admit that poetically it is at least a good analogy.

I think that the term valid here is completely subjective, valid is dependent on the client you run, I think that Bitcoin ideally should be defined as being the longest chain, not the longest valid chain, since otherwise it would become a completely subjective position to take.

I do not think that most of the community supports Core, I think it is actually very difficult to measure such a thing especially when there are people on both sides of the debate who can be very loud. It creates a situation where the "consensus" is not clear which is maybe why many miners are presently still siding with caution and sticking with the incumbents. This is also why splitting the network has become a better option for users to express their opinion, miners will simply just follow the value after all.

Hard forking is how most important changes should be made, before Ethereum split there were multiple hard forks where the network did not split. This is an example of how this mechanism works, if enough people are unhappy with the change they can simply choose to stay behind, the sooner we embrace this mechanism the sooner Bitcoin will be able to continue to evolve.

The consensus rules are subject to democratic vote, that is exactly what Bitcoin is, I understand that you are part of a group of people that rejects this and have therefore constructed a flawed understanding of how Bitcoin works. I do not think there even is a cryptocurrency out there that works that way at all, it might presently even be a technological impossibility also for practical reasons. I am not a technologist myself, I have a background in humanism, maybe a fellow technologist/technocrat will be able to explain this to you better:


In a few words this is how I would describe my theory on Bitcoin governance:


In the words of Satoshi Nakamoto himself, from the Bitcoin whitepaper:


I also explained my theory on Bitcoin governance in more depth in the thread I also linked earlier in this post.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1612347.0

I agree with you franky1, but I do agree with exstasie that you do come across a bit angry and it does get in the way of the message I support as well. I am a bit angry myself at the injustice that is occurring, Bitcoin being changed in such a radical way, is something I never signed up for and it is a shame to see that this issue might even delay mass adoption of this technology at such a critical time. Understand that not changing the blocksize limit fundamentally changes the economics of Bitcoin. I also think that the alternative economic model developed by Core is fundamentally flawed.

It is better to keep a cool head franky1, that way we can argue more rationally, I can argue rationally for this different perspective, and I have a solid understand of the theory. Based on experience I know I will not be censored here, unlike r/bitcoin.

I know it has become a very long post, I was simply replying to your singular message, I suppose the ideological split has become so wide, that we have started to see most things very differently.

At this point I suspect a controversial split will be the only way forward, keep in mind it only takes a very small minority of people to disagree to cause a split to happen in the first place. Which is definitely the case now, it is not unfair to think that some of these small blockist will simply never change their mind, and these two opposing ideologies can not exist on the same network since these differing visions also have very different road maps and projected outcomes for Bitcoin, which is why a split has most likely become inevitable.

I do agree that in principle consensual forks are not scary, but this has become a controversial topic for better or worse, no matter how long we wait or how good our arguments might be, this might not change, this is in part why splitting the network has indeed become the best possible solution to this impasse.

You would be creating something that we've seen numerous times already, an altcoin. You can try to use pseudo-intellectual reasoning to justify that your split-off version is still Bitcoin, but it isn't. It's an altcoin per definition. Additionally, there have been quite some people telling you several times to fork-off already and re-brand yourself as whatever you want (to avoid general confusion that is detrimental to both sides).

To be clear BU is compatible with all implementations of Bitcoin under all conditions, depending on the configuration that is used, though out of the box this is certainly true. It is the only client that has this characteristic. Therefore this accusation by Greg is unfounded, you can absolutely fork the network using BIP109 using BU, and I do not see anything wrong with that.

Bitcoin Unlimited is presently my favorite implementation of Bitcoin, it has the most elegant solution to the scaling debate in my opinion. Solving it once and for all, it can be forever tweaked to be made more efficient but it should never be a problem like it is now if there was wider adoption of Bitcoin Unlimited. The blocksize limit should be determined by true supply and demand, not arbitrarily decided by a centralized technocratic elite.

I hold the position that the longest SHA256 chain should be defined as Bitcoin. Whether that will be the network you favor or not will remain to be seen. However the most likely scenario is that we will split of as a minority to begin with which means we will take a new name, to avoid confusion, I can agree with you on that Lauda.

I actually think that what we will be creating will be something new, if it becomes the longest chain, it will simply be the continued evolution of Bitcoin. However these splits create a new type of "altcoin" I am referring to them as "genesis forks", since they contain the original genesis block by Satoshi and all of the same blocks up to the point of the split. Another term that I have seen being used is "spin off".

You are indeed correct in your recommendation Lauda to fork off, that is exactly what I think will happen soon. Though there is a chance that in the future you might regret not being more compromising on this issue.

The first part is wrong: "longest SHA256 chain as Bitcoin". Bitcoin could be replaced (hypothetical scenario) with a SHA256 chain that has nothing to do with the previous Bitcoin blockchain (e.g. no balances). You won't define this as Bitcoin, will you now? Just pointing out that the position is missing a characterization that describes a longest SHA256 chain relevant to Bitcoin (at least up to some point).

There is zero reason for someone rational and open-minded to regret having a wrong position, especially if they learn and adapt. If the proponents of the 'split' chain end up being right about the whole 'debate', finds a way to scale Bitcoin 'the right way',and that chain becomes the main chain, then there's no reason for me not to shift my position towards it. I'd expect an irrational person to act differently.

---

Hint: Do not make consecutive posts, but rather try to group them up as 1 post whenever possible (forum rules).

I thought you said promoting fear was a hallmark of propaganda? And, hmmmmmm, isn't that exactly what the forkists have always argued with, fear based arguments? According to Hearn and Andresen, Bitcoin should have imploded by now. Yet the real Bitcoiners won the debate, and you're coming back for more. Ok.


And why are you still pretending that the fork is about technical issues and not politics? You're the propagandist here.

You are correct that under this extremely unlikely scenario this principle does not hold, a slightly modified statement would though: "I hold the position that the longest SHA256 chain that also contains the Bitcoin genesis block should be defined as Bitcoin". Another exception might be if the hashing algorithm is ever changed for legitimate reasons, thanks for pointing this out, you are keeping me sharp!

Good to hear that Lauda, the possibility exist that we might one day be in agreement then. :)

I could always be proven wrong in the future as well, and I would have to admit the fault and continue learning.

Point taken about consecutive posts, I will do my best to avoid that. I can lump them together now actually.

I have always argued using reason, so you are still building those strawmen I see Carlton. My predictions are holding true, just look at the chart I posted earlier on this thread. I have always said that this debate has primarily been about politics, to discuss the politics of the code we must also understand the code however.

I really just came back because I missed you guys. ;)

You have always argued using a cleverly layed out mixture of reason... and every underhanded debating tactic in the book. This is the fundamental problem with your strategy; because you're attempting to convince people of something that has no merit, you have no choice but to use manipulative tactics, because genuine reason would lead readers to believe that you're wrong.

The above post is a classic example of your strategy: claiming that I'm misrepresenting your argument, then going on to agree with statements I make about your arguments (an attempt to irritate, presumably, so yeah, you're Mr. Reason on so many levels there). And then you try to conflate code with politics. The only politics in the Bitcoin source code is in the genesis block. So not one statement of yours above is founded in reason, entirely the opposite, and deliberately so. You might want to update the Carlton pscyh profile you've been referring to, lol

So, if you're willing to discuss why you want to depose the present coding team for one of your choice, go ahead. But I am, of course, expecting you to manipulate what I've said to derail back to your contrived scaling debate again. Newsflash: the actual innovators have better solutions, and nonsense arguments about unresolved malleation attacks are just desperate at this point. The person who discovered that attack is an XT/Classic bete noir, Peter Todd. And it's been squashed to the satisfaction of most Core developers, only really care and diligence in their testing methodology has prevented them closing the git issue. None of your preferred programming team either discovered or solved the bug, they simply carped about it from the sidelines like wolves trying to bully bigger stronger prey.

So go ahead, try and re-open that flank that closed up on you months ago. While the real Bitcoiners still have a pulse, you've got no chance

That's all you had to say. ::)

So according to you I use a mixture of reason and debating tactics, well thank you I guess, but that is not a complement from you as far as I understand it because you think this is a fundamental problem? Our beliefs certainly have drifted far.

Yet you are the one employing ad hominem.

It is accurate what you are saying about the "debating tactics" I deploy, however the objective is not to irritate. A Socratic dialogue has been known to irritate certain people however, this has happened throughout history.

This is part of what I think is part of the problem, you are not acknowledging and therefore not accounting for the human elements in this system. You say that there is no politics in code, there are multiple implementations of the Bitcoin code, ask the question what code, and who decides? According to Wikipedia the simple definition of politics is:


You claim that there is no politics in Bitcoin, I think you are blatantly wrong in this point. Bitcoin relies on the game theory incentives of its human participants, there even is a voting mechanism where certain human beings have to make decisions about the future of the network, Bitcoins entire value and therefore security is predicated on its price, which comes from the believe of human beings again. Like I said before, Bitcoin is a cyborg and we are all a part of the machine and politics certainly does have a role to play within such a leviathan. If you do not acknowledge that or take it into account you are not seeing the whole picture.

I have never claimed that was my objective and it is not. I think there should ideally be multiple viable competing development teams for Bitcoin, I am fine with Core contributing code to the protocol I just do not think they should be making all of the decisions, in this case I think they are wrong about restricting the blocksize limit.

I remember we have debated before who the "real" bitcoiners really are, since last time I checked Satoshi did support on chain scaling and this ideology of small blockism is actually a relatively new development. Not that I really care who you think the real Bitcoiners are, its just from my perspective it has a touch of irony.

The primary reason for my return has been to discuss and promote the idea of splitting the chain intentionally as a minority. I am certain that this will happen, it is one of the main reasons I am still holding the ratio of Bitcoin to altcoins that I am today, since I am very interested in the eventual genesis forks that will spawn from Bitcoin itself.

You've also factored in something that may likely be modified to a certain degree in the future. Even if the algorithm was only modified to SHA512, then even the current Bitcoin wouldn't fit into that description.

I think that, even if we disregard a lot of the misinformation in regards to the block size limit (e.g. idiotic posts like:"My computer could handle 100MB+ blocks"; "Scale now or doomsday"), there are some people with genuine concerns on each side. Such people would not be afraid of being wrong. The goal is to scale Bitcoin in the best possible approach. I'm primarily anti controversial hard forks. Additionally, I think that this debate is being abused by people who could be damaged by Bitcoin's success. They could easily abuse it by paying people to "infiltrate" each side and keep inciting war, flame and hatred on each other.

Great!

And this is what Veritas Sapere represents.

It's the most twisted debater I've happened upon for a while. Above, it falsely asserts I'm using strawman arguments, then goes on to unleash a panoply of strawman arguments using my recent replies.


Every single Veritas Sapere argument is couched in deceit. It always has to lie or manipulate to make a point, because it doesn't have any actual arguing points.

I've already debunked it's nonsense assertions that Peter Todd's malleability vuln has in fact been patched. And there's more.... it claims above that SegWit transactions are larger than standard transactions, but of course, this is only true if one is carefully selective with which facts one presents and which one does not (another classic Veritas Sapere strategy, it literally behaves as if inconvenient facts do not exist).

If Veritas wasn't being so self-servingly selective, it would report that SegWit transactions are being rolled out in 2 stages - to begin with, they're wrapped in ordinary Bitcoin P2PKH or P2SH formats, and this makes them larger than standard Bitcoin transactions today. But the 2nd stage involves invoking native P2WPKH and P2WSH, which will be more compact than regular transactions. Hence, Veirtas Sapere is lying by omission.

But of course, it will return fire without mentioning a word about it's deception and manipulation.

Interesting how the personality of this particular troll is "honest and straightforward", but you don't have to dig hard to discover that it is in fact the polar opposite: deceitful and tortuous. And I've demonstrated that as a fact. (not Ad Hominem when it's a fact, getting too used to the "tactics" already lol)

I think that are specifically wrong in saying that you are anti controversial hard forks, I think that increasing the blocksize will always be controversial because of the culture of believe that has now been build up in the Bitcoin community, according to that reasoning we should therefore never increase the blocksize limit? I think this is fundamentally flawed, especially considering how important a parameter this blocksize limit actually is. I think part of the difference in our opinion is that you are also not taking the competition into account.

I think that both sides suspect each other of being part of a psychological operation by a possible a government agency in order to disrupt the Bitcoin community, historically this does not even seem that unlikely. There is a long history of infiltration and disruption by government agencies in order to counter organizations and communities they see as threatening.

Though personally I would find it much more likely that their goal would be to restrict and disrupt the original plan of Bitcoin by restricting the blocksize limit. Since from their perspective an unrestricted Bitcoin would be more threatening, I could get into where the blockstream funding actually comes from. Then again maybe there are spyop agents on both sides of the debate, further inflaming and widening the gulf. Though I think it would be more productive to stick to the issues compared to pointlessly accuse each other of being double agents, that is just more ad hominen after all.

My argument stands on its own, if Core simply increased the blocksize limit to two megabytes it would reunite much of the community and Bitcoin would not be currently suffering from a congested network, which is currently causing transaction delays, increased fees and unreliability. This is not good for adoption, I understand that you think lighting network and sidechains should replace most Bitcoin transactions and that therefore we do not need to increase the blocksize limit. However I propose that we increase the blocksize limit now so that we do not need suffer from a congested network without actually having any layer two solutions ready, and then when the lighting network and sidechains are finally ready and deployed we can see whether people choose to move their activities off chain, or whether people prefer transacting on chain with all of the advantages and disadvantages that brings, or more likely something in between, then we will know whether we need to increase the blocksize limit again or not, instead of radically changing the fundamental design of Bitcoin now and betting the future of Bitcoin on what is essentially still vaporware.

I know you like to paint me as being an extremely unreasonable person, however what I am proposing here is very reasonable, most people outside of this field would recognize that the small blockist are taking an extreme and fundamentalist position. Most big blockist are applying pragmatic rationalism. Ideally I would just remove the blocksize limit completely or use an adaptive blocksize. However as a compromise we proposed the mechanism within Classic, for an increase to two megabytes, originally we went from 20MB to 8MB and finally to 2MB, and I could argue using Bitcoin Unlimited we could even agree to a 1.1MB blocksize limit. There has been zero compromise from the small block camp, after 18 months. There is not even a blocksize limit increase on the Core road map.

Which is why at this point we will just split Bitcoin, it is our right to maintain and continue the original Bitcoin blockchain as it was intended. We have the freedom and capability to do this, if the small blockist could just compromise a small amount this would not happen and they could avoid the split from happening at all, I know many of you fear the split. I have nothing to fear from it, at this point I see it as progress and an opportunity for further evolution. Bring on the intentional minority splits I say, let the chips fall and allow people to put their money where their mouth is, that way we will really see over the long term what people value more, at this point it could even be an alternative cryptocurrency that overtakes Bitcoin.

No, that's not what a controversial hard fork is. A consensus based upgrade (via a HF) of the block size limit is very possible. A controversial fork would be one trying to push only up to a certain percent of miners, which make up a 'majority' or even a minority, which is far different from upgrades based on consensus.

We have been down this path before, it is unsafe to do so. Just because you may not know or understand why that is, that doesn't make it any less true. There may even be security issues at 1 MB that are not publicly disclosed for the obvious purposes. Whoever you ask about such, I doubt that they would disclose them outside of their 'inner' circles due to safety reasons.

As soon as the quadratic validation time problem has been solved, I see a semi-near future in which it is possible to increase the block size to a total of ~3-4 MB (includes the base expected amount that Segwit should provide, which is around 180%, i.e. 1.8 MB). However, the parameters are certainly going to be much different that you guys are expecting them to be. Doing a HF, which requires ALL custom implementations to be upgraded (this takes time for big businesses) just for a block size limit upgrade is also inefficient. The next HF should be optimally carry desired changes that require a HF in addition to a capacity increase with a grace period of 6-12 months.

Moot points, from Veritas, all of them. It doesn't want Bitcoin to scale, it wants Bitcoin taken over by banksters and run into the ground.

This is why it's trying so incredibly hard to twist the argument against the universally appraised experts on Bitcoin. Claiming it's a 50:50 split is entirely manipulative and has no basis in fact. If Veritas' argument made any sense, then miners, users and devs would have actually supported at least one of the 3 hard-forking clients that have already been attempted so far.

All failed, because of a lack of demonstrable support. Their camp were so desperate that they tried to fake demonstrable support using non-functional nodes, and now Classic, XT and BU are languishing at the bottom of the client league table. Meanwhile, versions 12, 12.1 and 13 of Bitcoin Core have attracted more users in a few days than the coup-clients managed in their entire life cycle.

Your coups failed, and this last ditch effort will fail too.

I have not used any strawman arguments, you are saying that I am using fear because according to Hearn and Andresen, Bitcoin should have imploded by now. To be clear I did not say that at all, you are literally using a strawmen argument, this should be obvious to you and everyone here.


You are just attacking me here, you can not prove I am deceitful or that I am lying.

I did not realize that particular vulnerability has been fixed, this was less then a month ago, it does not exactly inspire confidence in the code so close to when it is supposed to be released on the Bitcoin network.

You are actually just confirming what I am saying here, I was correct in saying that the first version of segwit that will be rolled out on the Bitcoin network if Core gets its way will make transactions less efficient, I am also correct in saying that doing segwit as a hardfork makes it much more efficient. Since this P2WPKH and P2WSH will require a hard fork in order to implement as far as I understand it, since it is not backwards compatible.

If that was your objective you have failed, you have repeated many times that I am deceptive and manipulative supposedly,

I have not attacked you a single time and it seems like you are the one employing the Ad Hominem here continuously. Rather ironic really considering what you are accusing me of doing. Thanks for describing me as "honest and straightforward" I guess, I did not mind the other insult either of using a mixture of reason and "debating tactics".

You're just asserting all that without providing examples, and lying about what you said about Segwit transaction types in the expectation that no-one can be bothered to traverse your overcomplicated posts to find it.

Your objective is so incredibly obvious: falsehood trolling. That is, carefully constructed lies that sound very similar to what happened, but subtly (and sometimes nakedly) distort what actually happened. Bear in mind that this doesn't resemble Socratic dialogue technique at all as you claimed earlier (which involves a process of asking leading questions, not making statements).

Can they hardfork the ability for Node hosts to get a small reward? It would be nice to upgrade my Raspberry Pi.

This would take a lot more time, and wouldn't be "much more efficient" in it's current state. Deploying it with a hard fork isn't even a big change. There was a post by maaku on reddit stating that it's rather just a few lines of code.

A hard fork can pretty much change anything. However, the question is always "Should we change that?". The answer to your suggestion is a clear: Not likely going to happen.

Of course it is possible but whether something is practically attainable within a reasonable time frame is a different question. I understand the difference between a consensus based hard fork and a controversial hard fork. My point is that is that this entire subject has become controversial and there are some very staunch defenders of the blocksize limit, even within the Core development team itself. It would only take one of these developers to veto the code in order to block the change. Since any code that does not come from core would be regarded as controversial? I could see this taking years if any change is even achieved at all, there is a good reason why large democracies vote by a simple majority and not consensus, consensus in the literal sense of the word is almost impossible to achieve among large groups of people.

I can see Bitcoin easily being overtaken during this period, this is one of the reasons I am also invested in the altcoins. Bitcoin truly seems stagnant in comparison to me, the alternatives are able to innovate much faster and already have much greater transactional capacity then Bitcoin.

I think it is ridiclous for you to say that 2MB is not safe. We have discussed the reosons for this extensivly already, for anyone intrested just look at our post histories.

I am presently mining 17MB blocks on the testnet using Bitcoin Unlimited. ;)

So one year from the time that it is announced, and it has not even been announced yet and probably will not be any time soon. Great, lots of luck with that, I would advise you and everyone here to diversify their investments, this is the reason why Bitcoin has become stagnant.

Fortunately there are many alternatives to Bitcoin out there, I personally like Dash, and its solutions to governance, Ethereum and Monero are also both good cryptocurrencies, all of these cryptocurrencies do not have problems with scaling, Dash has a second tier, incentivized and collateralized voting full nodes that can handle a much greater load, because of the build in incentive. Ethereum already has far greater capacity then Bitcoin and it will have even more in following releases. Monero simply has an adaptive blocksize, with some very interesting incentive structures to keep the blocks from becoming to large.

I am pointing this out, because I think that you are underestimating the competition and overestimating the network effect of Bitcoin. Waiting several years for a simple capacity increase while the network is congested with all of its negative consequences is terrible for mass adoption, meanwhile the market share of Bitcoin is now 79.6%, there is a good reason for that and the trend will most likely continue as Bitcoin will continue to lose market cap to its competition.

What's wrong with selling all your Bitcoin (prove it IMO) for altcoins, Veritas? Why would you stick around on the ostensibly sinking Bitcoin ship, if you really believe what you're saying?

I actually got the information about backwards compatiblity from the github. It says it right there in the wiki:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0142.mediawiki

It started with leading questions, I obviously also do not consider what I say to be lies either. Which you seem to keep accusing me off.

Stagnant based on what, having the highest market capitulation since late 2013/early 2014, having the higher number of transactions per day than it ever did, having the by far(!) the best development team in the ecosystem? Please tell me what's the "stagnation here". Hint: Not being able to process a number of TXs that you want != stagnation.

I'd use a nice word that I use for people that usually say this, but then you'd cry out to ad hominem. 2 MB is not safe, not matter how you put it, no matter what you say, it doesn't change that since it's a fact. Obviously you can use 2 MB safely if you create normal transactions. However, it's just a matter of time until someone starts constructing TXs that will DOS the whole network as validation will take too long.

I couldn't care if it were a million TB blocks, that doesn't change the fact that they're inherently unsafe and carry a huge security risk (disregarding the fact that such blocks would kill decentralization very quickly).

Dash has a very shady history behind it, I know since I was an early adopter. ETH is neither a immutable, censorship resistant nor decentralized. Additionally, they've had very troubling security problems with the DAO and now with geth. Monero will likely end up being illegal if it picks up. Don't even get my started on the transaction volume on those chains. Anything else?

One of the main reasons I am holding Bitcoin now is because I am interested in the cryptocurrencies that will be spawned from Bitcoin, the spin off chains or genesis chains. Or in the unlikely event that Core sees reason and increases the blocksize limit, but I suppose we can both now agree that this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Diversifying our investments at such a time does seem wise to me. Maybe when enough people leave Bitcoin, the small blockists might then finally be able to reach consensus. ;)

EDIT. I misread your message, I have rewritten it

So you're pretending to answer a point that I didn't even make. That's called a strawman argument, remember?

First of all, the transaction rate of Bitcoin has historicly been increasing, untill it hit the blocksize limit, I do not consider that to be a positive thing, literal stagnation because of a restriction in the code.

Secondly, Bitcoin is stagnating technologically, when compared to the alternative cryptocurrencies.

Thirdly as I proved earlier in this thread Bitcoin has been losing market share steadily over the last two years, while the altcoin market share is growing consistently.

I can give you many examples, and I support all three of the projects I just mentioned, I could go into defending each of them on their merits, but I am busy enough attempting to defend the original principles of Bitcoin here on this forum.

No, that's definitely a false statement. Bitcoin has the most advanced and developed protocol. Most of the shitcoins haven't even patched up the security exploits up until the latest versions.

That doesn't matter since the market cap of Bitcoin has been growing. It has been the highest it's even been since early 2014. Besides, we all know who's behind the altcoin pumping schemes. Hint: The last name starts with a "V". ::)

You can say why you like them, or why they may be good but you can't change any of the things that I've said because they're facts. There's no need to sugar-coat it.

Why do you misread so many messages where your reply bears no relation to what you are responding to?

i prefer to wait a bit longer

Sigh...this guy again? Back pumping DASH: totally expected. Presenting Ethereum's mutable bloatchain as a goal: standard. VeritasSapere, give it up. Nobody who has read more than a handful of your posts will ever again subject themselves to your tortured logic, your rationalization upon rationalizations which are completely divorced from the subject at hand---always. Take your shitcoin pumping to the altcoin forum or r/btc, please.

How Bitcoin is developed should not depend on altcoins. Altcoins are testnets for Bitcoin. You've been saying this same shit ("Bitcoin stagnating, alts are the future") for over a year now. Why haven't you left yet?

Why do you believe Bitcoin is sinking?

dont worry about carlton he is cheek to cheek with greg maxwell who wants monero to be the next big thing.
carlton doesnt care about bitcoin(decentralized/not controlled).
in short he defends core not bitcoin, because he wants core to control bitcoin(centralized mindset), thus defending core is defending bitcoin in his eye

he wants core to twist bitcoin, to stagnate bitcoin with fee wars and nodes that dont validate(if its not core) or store transaction history(if its cores pruned mode) so that his favorite monero can grow.
i highly doubt carlton can have a logical debate about bitcoin without it sounding like defending core.

Anyone that believes an alt will surpass Bitcoin any time soon is extremely delusional

I find this statement rather amusing, I hope you do realize that a clone of Bitcoin is considered not be innovative at all within the altcoin world, that should tell you something, any altcoin that is worth anything improves on Bitcoin in some way.

I suppose you can keep telling your self that 10min block times and a one megabyte blocksize limit with a transparent blockchain are the perfect parameters, this is Bitcoin maximilism I suppose, it would be healthier to at least acknowledge the innovation that is occurring in the altcoin space.

You can joke all you want, but Bitcoin is still losing market share to the alternative cryptocurrencies and that is a fact.

Most of your critisisms of these cryptocurrencies are not facts but opinions, I will prove that you now:

I am familiar with the history of Dash, I do not consider it to fundementally undermine the currency of Dash today. I can agree that the history is "shady" but whether that effects the viability of the currency today is again an opinion.

This statement is just not true, at least not in the way that I suspect you mean it. I supported the ETH hard fork, and I am actually more bullish now then I was before on ETH. First of all in terms of its "immutability" and censorship resistance it is no different to Bitcoin in terms of normal blockchain transactions, it is equally immutable and censorship resistant, it is equally difficult to roll back transactions on Bitcoin compared to Ethereum, a state change to the contract layer is different to actually rolling back transactions on the blockchain, I have noticed many Bitcoiners equate these two things as if they where the same thing, it is not, this is mostly likely because they are thinking of this event in Bitcoin terms when there are some very important differences in the design. It was only possible to return peoples funds because it existed within a smart contract, something that would not even be possible within Bitcoin.

Arguably Ethereum is presently more decentralized then Bitcoin because it uses an ASIC resistant mining algorithm.

Maybe it is best not to get into a full discussion of the pros and cons of these events and of the design of Ethereum and Bitcoin, but as proof of work blockchains their governance, and transaction immutability are actually identical on a technical level at least. So my point is that your opinion on these altcoins are an opinion and not a fact.

Monero will become illegal if it picks up, and you know this as a fact? Again I would argue that this is just an opinion, this is classic Bitcoin maximalism, completely disregarding and not taking the competition into account at all, even being dismissive of their achievements and innovations.

The transaction volume on these chains is obviously much lower, but the transactional capacity of these chains is much much higher. It seems like a strange argument to use against these altcoins when Bitcoins transaction volume is presently restricted, which means one of these altcoins could easily overtake the transaction volume of Bitcoin one day, as long as Bitcoins transaction volume remains restricted.

You've got the same problem as Veritas and Franky: I didn't say that. To understand why, you need to know what "ostensibly" means, which is: according to your/the story

I find this statement rather amusing, I hope you do realize that a clone of Bitcoin is considered not be innovative at all within the altcoin world, that should tell you something, any altcoin that is worth anything improves on Bitcoin in some way.
[/quote]
Pure strawman. I was talking about security exploits, not specific features that some altcoins may or may not have.

I was not joking when I said mister V was behind it.

It's not an opinion, it's a fact. We know the definition of the word 'shady' and it perfectly aligns with what happened with DRK in the first few days.

No. The chain is not immutable, as was demonstrated with a rollback. As soon as you do this once, it sets a dangerous precedence. Please let me know if my DAO fails miserably why you won't roll back and bail me out like the Fed? Oh wait, "The DAO" was too big too fail. I wonder where we've heard that before. ::)

Straw man.

No. Stop defending mutable shitcoins.

Yes. I can't tell you how though, since that's confidential.

I'll believe it once I see it. Until such time, these are just unbacked claims.

---

Hint: Every-time you say "Bitcoin maximilism" to back up your arguments, you just end up looking like a fool.

@Veritas:

for the 2nd time, answer; why do you use so many strawman arguments, so frequently? and why do you deny it so vehemently?

Not a strawman, you where not that specific in your statement, furthermore such a hand waving statement that most "shitcoins" have lots of security exploits does not carry much weight.

Bitcoin market share is now at 79% a historic low.

It is not a fact, the word shady is highly subjective, and even though I do agree with you in using that term, it still stands that whether this should effect the viability of the currency today is again an opinion, and not a fact.

Blockchains are not protected by precedent or social convention like you might think but hard cryptography and game theory mechanics. In regards to the transactional immutability Bitcoin and Ethereum are mostly identical, it is practically impossible to roll back blocks and therefore also transactions. This is not what happened with the Ethereum hard fork, it involved a state change on the smart contract layer through the "consensus" mechanism. I consider any change to the rules of the protocol legitimate if it is brought about in such a way.

I understand that this is a major difference in our theories on how the governance of these blockchain systems function, I perceive it to be much more of a social construct, a tool for human beings to govern themselves and each other in a better way. It is a good thing that the code can change through this governance mechanisms, "immutability" in the literal sense of the word is not something we should aim for, if something goes wrong the majority of people should be able change the rules of the system, ideas and people also evolve, these blockchain networks need to evolve with our civilizations.

It is wrong to describe the DOA fork as a bail out, since there are no extra taxes, inflation or "haircuts" like there would be in a bailout like we understand it today. Rather I think the analogy of a bank robbery is much better, we are simply intervening, preventing the bank robbery from taking place. I think this is perfectly justifiable. Before you say "code is law" and smart contracts have no value if they are not "immutable". The opposite is actually true, there is a good reason why all law systems today are non-deterministic, it is the intent of the law here that counts, not the letter of the law.

At the same time even though I do not agree with the reosons for Ethereums Classics existence, I do absolutely respect their right to self determination and at the same time they have given Bitcoin a perfectly viable option that we could follow, splitting the chain, resolving this ideological debate.

Again not a straw man, you can clearly see that I am directly responding to what you have said, furthermore it is impossible for this statement to even be a straw man argument because I am not even implying or inferring your position here whatsoever.

Not an argument.

You can not expect a rational person to believe you when you say such a thing, you might have insider knowledge of some sort but I am not in a position to know that, it would be gullible of me to believe you, surely you would agree. Furthermore you claim to have knowledge that Monero is going to be banned in all jurisdictions. What kind of a person are you then? Can we deduct based on this information that you have ties to government? Whatever I am not going to speculate, but this is a rather peculiar statement.

lauda is just a young guy (under 30) he has no real world experience, no experience of coding.
he is however very chummy with many monero holders, and i think he is just baiting you.
secretly him and his chums want monero to supersede bitcoin.
the hint is in the REKT campainers posts. gmaxwell is highly into monero, so is the REKT campaigner icebreaker. then we have the troll twins carlton and lauda who blindly follow their chums and back each other up in a circle jerk by getting spoonfed with whatever false information they can get hold of to push bitcoin in one direction with the ultimate aim that they hope monero becomes more useful because bitcoin has lost its utility
EG lauda loves the fee war that pushes bitcoin away from being cheap for the unbanked third world
EG lauda loves sidechains and offchain because he doesnt want bitcoin capacity growth onchain (even when his friends beloved monero has it)
EG lauda loves centralized control and doesnt want users to decide how they want bitcoin to grow

I prove your presentation is misleading or false all the time, you've never done the same. And this Monero thing, what are you talking about? I've never been involved in Monero, the only reason you have to bash me with that canard is pure desperation. And you claim I'm trolling! Where is your evidence for this babbling ::)

No evidence exists, here or anywhere else, that I used or use Monero. It's a pretty good alt, but it's still not going to compete properly with Bitcoin without solving it's (far more significant) scaling issues. Last (and first) word on the matter.

It's a pure strawman. Don't blame me for your inadequate research into the development of those altcoins. None of them comes close to Bitcoin in terms of security (both code and network security).

This is an obvious case of you spreading false information again. The historic low was reached on March 13, 2016 with 74.41% dominance. Furthermore, it has also hovered around a lower threshold back in late 2014 (specifically 18th of December). If you want to preach the doomsday bullshit, at least do proper research.

You're defending a premined shitcoin since you're now invested in it (your words; this makes you highly biased; note: I'm not invested in Bitcoin). That makes you pretty much any average pump & dump altcoin fanatic.

You've wrote an useless wall of text that doesn't matter at all. We all know that ETH's promise that "Code is law" was a pure lie. The primary thing that matters is the DTV factor, i.e. "Distance-to-Vitalik".

Stop wasting everyone's time "no you're wrong, and I'm right" bullshit. You don't even understand fallacies, yet you call upon them constantly against other people.

"All jurisdictions"? I have not made this claim.

No, stop being a blind fool. I don't have any ties to Monero. There's no reason to use it besides for illicit purposes. Not that this is the topic here.

I have to ask, for I am wondering, later on (Lets say in 100 years), if bitcoin is still around and all, will the mining (calculation of the blockchain) be so difficult where one block could get as large as 100GB in file size?  What is put in place where bitcoin will not time out because the transactions are just to difficult to process and store?

The Bitcoin difficulty has not correlation with the block size.

The block size limit, which is currently 1 MB. The block size limit is a consensus rule and does not change due to mining difficulty.

i basically wasted 30 seconds of my life on lauda's off topic bait..(not gonna be baited to search whole 2 years, just enough to show he was involved, which he denied)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.msg8503834#msg8503834
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.msg8512228#msg8512228
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.msg8515859#msg8515859
this final post was the biggest laugh.
especially in regards to all of laudas attempts to make bitcoin look bad saying capacity should not grow and 2mb is bad...(you know, for the same reasons he defended monero)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.msg8524022#msg8524022

Look at those dates (you are either a blind fool or just a troll): August 25, 2014. I have been involved in a lot of altcoins in the past, but have exited the altcoin space during 2014-2015. Now, this isn't even part of the topic here and you have clearly failed. I suggest that you either try to make reasonable arguments relevant to the topic or keep quiet.

---

Hint: The topic is "Stop fuckin' around, fork the son-of-a-bitch already.".

The fact that you are now resorting to character attacks says it all. Meanwhile, your pal VeritasSapere has been pumping DASH, Monero and Ethereum throughout this thread.

It's pretty clear that none of your arguments stand on their own merit.

I was specifically responding to you saying that Bitcoin has the most "advanced and developed protocol". I responded by saying that some altcoins are more innovative then Bitcoin, this is a valid response and it is certainly not a straw man argument.

That was and still is an accurate statement, I said that the Bitcoin market share is at a historic low. If I wanted to say it was at an all time low I would have said so. Furthermore when you look at the chart you can clearly see that the points on the chart you are referring to are just short dips. The period we are in now has been categorized by having a consistently low Bitcoin market share. If we where to take a weighted average of the Bitcoin market share today over the last six months we would be at an all time low now.

If you can look at this chart and not see a downwards trend in Bitcoins market share then you are simply blind to the truth.
http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#btc-percentage

I find it revealing you are not invested in Bitcoin, people can make their own judgement in that regard. For the record I have a bigger share in Bitcoin compared to any other altcoin, including Dash.

I understand now that most of what you are doing is just attacking my character at this point, it should be obvious to everyone here that I have remained civil, unlike yourself I do not engage in that type of ad hominen and other type of fallacious argumentation since it is not productive towards rational discussion.

Not an argument.

This is also not an argument, I find it ironic that are saying I do not understand fallacies considering you are accusing me of using a straw man argument over a statement in which I do not infer or imply your position at all. Furthermore for me to point towards the decentralization of mining in Ethereum due to an ASIC resistant algorithm in response to you saying Ethereum is not decentralized is a perfectly valid argument. As a matter of fact I am precisely refuting the argument you made to me directly, the very opposite of a straw man argument.


I hope you can stop accusing me of straw men arguments considering that I have irrefutable proven that you have falsely accused me of a straw man argument in this case. I do not expect you to admit that you where wrong, however if you did I would respect you more for doing so.

To be clear you claimed to know as a fact that Monero would be made illegal if there was greater adoption, you further went on to claim that you had insider knowledge that this was true, first of all your insider knowledge can not be considered as a fact by other people because it can not be publicly verified.

Secondly if I understood your argument correctly, you where saying that Monero can not be a viable alternative to Bitcoin because it will be made illegal, based on your insider knowledge of course. However as far as I understand it, something like Monero could only be stopped by having it made illegal in all jurisdictions, just like Bitcoin, which obviously makes Monero extremely resilient, just like Bitcoin. I did obviously assume that you meant in all jurisdictions since otherwise your reasoning for why Monero can not be a competitor to Bitcoin would be flawed. Since I was using Monero as a counter example to your argument that Bitcoin does not have any competition from the alternative cryptocurrencies.

I have a hypothetical question. Let us pretend that a hard fork indeed happened. For this example let us use BitcoinXT as the new version to be used in the fork. If the hard fork ended up like the one that happened to Ethereum, who is to blame and what should be done? Now we have two Bitcoin chains and both have die hard supporters unwilling to let go for each.

If there is anyone to blame it is the proponents of the hard fork, because they initiated a network split. There is nothing to be done about it. Miners will mine any chain which it is rational to mine on; there's no way to stop miners from securing either chain. And whether it's rational for miners depends on users; there is no way to force users to use one client or the other.

So if users remain on the original chain, the network will likely split and we will permanently have multiple incompatible networks/blockchains. It doesn't matter which chain has more work (POW) because the two networks cannot communicate with one another.

You don't get out much do you?

That would be like suggesting you could only go into a shop and pay with Visa instead of MasterCard or Visa-versa and then saying to the customer "Well, even though you have the right card, your money isn't the right type of money.

Which fork would get to retain the right to call itself BitCoin?

The horror, the horror.

https://i.imgur.com/siYLLDz.png

Are we afraid of the wisdom and function of free market capitalism? You know... that thing that's supposed to underpin the incentives of Bitcoin?


Whoa... and here I was just thinking lauda was a petty sig spammer and paid toady... The ol' iCEBREAKER model to "early-adopter" profit. Sly as a fox Lauda, I'm legitimately impressed.  :)

The price is besides the point here. The thing to learn from the Ethereum hard fork is that there were factors that they did not anticipate that would happen. Instead of doing only the hard fork, the original chain lived on and became a competing chain. The effect of it on Ethereum may be minimal because the network is quite young. So yes they have that luxury to make drastic measures. My question is how will this affect a more established blockchain like Bitcoin?

It's called freedom, friendo. A fork, it's the open source way.

It's why little Johnny is better off if Mommy and Daddy (who hate and abuse each other, in front of the investors kids), find separate houses.

No one is to blame or should be. What has recently happened to Ethereum is not a bad outcome, splitting Bitcoin in the same way should be considered a positive thing. Like dumbfbrankings just said it represents freedom, the analogy of a couple breaking up and finding separate houses is indeed a good analogy.

If you think that the split in Ethereum's chain was not a bad outcome then you are gravely mistaken. Who would want for it to split like that resulting with another chain that is now competing with your own. You also say that splitting the Bitcoin blockchain should be considered a positive thing? That is absurd. I do not know if you are serious or you are trolling.

There is more at stake here because the whole Bitcoin economy is relying on the stability of the network to keep it going. If they do a hard fork and then the network splits then they are risking destroying that economy and the value of the coin itself. I am certain a lot of people WILL look for someone to blame.

Thank you for explaining that. What you've described is the 'cherry picking fallacy'.

That's why you're heavily biased. Just the fact that you aren't willing to admit this to yourself, makes most of your arguments plummet into water.

Not an argument. Stop crying out to "ad hominem" to defend flawed positioning and argumentation.

This is very well an argument as it describes the lies that the shitcoin was built upon, which later turned into a mutable chain.

I did claim it was going to be illegal. I didn't specify where. I didn't make any claims about insider knowledge, that's what you concluded out of my statement. "It's confidential" may mean a lot of things.

---

Objectively speaking, I can only put someone like that in one (or more) of the following groups:
1) Trolling.
2) Paid shill.
3) Idiot.
Hint: This isn't ad hominem, nor character assassination. This is an objective evaluating of a viewpoint which is not rational.

And if Monero is going to be called illegal, who's going to label it "illegal"... the authorities?

They have a hard time accepting bitcoin as money not to talk of an altcoin.

Then why don't you fork? Why do people like you just constantly talk about forking, rather than following through? Is it because most of the technical community isn't interested? Is it because you are waiting for miners to pressure opposing users with their hash rate?

I don't see why you guys can't just fork, if not for fear that no one would support your chain. Go ahead and fork; it's the open source way. I'm guessing you won't get very far.

Patience young padawan... the market will serve as the orchestra for this dance... follow its lead. Or don't... and dance to your own drummer. Freedom...

It sounds like you are just hand-waving, repeating tired cliches and really saying nothing at all. This seems like a theme with the pro-fork crowd. "The market this, the market that..." But the market seems generally opposed to a hard fork---that's the overall sentiment on social media, the forum, slacks and mailing lists....backed by nodes and miners.

Perhaps it's more important to note that the market can't change the rules of the Bitcoin network---it can only switch to a new network with new tokens. In the process, you'll probably split the community into multiple blockchains.

A lot of people (like me) oppose hard forks on principle in the context of a consensus ledger. You're not going to convince us. You can push bandwagon propaganda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_techniques) about the inevitable victory of your chain if you want (that's the most common approach)....but you will split the network and people like me will make sure you won't have a clean hard fork.

Gasp! Will you dump your pre-fork sig spam earnings on the on-chain scaling side of teh fork?! Pls, no!

controversial forks (intentional splits) are not good.

that is why THE COMMUNITY wants a CONSENSUAL FORK meaning the majority continue on a single path, but have the upgraded features, higher capacity buffer, where the orphaning mechanism built into bitcoin take care of the minority.

again not an intentional split (EG ethereum '--oppose-dao-fork')
but a true consensual upgrade of features and buffer, based on majority consent

the problem is that core fanboys dont want a true consensual fork.. they have done all they can to give core power and control. to veto out any plan that involves a consensual fork..
segwit does not require consent(no nodes need to upgrade to consent to the change) and some people are mixing up the metaphors to think that the only options are controversial split or no consent.. by calling the no consent option, consensus..(facepalm)

i just wish the core fanboys dont REKT a core team release of 2mb
so then EVERYONE has the freedom of choosing, and that choice does not have to be a social choice of fanboys of certain groups.. but instead based on features they want the chain to continue on in one direction using.
because those in he core fanclub can remain with core because there is a core version of 2mb buffer

again by having a core version. it stops the social war and brings the debate back to basics of features.

wake up people. if your a core lover. by shouting hate about core releasing a true consensual fork version because you prefer the controlled no-consent path. you are truly revealing that you dont want decentralization. and it cant be hidden by "no i love core", because the code would be a core release.

but lets watch the replies from some who will shout hate speach of decentralization and show obvious bias to want core of no-consent changes. dominance and centralized control.
lets watch who REKTs people like luke JR who will release a core code implementation of 2mb buffer.

in short if you want decentralization and love core. let luke (as part of core) release the implementation.
in short if you want centralization and love cores no-consent corporate policy. reply with your hatred of decentralization

Interesting. Your last few one-line posts seem a lot more spammy than anything I've written. You haven't contributed a thing to this thread. And to be clear: Segwit contributes to on-chain scaling. For instance, it fixes perverse UTXO incentives which cause longterm UTXO bloat. It also increases capacity in a backward compatible way, to mitigate the externalities of increased throughput on nodes. This is what scaling is about: optimizing the protocol to mitigate the effects of throughput, maintaining the system's robustness. You are just talking about increasing throughput with zero scaling mechanisms. That's not scaling at all.

More than that, Segwit enables significant on-chain scaling mechanisms like aggregate signatures, which can cut down signature size by 30-40%. That's on-chain capacity gained. There's lots of little things I've read are in the works to improve verification and syncing times and mitigate bandwidth spikes and network latencies---all extremely important because scalability entails retaining node and miner decentralization in the context of increased growth. Lightning transactions (aside from the 2-of-2 multisig transactions that open/close channels) are indeed off-chain---what's the problem? Every transaction is  trustless and can be broadcast to the blockchain.

You should look up the meaning of "consensual"....it relates to "consent". The "majority" as you say cannot "consent" for the minority. Consensual means every user agrees, not tyranny of the majority. Orphaning is irrelevant here---why would you even mention it? If a hard fork gains the majority of hash rate, the minority just stays on the weaker chain. They can't even see the "longer chain" because it's invalid according to their consensus rules. They just ignore it. Two separate blockchains. This is why there is no such thing as a "majority rule consensual hard fork".

And what makes you think a hard fork won't be controversial?


Nobody is going to stop Luke from submitting a pull request. Whether it's merged is another matter. And whether users support it is another matter.

...And now if we don't support some hard fork, we hate decentralization, right...

This doesn't make sense at all. A HF proposed by Core would still make them retain "power and control" that you're preaching about . Note: I'm not saying I agree with what you're saying, just that it doesn't make sense).

As soon as the security issues of that are mitigated, then I don't see a (big) problem with it.

I'm actually quite curious and waiting for them to release a proposal and implementation. It's taking too long in any case.

My impression from lurking in IRC and the Slack over the past few months is that there's no consensus around a hard fork. I also think there was somewhat of a mutual understanding among most people involved in the July SF dev/miner meeting....that in the wake of Ethereum's failed hard fork, that a hard fork is more dangerous than most had expected. It's on the back burner. Way back. I don't think the timing of the deadline for that proposal, and the SF meeting were coincidental.

I thought that someone may associate my post with that July/August deadline (or whatever exact the deadline of a meeting was supposed to be. However, that's not what I meant and not what I'm concerned about. AFAIK luke-jr said that they would still write and submit both  a proposal and the code. I'm interested in the specifics of the proposal (not the deadline/activation mechanism) as I doubt it will be solely a block size increase (which would make that particular HF very inefficient; there are desirable changes that could be done along with it).

But you're not advocating finding separate houses, you're casually arguing for the right to evict the legitimate owners and burn the house down.

Freedom does include the option of freedom to be an abusive, destructive dickwad. But all freely chosen acts have consequences, good bad and indifferent. Trying to pretend that all free choices are magically the best choice is naive and moronic

Can you explain to me why the split in Ethereums chain was such a bad outcome? I am invested in Ethereum myself and from my perspective everything seems just fine. Do you think it would be better if either side did not get their way and would therefore be "forced" to leave Ethereum or stay on a chain they do not agree with? Splitting seems like a better solution since all parties can be happy, both ETH and ETC supporters get to have the chain that they want. This seems much better then either side being able to dictate what the rules of the protocol should be for both sides. This is and should primarily be about freedom first.



Shifting the goal post I see, explain to me how am I cherry picking? As far as this line of argumentation is involved I did respond directly to a part of your statement, which was not directly linked to the second part of your sentence, advancement and development are not necessarily depended upon the security patches from the latest version of Bitcoin, since in the example I used, Monero and Ethereum are not even based on the Bitcoin code at all, therefore I would think that the latest security patches from Bitcoin are actually irrelevant.

Because I am invested in Bitcoin none of my arguments are therefore valid? This is a strange thing to say to me, if anything being invested in Bitcoin aligns my incentives to do what is best for Bitcoin.

Maybe instead of constantly attacking with me ad hominem you should argue rationally with me and not resort to such manipulative tactics.

So to be clear, you think that is a counter argument to this:

So according to you, your counter argument to what I have said here is that Ethereum is a mutable shit coin and that all that matters is "Distance-to-Vitalik". If that is your complete argument we can leave it at that, people reading this can decide for themselves what they think is more correct.

This discussion started off by me saying that both of our positions are just subjective opinions because they are based on ideology, but I suppose that you are still maintaining the position that what you are saying is a objective fact, I obviously still think that is a irrational position to take.

You are saying that I must be either a troll, shill or an idiot. And you are claiming that this is not ad hominem or character assassination and that you are being completely objective and rational by saying this. Instead of proving my irrationality through argumentation and exposing fallacy you are saying that my position is not rational, without even qualifying your position. I hope in the future you will see how twisted you have become Laura, this is literally double speak.

Invested in altcoins -> preaching in favor of altcoins due to bias.

If I call you an idiot somewhere in between, that isn't ad hominem as I'm not trying to undermine your argument by doing so. In other words, there have been no ad hominem attacks.

Correct, because what you wrote is such a big piece of crap that doesn't even need argumentation. People would just end up wasting their time reading it, like I did.

That is correct. I have not undermined any arguments, nor specified a singular person to be in any of those groups. My assessment may be flawed if I've missed some potential groups (which I'm sure I have).

---

Fun how this drifts away from the original topic and forking, because your position is inherently wrong due to a number of factors that are not being considered. BU assumes everything is going to be a fairy tale and everyone is going to create 16 MB worth of nice, and sigop friendly transactions. ::)

BU is user requested scaling.. its not like it actually will contain 16mb of data tomorrow.. miners have their own preferences and will grow incrementally.
EG bitcoin is only 1mb.. even in 2016 you yourself bleeted that blocks were generally not yet at 1mb and there was still room for growth
EG bitcoin is only 1mb.. even in 2013 you yourself know blocks were only 500k full
meaning even with 1mb rule blocks were not 1mb..

so a 16mb, 8mb, 2mb rule does not immediately make every block that size. its just a BUFFER..
EG you can have 64gb of ram but never be at full memory usage
EG you can have 3tb hard drive but never fill it.. but atleast relax you have more room then you need for the future

but speeking of the future.. lets look to the past
guess your too young to remember 16 years ago when hard drives were a max of ~4gb and most users though that 1.4mb of reusable transportable data was great and more than we needed

also you mention sigops.. werent you the one crying that transaction bloat was straining bitcoin due to so many sigops.(u know the 11minute validation time doomsday you bleeted out like a sheep)

so tell me.. what REAL WORLD scenario can you see that a user needs to use XXXXX sigops in one go.
so tell me.. what REAL WORLD scenario can you see that a user needs to use XXXXX sigops in one go instead of batches
so tell me.. what REAL WORLD scenario can you tell me would be a reasonable sigop limit.

EG using sigop rules to limit spam instead of expensive fee wars is actually good for bitcoin and good for users.

for future reference:
remember the hypocrisy of you also favouring a system of discounted transaction costs via segwit and no sigops, which will result in more spam when you cry about spam in the future..

edit:
wait i see the plan now that you hope validation times are no issue you are happy for spammers to spam to cause a fee war.. hmm i wonder why. hmm..
anyway i digressed. so back to what i really want to know from you..

so tell me.. what REAL WORLD scenario can you see that a user needs to use XXXXX sigops in one go.
more precisely.. what REAL WORLD scenario can you see that a user needs to use XXXXX sigops in one go instead of batches(separate tx's)
so tell me.. what REAL WORLD scenario can you tell me would be a reasonable sigop limit.

You and people like you are really gullible. Nobody is talking about "16 MB real-world" data tomorrow. I'm talking about malicious data that could infinitely DOS the network. The 1 MB block size limit prevents this, a 16 MB block size limit does not.

lol.. you have no clue... time you done your own bench tests. oh heres a hint, when u go on IRC to be spoonfed from ur pals.. ask them to link you real info.. i know u love asking people to link info.. and because its coming from your friends you wont argue and put your fingers in your ear when you get it

You haven't made an argument here. Stop trolling.

Yes I think it is a important difference between our ideologies, we place more weight on the market and the forces of competition, which relates directly to the blocksize limit.

The only way the "market" can truly express itself right now is by moving away from Bitcoin, that is exactly what is happening right now, Bitcoin is losing market share. Splitting the blockchain actually gives the market a much clearer choice, when that happens we will see where the value will flow.

The market can change the rules of the Bitcoin network, that is one of its fundamental and most important principles, I have already explained why I think that is the case in this thread.

We do not need to convince you, you can not stop the hard fork from happening regardless of what you think. You are correct in saying that because of people like you a hard fork by a non Core client would guarantee that the chain will split, I entirely agree, and since nobody can stop a minority from initiating a hard fork the split has become inevitable.

If you read closely what I have been saying in this thread you would know that I accept and embrace the concept of splitting the chain, instead of promoting the victory of one side over the other.

Which is exactly why I think a split has become inevitable, I can respect your position, how come you can not respect mine? We can just go our separate ways, in peace and tolerance.

There is nothing you can do to stop the split from happening except for compromise. You keep asking how come we have waited this long to initiate the hard fork? It is out of courtesy and respect, and it is in the hope that we can find compromise and agreement so that we can move forward together as one, splitting the chain is a measure of last resort. But it has come to this, we have radically different ideologies on what we think Bitcoin is and what it should become. Therefore it does make sense for these different groups of people to go their separate ways.

Has everyone been casually sitting by ignoring what happened to Ethereums (Mass majority agreed) fork?

It seems as though people see what they want to see... Incredible really, either they're 100's of shill accounts which want to see Bitcoin fall into a pool of confusion and miss direction.

Or people genuinely don't know how to study facts

So what happened to that Bitcoin fork that was slated to activate in April? Much excitement on bitco.in if I recall. Funny, no one seems to be talking about it.

Why don't you fork? Is it because that fork failed, and now you must try to lobby miners to leverage their hash power to force a split?


The market can't change the rules of the network. This is a matter of fact. The market could migrate to a different network with different rules. Could you point me to the protocol documentation that suggests changing the consensus rules is "one of its fundamental and most important principles?" Perhaps something from the whitepaper? The whitepaper only talks about the possible need to enforce new rules (and incentives) if needed. That suggests soft forks, not consensus break.


Nobody is trying to stop you. Why are you trying to convince people? If the market is interested, you can fork and the network will follow.


I have said repeatedly that you should just fork. You were quoting my response to someone else.


Yes, just fork already. I'm tired of hearing about it---you're not going to convince the people who have not budged for the last year. Splitting the network could have disastrous consequences for users and custodians, but the blood will be on the hands of those that initiated the split.

I think me and franky1 differ in opinion about this point, I have come to realize that we are past the point where a non controversial hard fork by a client that is not Core is no longer possible without causing a split in the network because of the particular beliefs of certain participants within the network.

I actually agree with you here, which is why splitting the chain is such a graceful solution to this age old problem. It solves the problem of the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority.

I actually agree with you that there is no such thing as "majority rule consensual hard fork", that is a practical impossibility, unless it can never change, but that can only be achievable by ignoring the splits and attempting to maintain social consensus, that is no guarantee, and in my opinion not a good approach.

However there is such a thing as a non controversial hard fork, where the chain is not split because of there not being any major opposition to the change. I think this is what franky1 is referring to. This is how Ethereum, Monero and Dash have been able to hard fork many times without splitting the chain, Ethereum Classic is the first major split we have seen in cryptocurrency history and Ethereum is doing just fine, it proves to me that this solution is viable. Whether the chain splits or not at least it does give people the freedom of choice over important issues.

You have twisted this analogy into something horribly inaccurate.

It would be more accurate to say that in this breakup the house gets copied and mommy and daddy both got a copy of the same house, the kids (investors) then get to choose where they want to live, they can even spend time in both houses, the value of the house is determined by the proportion of kids (investors) that want to stay in each house.

You do not know what you are talking about, that fork has not even been launched. We did test it on the Bitcoin network, splitting the chain and most people did not even notice, the sky did not fall from the heavens.

That passage in the whitepaper also refers to hard forks, Satoshi even left behind instructions on how to increase the blocksize using a hard fork:


You claim that it will be a "disaster" yet Ethereum has proven not to be a disaster at all.

If it is possible now for any small minority to split the chain now over any reason and you think this would have disastrous consequences for users. I hope you are not invested in Bitcoin. That would seem like a very fragile network if that was true, I do not think it is, I think that this process of splitting the chain should be considered as part of Bitcoins design, a mechanism to resolve disputes within the network by splitting the network, freedom of choice for all of the participants involved, this is the only way to achieve such a real consensus.

There would not have been a need for a split if people weren't so stubborn as to religiously hold on to an obsolete 1MB blocksize limit.

Other than a mindless fearr of a hard fork, give me 1 solid reason based on logic against a block size increase.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366

1) Security risk of a DOS due to quadratic validation problem.
2) No hard fork experience.
3) High risk of damaging merchants and businesses that do not manage to update in time (if the activation parameters are improper such as with Bitcoin Classic).
4) Higher storage cost.
5) Higher bandwidth cost.

---

Even if we disregard the 4 latter, the primary issue is still the security risk.

we are just in the beginning of the blockchain era, there's a lot of things to change, a lot of alts to come in and out.
at the moment bitcoin lovers are on their own bubble just holding and holding for speculation, I don't think it's healthy

the sad history is: some bank(or union of banks) will create a alt and this alt will rule the world, people are slaves of banks right now and always will be ;)

core releasing a 2mb+segwit CONSENSUS version =
1) no quadratics because its 2mb base 4mb weight + all the segwit features including linear validation
2) core make it, so they have experience (unless you now deny their capability(lets see you back track))
3) consensus has long enough time to attain 95% meaning merchants are probably first to vote and be in that 95%. then a grace period, so no problems. merchants care more then anyone about ensuring they have upto date code. they wont be stuck running version 0.10(they already at 0.12 and moving to 0.13)
4)2TB hard drive is not a billion dollars. wake up.
5)hang on.. core proposes 4mb for all their features.. refer to my point 1.. 4mb is still 4mb which we both know is acceptable

wake up lauda stop with the twisted mindset to scare people

This is another straw-man attempt again. Nobody was even arguing for this, nor does this refute any of the points that I've made.

You're the one who's in deep sleep around

thanks(sarcasm) to blythe masters. the banks already are.. RTGS is going to be using crypto currency technology (not quite blockchain more so 'liquids' multisign using cryptography system)

no, you, carlton, gmaxwell are not advocating it.. so you pretend its not an option.
but you forget the roundtables, the miners, the merchants and many users not in your fanclub that are wanting it..
mayb i was strong by saying you were asleep. more like u got your fingers in your ears pretending you did not say something or know something u previously said and known

even the roadmap said that segwit would release this summer and the mainblock capacity activated by summer 2017.. you had many discussions about that since 2015 (when it finally got to a general agreement by all those involved at the many roundtables.)

remember you even said segwit first then mainblock increase later.. meaning even you have said it will be a thing in the future..
(though more recently adamback went to a few meetings to deny such.. but luckily luke will hopefully stick to his word)

if your now talking about some doomsday split, then your straw-manning something merchants and miners and users are not advocating since late 2015

That you refer to us as "religious" shows how biased you are. I could say the very same of you---so obsessed with the idea of hard forking when there are far less risky and more ethical options.


If a fork is miner-activated, this is economic coercion to thwart user consent. Consensus (and breaking consensus, i.e. hard forking) concern ethical issues like this:


http://cointimes.tech/2016/08/hard-forks-and-consensus-networks-meta-questions-and-limitations/#comments

I don't think it is "mindless fear" to point to Ethereum's failed hard fork and point out that it permanently split the network. This caused significant losses for custodians---Coinbase lost ETC and still hasn't repaid their customers. BTC-E was replay attacked and lost all of their customers' ETC; they won't be repaying it. The results would have been disastrous if Kraken and Poloniex didn't have the foresight to ignore the Ethereum Foundation's advice to ignore ETC and not repay their customers their money. Replay attacks were commonplace, and many users lost money in trying to spend on only one chain or the other. Bitcoin is actually in a far worse position for this than Ethereum---no one uses Ethereum for virtually anything. It's a bloatchain full of "hello, world." It's hardly used for merchant payments, cross-border payments, and there is hardly an economy to speak of. The losses incurred by users and custodians in a failed Bitcoin hard fork could be far worse than in Ethereum. Further, Ethereum doesn't even have a finite supply limit (and is widely viewed not as a store of value). The effects of splitting the Bitcoin network and increasing the supply of "bitcoins" across multiple blockchains could be far worse for Bitcoin's value proposition than a network split in Ethereum.

The sigops issue is a DOS attack vector. For example, a malicious miner can essentially force the network to get collectively stuck validating a single block for many minutes. Here's the worst at 1MB: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3cgft7/largest_transaction_ever_mined_999657_kb_consumes/csvahzn

Forcing increased throughput on nodes without backward compatibility is a node centralization issue: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344522.msg13915026#msg13915026

Forcing increased throughput on miners without effective latency mitigation is a miner centralization issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsvm9/mining_centralization_pressure_from_nonuniform/

More generally, I support demand for block space outpacing capacity, to prevent the worst-case scenarios concerning ineffective fee markets: https://botbot.me/freenode/bitcoin-wizards/2015-08-25/?msg=48126773&page=3

Storage costs are a concern as well in the context of unlimited block size, but a lesser one. But the general point is that increasing resource usage without scaling mechanisms makes nodes and miners drop off the network. So if we are dead set on increasing capacity, we should do it in a backward compatible way. This has the added benefit of not splitting the network.....

Seems like mindless fear to me, the replay attack has been fixed on all of the proposed Bitcoin forks, it is rather trivial to fix actually. The ethereum foundation purposely decided not to fix this particular issue, I thought that was a mistake. Splitting Bitcoin as a minority would not cause such problems at all, custodians also need to be more responsible in such a situation and take it into account. Some of those custodians simply just did not believe ETC would survive, now we know better.

Splitting the network does not worsen Bitcoins value proposition, since the share of total Bitcoins remains the same across all chains for investors, which means it does not create any type of monetary inflation, it protects the value of investors. Furthermore because it is already relatively easy to do this with a small minority it should already be a part of Bitcoins value proposition, if you are not taking this feature into account you are not truly evaluating the value of Bitcoin, for me it actually improves the value proposition of Bitcoin since I perceive this feature as being a crucial part of the governance mechanism.

That's not true. If Classic merges an update to change transaction format (not just add a new transaction format), it will be true for Classic. XT and Unlimited offer no replay protection. This is actually not just a technical issue---many that believe that a clean hard fork (one network) is possible don't want explicit replay protection because it promotes the idea that multiple blockchains will emerge. This was partially why Ethereum did not include replay protection in their fork; they simply assumed the original chain would die. The very idea of including replay protection in a fork is to make both networks viable (i.e. to enforce a network split). In the past, Gavin became quite upset at the suggestion that a hard fork could split the network---I'm curious about his thoughts on this.

Part of the problem in Ethereum is the heavily centralized development under the Ethereum Foundation, which has no public review/consensus mechanism. Vitalik said "let's fork" so mining pool admins ignored their miners, client developers forked their clients by default (no user choice whatsoever) and the fork came from the top-down. This makes user consent very difficult to gauge. Even in this context, Ethereum could not successfully hard fork.


Within a particular network, there has not been inflation, but you need to consider public perception and a confused userbase deciding among multiple networks, each with a supply of 21 million BTC. Again, I wonder if you could point to the protocol documentation or description from the whitepaper that suggests that breaking the consensus rules are "a crucial part of the governance mechanism"? Like I said, go ahead and fork....just don't be surprised when no one refers to your fork as Bitcoin.

I think ultimately, decentralising bitcoin has made it difficult to reach consensus. Bit ironic don't you think?

On the contrary, I think that's the whole point. A highly centralized community (perhaps a small community with a "benevolent dictator") could likely pull off a hard fork very easily. A highly decentralized network agrees on only one thing---the consensus rules that every node enforces. They demonstrate consent to those rules by joining the network and running nodes.

The idea that every user in a highly decentralized system is going to agree to change those rules---that's a long shot. The only context I see that working in is where there is a protocol flaw/failure.

I suppose that is why I now support splitting the chain, the alternative chain would simply have alternative clients that support it, solving the replay attack on both networks. I think that you are correct in thinking that a non controversial hard fork is no longer possible unless it is done through Core, who seem unlikely to increase the blocksize limit anytime soon. Therefore the only solution for people like myself who prefer that Bitcoin stays true to the original vision of Satoshi, is splitting the chain, after all Satoshi was a big blockist as well. ;)

---

---

Ethereum presently has the same consensus mechanism as Bitcoin, users can choose to use Ethereum Classic instead, this is what gives people the freedom of choice, that is part of the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin as well and soon this will happen to the Bitcoin network as well.

Exactly, a confused user base does not change the fact that investors are still protected under such a mechanism. Not everything is in the whitepaper, but the consequences and reality of the rules that exists are within the code and the world for all to see. Because this is possible, it should be considered as part of the design of Bitcoin itself and considered inevitable from happening, especially considering the nature of human behavior.

seems like people are still confused and use ethereum as a domsday for bitcoin.

a consensual vote for changes to bitcoin can happen, it wont cause a second coin because orphans will take care of the minority that didnt upgrade.
things like a 1000 block voting period to get 95% of nodes ready.. and a 2-6month grace also helps the remaining 5% get ready
thus affecting well under 5% when finally activated

as for ethereums controversial split. this was not simply changing the rules.. because as i said orphans would sort out the minority after activation
ethereum INTENTIONALLY chose to make an altcoin
reference:
meaning orphans wouldnt ever have settled a winning chain and killing off the other.

this is because the reference literally blacklisted nodes apart depending on which chain they wanted and ensured they didnt orphan each other out by ensuring they didnt talk to each other.

in short: changing the rules creates orphans, blacklisting nodes creates alts.

remember in a consensual upgrade, it requires 95% to upgrade BEFORE the grace period rolls.
if it doesnt get 95% the grace period doesnt start meaning nothing changes.

changes only happen if the majority want it and then even at 95% vote extra time is given for those reluctant few to realise they will be left orphaning blocks. thus that 5% will upgrade too(eventually)

if you want to create a intentional bitcoin fork you need a blacklisting feature to ensure the two opposing rules dont orphan the minority, because they are not communicating to be able to

No. The 3 people that you've listed have no connection to each other whatsoever.

Pretty much everyone reasonable, and non delusional is currently supporting Core.

Not an argument, but rather ad hominem.

Irrelevant.

That's because someone like you, who's knowledge is obviously limited, does not understand the deployment of new software on large scale businesses. You'd probably be fine with a 28d grace period.

grand scale?
theres only 6000 nodes..not 600k, not 6mill, not 6 billion... just 6000 (which only ~ 5500 are active at any one time)

and by the way, you yourself dont even know C++* and a few other languages, you have been proven to lack understanding of programming on many occasions. and now you pretend to think you are an expert about the ability of just 300 people upgrading in 6 months

here is some lessons about the 6000 nodes
1. 5700 nodes would be upgraded just to trigger the 95% benchmark
this trigger wont occur tomorrow. it would occur AFTER 95% of the community get a chance to review the code, run the code, see its ok, and then be part of the consensus process.
which would require all 5700 to be running the vetted and checked software at the same point for a certain period.

2. 300 nodes (5%) then have 2-6months to move across, to give them a little more time to vet and check the software.
again its not some BIG billion different computers that need to be upgraded.. essentially the grace period is just waiting for 300 nodes..

but here is the funny part.
all 6000 full nodes are running as full nodes instead lite nodes for a reason. so its not like they dont care about bitcoin. they will want to stay relevant and part of the validation process, otherwise they would have stopped running their full node and just done something like setup a blockchain.info account. or downloaded multibit instead. and not be part of the network.

but because they are obviously a full node, they will obviously be more alert to things going on in bitcoin and so be a little bit more proactive then you presume people running nodes are.

*i refrained from embarrassing you by quoting your admissions of lack of programming knowledge. im sure you remember me quoting them before

The number of nodes has nothing to do with the size of the infrastructure of a singular business. They can be fine running 1 node, or even running none. In addition to that, just because Core has updated to 0.xx.xx that does not mean that a business, running a custom implementation can update within a particular time frame.

Pure ad hominem. While the first statement is correct, as I don't do "C++", the secondary is false. In addition to that, not knowing a programming language has nothing to do with the argument that I'm creating.

This is all completely false, and useless to read. The number of nodes updating has nothing to do with HF activation parameters.

Said the person attempting to undermine someone's argument with pure ad hominem, in addition to lacking the same knowledge yourself. ::)

let me guess you have on many times suggested consensual parameters that are acceptable... but you are now pretending that instead you imagine the parameters have to be some different and lower doomsday parameter and 28 day grace just to make your newest doomsday argument your creating plausible.


again.. the 95% does not trigger until 5700 have reviewed code, tested it and happy to run it..
this could take days-weeks-months before we start to see people using it. and longer before there is a clear 95% stable and constant use of it that meets a stable/constant use parameter of lets say 1000-10000 block measure of constant 95%.

then after that (which itself may take months to get to that point) there is also a further grace period.

this is not to say the 95% trigger is time locked to activate next week
this is not to say the 95% trigger is going to happen at any predictable time at all..
it will happen if and when 95% have done all the checks and tests and run the code for a length of time

No. You have no idea what you're talking about. The "95%" is regarding the hashrate supporting the proposal, not the number of nodes supporting it. If it were up to the number of nodes, one could easily disrupt this by creating a ton of AWS nodes using an older version. Once again, you have no idea what you're talking about.

no wonder you have your fingers in your ears.. its digging all the grit out from sticking your head in the sand.

seems you forget what happens after the grace period.
when miners see users are ready users are then happy to accept 2mb blocks, but still only receive 1mb blocks, because...

miners have to be satisfied their competitors dont disregard thieir blocks
so when miners are then satisfied that atleast OVER 95% of user nodes have the rules ready... then the miners do their own flagging and consensus mechanism over another block measure to show a 95% of miners are happy

seriously wake up to reality and join the conversation, get out of the fantasy doomsday nightmare that is not reality and start thinking rationally about how things will work in the real world.

miners wont jump first, they will wait for users.
even when users are ready, miners wont jump unless they see other miners also consent, that way the orphan risk is low (around 0-5%, same as any other day where we are seeing small % orphans a eachday)

Miners don't care about the situation with the node count and they should not be interested it. The number of nodes in a small period of time is a horrible metric as it can be easily manipulated.

Ad hominem & no argument once again.

Again, the "users" that run nodes are a small minority. There's no way to properly "wait for users" as there's no way to "measure these users".

"users" refers to nodes that are not mining. not the physically breathing and eating and pooping human at the computer
also its the nodes that do the validating, that could lose a miner alot of income if the miner jumped first and made blocks that other pools reject and users full nodes reject.. so they do care about users nodes.
EG imagine if no merchant/exchange was using the same rules as the miner.. the miner cant then spend their income.
think about it. in a waking reality.

wait..
let me guess your subtly hinting that the node decentralization doesnt matter and you think that 6000 nodes is irrelevant and we should just have 1 node? or wil you backtrack and admit that the nodes do an important job.

That's not the definition of a user. It's one thing to be a user, and another one to be a node operator.

You don't say?

You've guessed wrong, yet again. If I thought that decentralization didn't matter, then I'd be proposing ridiculous block sizes like those BU lunatics. ::)

im not talking about node operators (the human) im talking about the demographic/category of nodes.. mining nodes vs user nodes
but atleast now your admitting that the distribution of non-mining nodes has an important job as part of the network.

and it seems you have failed to understand BU.
the 16mb safetly number, is the same as cores 32mb safety number..

then below those safety numbers:
BU has a dynamic mechanism for preferential buffer
core has a fixed preferential buffer of 1mb for 0.12 and 1mb base 4mbweight for 0.13

oops did you forget cores 32mb limit, well then
 
but have a nice day,

P.S
the 16mb explicit cap and cores 32mb explicit cap. have nothing to do with the preferential blocksizes the consensus should work at, but to do with a secondary safeguard in relation to issues with data packet sizes and other issues regarding the internet as a whole (beyond bitcoins control)

 i laugh at your mindset
'big blockers want 2mb'  ........ (core wants 4mb)
'big blockers have a secondary barrier of 16mb'     (core has 32mb)

easy maths question.
2 and 16.... or 4 and 32. which is perceived as the real big blockers?

lets put it into a scenario you may understand.

town rules.. the town shouldnt have more than a 32bedroom house because outside of town it can cause highway congestion(internet packet loss/delay), aswell as inside the town(bitcoin network) by logical default

now there are several neighbourhood councils(implementations) within the town(bitcoin network) with their own rules below the town rules.

old satoshi QT 1 bedroom houses but only half the room can be used due to a db bug infestation
old core council 1 bedroom houses
new core council 1 bedroom houses with a 3 bed mobile-home on the drive for parents(signatures) to sleep, possibility of 2 bedroom houses next year
BU council want people to choose but are highlighting the town rules by lowering the town rule threshold. while still allowing preference below it
other council want 2 bedroom houses, with hope that later the rule can be consensually changed again (in years, like an oliver twist' please sir can i have some more')

all council rules are WAY way way below the town rules, because although the town rules are in regards to outside town issues, the neighbourhood council are worried about immigrants over population (spam), local road delays (transaction bottlenecking within bitcoin), costs of maintaining the house ($200 hard drives)

1) You could limit the transaction size while still increasing the blocksize.
2) ETH did fine.
3) Few shops actually directly accept bitcoin without an intermediary. Those intermediaries should be bitcoin-savvy enough to prevent damage to the merchants. Those merchants that do accept bitcoin directly probably know enough about it as well.
4 & 5) The increased costs is only marginal. Most people already have internet that can easily support much bigger blocks than 1MB, both upload and download, without even affecting regular browsing behavior. And most people have plenty of room on their hard disks, even if they don't a 1TB hard disk will go a long way (lasts for 19 years with 1MB blocksizes assuming they are all full and are never once pruned in those 19 years). So obviously there is room for significant improvement without being cost-prohibitive to most people. In fact, a vast majorty of people wouldn't even notice the effect.

It's not a matter of 'could' or 'could not', but rather a matter of "should" or "should not". I disagree with those limitations.

We're talking about Bitcoin, not a mutable shitcoin.

This argument has no relevance to what I said. You don't know how long it takes for those "intermediaries" to upgrade and test their custom implementations (hint: 28 days is ridiculous).

A minimum of 2x increase is "marginal"?

You can't know this. Example: I have to upgrade my node soon due to inadequate amount of storage on it.

---

Oh, and I forgot to mention that in case something goes wrong with your datadir (if you use Core as a wallet for example), you will spend a ridiculous amount of time fixing it with absurd block size proposals.

what actual costs..

a 2tb hard drive does not cost more if its storing 52gb or 104gb.. and in 20 years-40 years when its full that hard drive cost is marginal
wait. lets put it into cores 4mb preference
10 years usage

most people change their computers every 5 years anyway


oh i forgot you dont have a real node running on a home computer. you have an online AWS node with only probably 100gb storage

try splashing out $300 and run a real node for once and be part of the decentralized network. that $300 will last you over 10 years
($30 a year, $2.50 a month) much cheaper then amazons $15 a month

If find it sad and surprising that so many people seem to be in favor of core, as opposed to classic/unlimited. I wouldn't be surprised if they just went with the 'default' option not actually even knowing that by downloading the 'default' wallet they actually vote in support of core.    

Core's official roadmap claims to have Segwit and LN active in April/July 2016 respecitively, but it's already september and neither of them are active now. Mainwhile blocks are mostly full and no solution is offered by core.    

By the time segwit and LN go online (if ever) it's too little too late. Mainwhile, bitcoin is losing marketshare rapidly, and due to the network effect, this could have permanent disastrous results for bitcoin.    

In my opinion, people make way too big a deal about an increase from 1MB to even 2MB, while 2MB blocks don't even hurt anyone (heck, even 20MB blocks wouldn't hurt anyone).        

1 MB of data per full block -> 2 MB of data per full block. This equals to 2x increase.

My node is not on any online service. Stop spreading lies.

$300 won't last you 10 years.

Both are false. Core did deliver Segwit in April, but there was no mention of activation by that time. "LN active" is a pure lie. There are other groups that are developing Lightning.

Statements like this one make people ignorant fools by default.

https://i.imgur.com/p9SoWvk.png


Interesting, freedom of choice :) no one will force you to run a software... never.

If you limit the transaction size to 1MB, nothing changes from having a 1MB blocksize without a transaction size limit.

Who would ever need to fill an entire block with 1 transaction?  

You are just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing at this point.      
That doesn't mean you can't look at other coins as an example. The main use of altcoins is to be a testbed for bitcoin, so that bitcoin can learn from their successes and mistakes. To prevent havng to make the same mistakes, while still benefiting from their successful projects.    
If bitcoin can keep up with the successful implementations of altcoins, while avoiding their mistakes, there will never be a reason for any altcoin to overtake bitcoin.    
However, if we stick our head in the sand and ignore altcoins altogether, some altcoin will eventualy shove bitcoin aside as old-fashioned and out-of-date. (Bitcoin would become the myspace of crypto)
It does. You can't just say this every time someone disproves your statements.
First of all, technology has become much cheaper in the past 6 years (on average at least). And besides, who really has a hard drive measured in gigabytes anymore?    
Do you have any idea how long it takes for a TB to fill up on blocks of just a few MB? FYI a TB is a million MB.
Even a year worth of blocks only takes up a fraction of a home computer. Not a server, a regular home computer (even a laptop). If we increase the blocksize, it would only take up a larger fraction, but still it doesn't even fill an entire disk. So it would not actually cost anyone anything, unless their hard disk is already full. But even if someone's hard disk was full, he'd soon need a new drive anyway, because even without bigger blocks he'd run out of space soon.    
And since no one is going to buy a hard drive of less than 1TB anyway (are they even sold anymore?) your argument is mood.      

Even worse with network. Does anyone seriously have a bandwidth so low that 266kb/s is a problem? (that would be 20MB blocks).




You're forgetting the part where they claim we want bitcoin to be a "get rich quick scamcoin"  

Because obviously the only reason we want bigger blocks is because a bigger block would magically cause the bitcoin price to become 20 times higher, which also is a bad thing.


You don't pay for data directly, most people already own a computer, and they use nowhere near 100% capacity on their internet nor on their hard drive.

Increasing the maximum block size doesn't change this (unless you increase it to terabytes, but  am not asking for terabytes)    

Besides, not every block will be full anyway. Every block is full now, but the whole point about bigger blocks is that not every block should be full in the first place (there needs to be some headroom).    

I don't know about you, but we haven't paid per MB of internet usage since the 90s. Or were you using your mobile phone as a node with cloud storage? Because in that case, you're doing it wrong.

By the way, a $300 computer can last you 10 years easily, you're not using it for gaming, you're using it as a node.

Also, where is segwit then? And if t's already deployed like you said, then why are they promising to deploy it in 2017 now? It's already active right?

There may or may not be attack vectors that could work with 2x 1 MB transactions. Just because it seems safe, that doesn't mean that it will be.

I'm not talking about normal usage when it comes to security problems.

Said every person when losing their ground.

It's one thing to fork something small and centralized, and another to fork Bitcoin.

Stop being "spoon fed" (as franky1 would put it) by Ver & co.


It does not, as can be seen with your lack of experience in regards to large scale infrastructure.

Strawman argument.

Yes, they're being sold and yes I plan to buy a 1/2 TB drive.

You obviously aren't factoring in the primary bottleneck, but let's go with this. How did you derive this number, i.e. by calculating what?

The whole reason huge transactions are unsafe is because of quadratic scaling, which won't work if you split up the equation across two transactions that scale linearly with each other.       

So you agree there's no normal use case for 1MB or larger transactions, so why do you oppose limiting transactions to 1MB while increasing blocksize? That gets rid of your man argument (security) while also allowing more transaction throughput, and therefore more users.   

Are you mad because I can destroy your entire argument in 2 minutes of typing?


Sorry but I just destroyed your argument, and you have no ground to disagree on, except the right to disagree, but you have no actual logical reason to disagree.     
I have proven this to be factually correct, and it remains true until you prove proof that your disagreement is backed by logical reasoning and facts. 

TIL ETH is centralized. Yeah they have their differences, but centralization is not one of them.

I don't even know Ver, but from the few interviews I have heard from him he seems like a reasonable and nice guy, although I don't always agree with all he sais.


And you can teach me?


I'm sure this is in no way a strawman argument.

If anything, your conjecture is based on a strawman argument, because you are defending imaginary nodes (strawman) that would be blocked out of being a node because they can't run an imaginary node on on imaginary system with a hard drive that belongs in the 90s and internet that is basically quite literally smoke signals.   

Any computer made after 2000 and even the most basic internet connection has no problem at all running a 20MB node. And with no problem at all I mean that it is barely noticeable that you are even running a node while at the same time actually using your computer for other tasks.

If anyone is having strawman arguments it's you, because you're using strawman nodes to back up your defense. I am talking about actual technology and actual nodes, that are not aaffected by larger block size in the slightest.

If you can find actual persons that actually will be affected by a larger blocksize, be my guest, I'd like to hear their testimonies.

That's still plenty to run 20MB blocksize for several years, even if you falsely assume every single block is full. (and it's still a drive measured in terabytes)


It's quite easy, you just divide the blocksize by the average time it takes to find a block. Obviously, you would need internet faster than that to be actually useful as a node, but on average your internet would use that amount of data. When a new block is found, it would for a few seconds use more bandwidth, followed by a couple of minutes of almost no activity at all. The point is though that 266kb/s is ridicilously small, and everyone has internet orders of magnitudes faster than that, so even for the most basic internet user, the network usage would not even be noticable.

And what is the primary bottleneck then? I'm sure memory won't be a problem with blocksizes smaller than a few gigabyte.

500gb hard drive. well your the one that chooses to not think about the future, only you will be the one crying
cant blame bitcoin or anyone else if your hard drive fills up in 2.5 years+ (core 4mb weight)

a 2tb hard drive is only 800,00 kuna (im guessing your still in croatia) (£90 : $120 for those not wishing to convert kuna to western currencies)
not sure why you are even choosing 500gb

i feel like your actually trying to shoot yourself in the foot just to have a reason to cry in 2 years, even though 2tb is not a "data centre" cost and will last you for atleast 10 years (core 4mb weight)

I wasn't talking about that when I mentioned the potential of unknown attack vectors.  

I don't agree with that. I haven't thought about it, and I'm pretty sure that there may very well be a normal use case for some business.

1) I don't get "mad" when someone rationally shows supreme arguments. 2) You did no such thing.

You have done no such thing. You're starting to resemble Veritas.

I may or may not be able to, not that it would matter.

It's a pure example of strawman fallacy. I never argued that "technology didn't become cheaper" did I? Don't attempt to use fallacies again, else we end up with nonsense as "Strawman nodes".  ::)

20 MB per block x 6 blocks per hour x 24 hours a day x 365 days a year = ~1051 GB per year. Please explain how a 1/2 TB drive (aka 500 GB drive) would run for "several years".

20 MB / 10 minutes = 2 MB per 1 minute. 2 divided by 60 = 0.03 MB/s. Let me tell you why your thinking is flawed (not that you're going to admit this). If a node is downloading at this speed, it will never catch up. Why is that? By the time that it downloads a 20 MB block, it is likely that another one will be created. The node would still be validating the previous block in addition to having the next one. I do wonder how long it takes to validate a 20 MB block on decent hardware though.

Validation time.

---

No, I am not and have never been in Croatia.

well i just thought that with all of your cries about internet speeds and stuff there was no way that you could live in america..
also things like talking croatian and being a mod of the croation category..

anyway
although 20mb is diverting off the current proposals by a factor of 5-10x.. and entering the cosmic theory of doomsday dreams, lets ask you..
are you saying to this other guy that 0.3mb internet speeds is something the world is averaging.
is this 0.3mb speed something you yourself are suffering with..

have you also complained to skype for offering video services to millions of happy people because in your eyes them millions of people must be unhappy.
have you also complained to twitch, youtube, and other video upload services that do live streaming?

in short is 0.3mb a real world problem where video uploading and livestream is a problem (uses more data then all current bitcoin proposals)

hmm.. lets pick a country .
ok africa..http://www.africawebtv.com/
ok korea..http://www.afreecatv.com/
ok russia..http://www.vichatter.com/

i could go on..
seems all countries around the world can livestream.

the funny thing is that you are more distraught about including 3rd world countries than excluding them.
this is because internet speeds are not excluding 3rd world countries, but the thing you have shown many times, is that your desire for higher fee's will price 3rd world countries out of using bitcoin.
i then laugh that you pretend you want higher fee's to reduce spam. yet you want to remove features like sigops, which will allow spammy transactions to increase. (funny that)

You do realize that in order to have transactions bigger than 1MB you would need blocks bigger than 1MB right?   
i hope you have at least that level of intelligence.

Considering your contradiction posts on this subject though, I am starting to doubt that. (either that, or you are forgetting your own statements in less than a few hours after posting them).

Statement 1:
I don't want blocks larger than 1MB

Statement 2:
I might want transactions larger than 1MB

These are not compatible with each other (not to mention, they're ridiculous, even in their own, but together they're even worse).

If you don't understand me, than that's not my problem, but yours.   
See above comment
I doubt it.
It's pretty clear you have no idea what a strawman argument is, and are accusing me of using them while your whole premise is based on one.   
You're only showing that talking with you is a massive waste of anyone's time.

well, this is the first time you actually have a point, I didn't bother calculating that, so I turned out to be wrong in that statement.

Still, in practice even a cheap 500GB drive would last for at least half a year, and most likely longer because it's unlikely blocks of 20MB would be filled every time at least for the next few years.


Except that you snipped out the part where I actually admitted this before you even brought it up as an argument, along with saying that this isn't an issue because it's several orders of magnitude lower than even slow internet speeds. So even if you account for this, it's not a problem.     

Not only do you show an inability to reasoning on any level of intelligence, you also are also purposely misrepresenting my quotes. I'm not beyond admitting when I'm wrong, I am wrong sometimes, but that does not invalidate my arguments. Fact is, every single person is wrong sometimes, but that does not make everything they say wrong.

And xthin blocks would solve that issue too, but Core doesn't support xthin (of course, because core doesn't support improvement).



Well, it's a good thing Satoshi was smart enough to keep block times at 10 minutes then, unlike many altcoins who have blocktimes of mere seconds.     
10 minutes should be enough for the slower nodes to keep up with plenty of headroom. (this is also why I oppose of altcoins with very fast blocktimes).

I have made neither one of these statements. Now you're just an outright liar and manipulator (say hi to Veritas for me).

Ad hominem nonsense due to losing ground.

You're the one wasting time with wrongful information trying to mislead people into supporting something that is both inherently controversial and dangerous.

Until somebody "turns on" the spam again, and suddenly everyone is stuck with massive bloat.

Xthin is half-baked level improvement, just like pretty much any other BU development has been.

No, that's not even nearly enough time, especially not without Segwit.

There's actually some proposals for 20MB blocks and they're widely accepted. source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy#Entities_positions

In favor: Magnr, Ethereum (If bitcoin is used as currency), armory, bitcoinreminder, bithours, bitpay, bittiraha.fi, blockchain.info, blocktrail, breadwallet, BTC guild, BX.in.th, coinbase, coinify, adam back, kryptoradio, okcoin, 3rd key solutions, xapo, F2pool (in favor of 5MB, 20MB is too soon for them).

Opposed: bitcoinpaygate, bitrated, greenaddress, mpex, paymium.

The only entity actually providing a reason for opposition is greenaddress, who provided "it's only a temporary solution" as a reason. So they recognize the problem, but they don't agree with the solution because they think it won't fix the problem long-term.


Btw, only 6 out of 144 countries have an average upload speed of < 0.9 Mb/s, only 2 of them have an average download speed of < 0.9Mb/s (burkina faso [0.84 Mb/s] and niger [0.6 Mb/s])

0 out of 144 countries have an average download speed of < 0.3 Mb/s and 2 out of 144 have an average upload speed of < 0.3 (burkina faso [0.29 Mb/s] and niger [0.2 Mb/s])

total population of those two countries is roughly 34 million (both countries are about 17 million)

Those might struggle a little bit, but even they could probably run 20MB blocks (especially if we include xthin blocks)



Although I think it's together with xthin blocks to make the network propagation more efficient by a factor of at least 5 times. So effectively they would be like 4MB blocks but allowing 20MB worth of transactions (and i can only imagine what SegWit/LN could improve on this).

Scaling is possible, it's only some people holding it back, for no particular reason.

Here you are disagreeing with limiting the transaction size. (limiting it to 1MB is implied, just to be sure you understand, the current limit is 1MB because the blocksize is 1MB and therefore a transaction larger than 1MB doesn't fit).


and here you are disagreeing with increasing the block size.

So even though those statements weren't direct quotes (I never implied they were quotes), I can proof that they align with your statements. Therefore you are contradicting yourself, and falsely accusing me of lying.


you can't just block honest transactions because you're afraid of spam. You're doing more harm than good that way.

That's like only allowing 100 users at a time to connect to google.com because otherwise google.com might be DDOSed. So whenever there's 100 users on google, google.com blocks all requests until one of the users is done.    

If google.com would do that, how long do you think google.com remains the most popular search engine?

Not very long.

And yet, that's exactly what bitcoin is doing right now.


Not enough time for what? Verifying with an abacus?

Could you get equipment from this century at least?

fun fact, 100% of the troll I have spoken to have used the following arguments when they run out of actual arguments:

Does not matter if I am actually using ad hominem or strawman arguments.

What was meant is that I'm against additional imposed limitations in order to favor a HF. I'm undecided about TX size as there haven't been that many discussions about it.

Listing cons of something != disagreeing with it. There is likely going to be some headroom with Segwit, where an additional increase of 1-2 MB may be okay. I'm still waiting for Luke-Jr's proposal.

Taking things out of context in other to strengthen your position is what one would usually define a lying manipulator as.

No, that's not what Bitcoin "is doing right now". Bitcoin can't do anything on its own as Bitcoin isn't an entity that can decide for itself. In addition to that, the analogy is false since the limit in currently a safeguard from the DOS risk at 2 MB or higher.

I'll even risk by saying that enthusiast grade hardware will not be able to validate a sigop expensive 20 MB block in time. Someone would need to test this out to confirm though.

If you are not against blocksize increase, then why do you keep arguing against it?

I'm not taking things out of context, although I do remember someone doing just that a few posts ago.


So is the analogy, with the side effect that it is limiting users. Which bitcoin is doing right now too. (and you know full well what I mean by that, don't derail the conversation by arguing semantics)

Because it's the wrong position to have and it has many cons which should not be ignored. 2 MB is inherently dangerous, hence the additional limitations as added by Gavin's BIP for Classic. Segwit aims to solve this, in addition to increasing the capacity with usage (which should result in around 170-180% increase). After Segwit, we should look into acceptable block size increases. In addition to all of this, deploying a HF just for the sake of a block size increase is horribly inefficient. There are certainly some changes/optimizations that require a HF and those should be deployed along side the block size increase.

Yes, you have. It's still better than the franky1's "You all want Monero to succeed" fantasy.

Today's DOS attack on Ethereum is relevant here:

http://www.ethnews.com/ethereum-network-under-a-dos-attack
https://i.imgur.com/r9OemnX.jpg

I suppose we can keep musing about how irrational it would be for such blocks to mined... but, food for thought.

The most interesting thing about the above-quoted list is that nobody wants to play the obvious zinger in response. Have a little fun. Please.

if your talking about why i switched from talking about hard drive to bandwidth, obviously hard drives are cheap so the other 'cost' is internet speed
if your talking about my reasoning to talk about UPLOAD instead of download.. there is a technical reason for this
if your talking about why i am mentioning uploading live video. as oppose to a tweet there is an obvious reason for this too

the reason i used live streaming is because its a real life scenario people can understand of large data moving..
(upload 10minutes of SD(0.5mbIT/sec) quality video=~37mbyte of data)

months ago lauda attempted to debunk WATCHING videos as that was only download bandwidth to which i replied months ago with UPLOAD stats of livestream recording at that time. and today was reminding him of the facts that the internet as a whole is not a problem for 2-4mb blocks upload and by default definitely no issues for download

though the internet is proven to be fast for hundred of MILLIONS of people as shown by all the countries doing livestreaming to prove its not a dream. the community accept some places can get over 100mb/s, but as a safe level the majority feel 2-4 is acceptable.. even core believe 4mb is acceptable now.
im not going to get into the debate of someone else advocating 20mb, as that is just poking laudas bear and not something the community as a whole could consider right now(though technically possible).

i personally have only been advocating for 2mb this year knowing rationally that in the near future technology progresses to allow for more (even if the technology is already available now. its best to stay in the safe zone)

in short 4mb is internet safe, 2mb is even safer so data speed debate of 2mb should be considered resolved as it was before late 2015 (even in cores 4mb eyes, 2mb is safe)

which is why i laugh hard when lauda was saying 2mb was bad.. yet his friends are saying 4mb is acceptable, and lauda has now backtracked to say 4mb is acceptable "because its core". but 2mb is still bad.

even if its a 2mb base 4mb weight linear validation rules.. lauda will still not be happy and will always try to debate some crap to keep core as the overlords, rather than all implementations coming to a joint agreement making all implementations all on the same level playing field coming to a joint consensus, which the community thought we reached before last christmas. and then tried to get core back inline in spring. and then again in summer..

But, but, BU team promised me everyone would be playing nice and creating sigop friendly blocks?  ::)

Comparing live-streaming to running a node is also a 'false analogy fallacy'. One has incentives, the other one doesn't for example.

Sure, even 1 TB blocks are technically possibly. This doesn't make it safe.

I have no friends, ergo this statement is an outright lie.

As said many times, not that it matters, I have no relationship to any Core contributor whatsoever.

The problem is that these "other implementations" only have half-baked, horribly coded improvements.

I just mean that Africa is not a country, goober.  People are tightly wound these days.   :P

:D ok i get your point about generalizing, well played,

says the guy who hasnt even read a line of code.
nor even knows a line of core code without spoonfeeding

I don't need to read nor know a single line of code in BU. There's something called third party code review (which unfortunately isn't as common as it should be). Oh wait, you wouldn't know that since you don't resort to knowledge nor rational arguments, but rather character assassination.

For every bitcoin you have, you will now have one bitcoin, and one bitcoin classic!  May the best coin win!

Exactly, it's just a spin-off of the actual bitcoin blockchain :).
I don't care about the name bitcoin classic, unlimited or I don't know... the important thing is that they increase the blocksize and add other few interesting things.

So introducing confusion in addition to the media portraying Bitcoin as a joke due to that is what you want?

Fun fact: Neither one of those teams have developed anything worth incorporating into Bitcoin Core. Don't get me started on idiotic ideas such as "header-first mining". ::)

I don't know but check this: https://ww.reddit.com/r/btcfork/comments/53tfnb/hfp0_an_early_prototype_of_a_bitcoin_hard_fork/

This obviously wouldn't be Bitcoin anymore, and no way is any miner ever going to support this. Not to mention the amount of botnets that will hop onto this bandwagon.

Unsafe without Segwit, although I like the idea of adaptive block size algorithm with an lower and upper bound (as long as the upper one isn't beyond safe limits).

---

I have no idea why they want this to be associated with Bitcoin when it clearly isn't Bitcoin. I'll take a wild guess: Manipulation.

No it's not.

We can safely increase the limit to at least 4MB right now, and there won't be a problem.

It has been tested on testnet already. Stop spreading misinformation. There's nothing dangerous about bigger blocks.

The reason of the blocksize limit was not decentralization, not safety, but anti-spam.

The blocks aren't full of spam, and the ant-spam measure is doing more harm than good right now, it's time to remove it while we work on a solution to keep the blocksize small without sacrificing security or throughput.      

Also it's ridiculous to say 2MB blocksize is dangerous while saying we should get 2MB later. f it's not dangerous later it's not dangerous now either.


500 Mb/s (Down and Up) is available to the public as well. (I have that internet as a regular user).
Pretty sure that's available for reasonable prices in most countries nowadays.

I know it's not the 'average internet', but it's available, and it will become standard eventually. As with all technology, the 'rich' are only a couple of years ahead of the mainstream.

Yes it is and no we can not.

The BU testing methodology is garbage and should not be used as 'evidence' for anything.

Both safety and anti-spam.

You can't prove this and you know it.

No, it is not. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Quadratic validation time without Segwit. I highly doubt you even understand the big O notation.

We never wanted a split, we just want bitcoin to be available to everyone.

It's you who wants to artificially limit bitcoin. Go ahead, limit bitcoin, but we will leave you and your Cripplecoin behind and fork bitcoin to get bitcoin back as it was supposed to be. A currency for the people.


Of course everything you disagree with is garbage in your eyes.

The facts still state that you are wrong, and 4MB blocksizes are perfectly safe. 20MB with xthin is also perfectly safe. But i'm happy with 4MB for now, or even 2MB until we need more.

I do know (and so does everyone else) that the blocks grew over time and for the past several months most blocks have been 900+ kB. mostly legitimate transactions.

No one has the money to set up a several months long non-stop spam attack. This is all legitimate users and you know it.

If you claim to not know this is legimate users, you're just plain stupid.     

Quadratric validation time doesn't matter if you just limit the transaction size to 1MB or lower.

If you really think idea behind these controversial fork attempts is that, then I'm sorry to tell you, but you've been deceived. You may want that, which is perfectly fine, but that's not the intent of the people who started with the controversial forks.

Saying "xx MB block size is safe" is wrong. Saying "xx MB block size is safe if we limit the TX size to xx or less" may be true. These two statements are inherently different, ergo I'm not wrong.

This got to be a bad joke, right? A fair amount of people have enough money to spam up the network for a very long time.

Please post the testing methodology that extracts 'real user transactions' from the pool of all transactions, i.e. excludes 'spam transactions'. I'm sure everybody would like to know how this revolutionary method works.

The statement contradicts itself. It matters until you add even more limits to Bitcoin.

im laughing here.

i think its time lauda goes spend a few hours to ask his friends the difference between xthin and headers first
Edit.. also compact blocks..
ill give him a hint. they all dont send the whole block in one go. they send the headers first, in both cases.

i think its time lauda goes spend a few hours to ask his friends the difference core 1mb base 4mbweight  and 2mb base 4mb weight.
ill give him a hint, they both have linear validation, they both have all the other fluffy features. but it actually increases the txdata in the baseblock to give REAL proper capacity.

once you have researched what they all actually are. then come back, without a core fanboy hat on. and instead with a coding logic hat on. basing your reply on actual real world usage, actual features involved and actual reality scenarios.
if i see you one more time basing your opinion not on code facts, but pure opinion of something just because of WHO. then you are no better than a racist who cannot see beyond the who

in short i want to see lauda approach the debate with technicals and not the simple analogy of BU=warewolves and Classic=vampire, kill kill kill

Again, I have no "friends" to ask. Anyhow, both of those proposals are such garbage that looking into them is a waste of time.

If anything, history has taught us that the information provided by you is false in most cases. Please let me know once miners measure 95% node adoption. ::)

Best. Thread title. Ever.  ;D

Regards,
Chris

Interesting assertion. I'd like to read your extensive code review of each such "other implementation".

You do, of course, realize that if one lonely cpu starts mining upon this chain, you will have been proven utterly wrong?


Oh wait - self-contradiction in one neat paragraph - quite an achievement!


Well, no. Segwit does absolutely nothing to make larger blocks safe. Although other changes bundled into The SegWit Omnibus Changeset do. Which of course are available for other implementations to adopt, should they so desire.

You yourself have no idea what they all actually are.

There isn't an extensive code review of such an implementation by myself (probably not by anyone, as I haven't seen one). That's not the point though. The point was that 'these people' are throwing around assertions regarding the safety of random block sizes just because 'it's fine one some test-net'.

I was talking about the current miners of Bitcoin.

It's not a contradiction; read the above.

Yes, it does actually, since there's no such thing as "The SegWit Omnibus Changeset".

Bald assertion devoid of any supporting evidence is duly noted.


Prove it? You can't even define it!


Your demonstrated pride in mastering this oh-so-advanced concept </s> is simply adorable.

Fight fire-with-fire, or bald assertions-with bald-assertions when obviously reason isn't adequate.

This is actually true. We don't even have a clear definition of 'spam', and yet some throw out the claims that blocks are filled with 'legit' transactions.

Sarcasm is pointless, and adorable is not an attribute worth pinning to this. A point has been made, and the point is correct.

Well, at least you admit when you are caught making shit up on order to influence a debate. Does that make you honest? No - it makes you a liar that has been caught in a lie.


Sure there is. You may not recognize it under that name. Hell, you may not recognize it at all. But there is certainly a difference between the feature 'Segregated Witness', and the bundled code release that includes several other features as well.

Oh - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1530463.msg15417685#msg15417685

I haven't been following this thread, so excuse the question if it has already been asked and answered:

Setting aside areas of technical disagreement for a second, what are the issues/areas for which there is technical agreement?

1. 21M coins
2. What else?
3. etc. ?

Right, I'm sorry.

Bill gates, would you please stop spamming the bitcoin? The Core team already caught up on it and they aren't falling for it.    



Maybe 10 minute average block time.

But maybe some people disagree on that too.

ive read the code of each. but find it funny that you dont know they all do the same basic function once you wash away the fluffy buzzwords.
you should have don yourself a favour last year and actually learned some C++ to actually actively engage in some real understanding of bitcoin.

but have a happy year with you subliminal mind programming set to:
BU=warewolves and Classic=vampire, kill kill kill.. core=king devote devote devote

In fairness, you would sound far more convincing if you actually did a bit of research and didn't spurt out things like:


Based on that, it sounds like you're not even remotely educated on what these alternative implementations are or how they work.  You seemingly just regurgitate opinions you've read elsewhere without even bothering to check the legitimacy of it.



It's precisely the point.  You're slamming something you haven't even attempted to comprehend.  People are now falling over each other to point out that fact and you're making it very easy for them.



Again with the garbage assumptions.  Perhaps you could explain why you're skeptical about the proposals and in the process prove that you actually understand them.  Or you could dismiss them as "garbage" and we'll all assume that you're just guessing again because you read something in passing and decided it must be true without questioning it.

No. I was proving a point which you seem to have missed.

What a nice joke. ::)

I'm "educated" enough about BU to not be interested in their work at this time. The reason that I used the "16 MB" was because somebody was advocating that 16 MB blocks were safe, which is obviously false.

If that was the case, then I'd be supporting Bitcoin Classic and BU.

No. That was a demonstration of the assertions being throw out by pro-BU members around here.

You tell me to do research, and then afterwards want me to explain why e.g. header-first mining is a bad idea? How about you do the research this time?

---

Obviously we're long past any technical debate in this thread, and are at a point where the mindset being received is in the lines of "No, you're wrong. xx MB blocks are super safe. Core is evil".

things lauda needs to learn

C++
explicit limit vs consensus limit
consensual vs controversial
reading code not social distraction
definition of hypocrisy
who is spoon-feeding him and why they do it

now then.
the current ACTUAL debate is not laudas meandered hypocrisy of the doomsdays of controversial forks of 16mb by groups of warewolves and vampires preventing linear.

but consensual '2base-4mbweight' buffer increase by EVERYONE in the community releasing an implementation. so that fans of kings, warewolves and vampires can all happily stick with their favourites and still have the open choice to decentrally vote in or out of a safe increase of capacity which still allows the kings to have their way too, and no one thinking they have to jump camps to get it.
yes this means the quadratics doomsday is also a moot point because segwit still works
again it does not mean segwit wont function by increasing the 2mb base, so relax lauda your kings still have a job and are not sacked
again this does not mean any excess bloat that kings are not also accepting as safe

I'm convinced most people support Core not because they actually think it's better, but because they don't know any better.

The main forums (this one, and /r/bitcoin) both support Core as the only 'official' bitcoin wallet. Most users probably don't even know about Classic/Unlimited/XT, and if they do, they don't know they are just as 'official' as Core.    

The thing about decentralization is, there isn't one official client. There are multiple.      

The 'official' client is the client that gets the most support from the users/miners/merchants/etc.      

I think it's wrong to have only Core being advertised on bitcointalk.org and /r/bitcoin. It gives the wrong impression and it's very centralized.      

Basically, this header https://i.imgur.com/KGhe0F2.png needs to be more neutral, and also include links to the latest Classic, Unlimited and XT clients. As well as a link to a page that explains the difference in a fair and factual way.       

The way it is done now only leads to centralization of bitcoin.

You've nicely described yourself. Focusing on ad hominem won't do you any good nor win any arguments.

It is the main and most advanced Bitcoin implementation. There's nothing "official" regarding that.

No. This is a privately owned forum, and as such, does not "need" to do anything.

seems someone preferred to avoid the topic to adhom about an adhom

now then.

the current ACTUAL debate is consensual '2base-4mbweight' buffer increase by EVERYONE in the community releasing an implementation. so that fans of any implementation can all happily stick with their favourites and still have the open choice to decentrally vote in or out of a safe increase of capacity, while not hindering segwit either, or having to change to another "brand"
yes this means the quadratics doomsday is also a moot point because segwit still gets to work

Yeah it's a privately owned forum, but it's the main forum for bitcoin, and it would be good for the benefit of all bitcoin users if this forum remained neutral.   

The fact that this forum is not neutral is very worrying, is this is already a first step in centralizing bitcoin.   

and then they claim Core is trying to keep bitcoin decentralized. What a joke.

I disagree with your view of "main forum" here. It surely is the most used forum, however you aren't creating any arguments for your case actually. If users wanted a more "neutral" environment (whatever this is supposed to mean), they'd simply start using one. That's how these things usually work, nobody is forcing you to stay nor leave.

No, it's not worrying at all. Besides, this isn't the thread here. You should probably keep this consistent to the thread that you've made in Meta.

---

This should be about a potential fork (although we drifted away from time to time).

I honestly have read this post three times by now, and still fail to understand what you've wanted to say with it. Not because of "technicalities", but because the flawed construct of all those sentences. You should really rephrase everything.

in short
core releasing 0.13.2a with 1base 4weight AND releasing 0.13.2b with 2base 4weight

that way core fanboys dont have to defect away from core to get real capacity, they can choose freely while remaining with core dream team
that way the community as a whole have an open choice without having any bias
that way you can finally be happy of your dream team having code for all the features the community have been requesting.
that way you can chill out your doomsdays because core is no longer vetoing the 2mb base option, to cause controversy

now with change of guard at Blockstream, maybe the pro fork people can get a little more momentum going and
'get 'er done'

Who`s crying?I don`t understand.

Are there people who complain about the hard fork?

What`s the point of this thread?

Folks are saying a hard fork is 'dangerous'.  It is only dangerous for the undesirable prong.