Let's imagine that all the Bitcoin devs were arrested by a tyrannical government or bought by an evil mega-corp and forced to change a fundamental aspect of Bitcoin. Open source doesn't work like that. The code is OSS and anyone is able to modify it and fork it. Current developers (be it Core, XT or whatever) have no more control of it than anyone else. In the end it's always the network that decides. The control is decentralized and collective. Only way that some goverment could have it's way is if majority of network accepted it or stubbornly kept running a client that is under govt. control. But at any time they would be free to choose otherwise. You are right of course... the point of this exercise is to determine what features users consider fundamental to Bitcoin's nature. If that is clear enough, it could prevent forks that endanger those features. Or in the case of technical issues where outcomes are more uncertain, it tells developers what user priorities are. |
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Let's imagine that all the Bitcoin devs were arrested by a tyrannical government or bought by an evil mega-corp and forced to change a fundamental aspect of Bitcoin. Let us further imagine that this evil cabal managed to control 80% of mining power and used it to support the evil fork.
What aspect of Bitcoin, if it were changed, would make you reject such a fork and stay on the original chain against all odds? What change would you consider would destroy the fundamental virtues of Bitcoin?
Regular users, holders and nodes could block any fork by refusing to adopt, even against the devs and miners... but what is important enough that a significant majority would do so?
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No, it will not work. Even "Send money to friends or family" is revertible, I assure you. Then I don't understand what they intend to use. I guess we'll have to wait from somebody from Coinffeine to come out with an official announcement... |
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The Decentralist Perspective, or Why Bitcoin Might Need Small Blocks https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21919/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks/Well-known cryptographer and digital currency veteran Nick Szabo explained:
“In computer science there are fundamental trade-offs between security and performance. Bitcoin’s automated integrity necessarily comes at high costs in its performance and resource usage. Compared to existing financial IT, Satoshi made radical trade-offs in favor of security and against performance. The seemingly wasteful process of mining is the most obvious of these trade-offs, but it also makes others. Among them is that it requires high redundancy in its messaging. Mathematically provable integrity would require full broadcast between all nodes. Bitcoin can’t achieve that, but to even get anywhere close to a good approximation of it requires a very high level of redundancy. So a 1MB block takes vastly more resources than a 1MB web page, for example, because it has to be transmitted, processed and stored with such high redundancy for Bitcoin to achieve its automated integrity.” |
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So flix? Any thoughts on the litterature i provided you?
Yes... I did not want to say anything, but since you insist: I was not impressed at all. Most were off-topic or only marginally referred to the blocksize issue. I did not find a coherent presentation of the no-increase argument. At least the one on the economics of tx fees was interesting... |
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Yes, flix, that's what the previous five posts in the thread were speaking in reference to. oops... I'll remind myself to read before posting!  |
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BIP106: BIP 106: Dynamically Controlled Bitcoin Block Size Max Cap https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/commit/2e0d3412546e28da19c8ab6cc0056fc05542acac+===Proposal 1 : Depending only on previous block size calculation===
+
+ If more than 50% of block's size, found in the first 2000 of the last difficulty period, is more than 90% MaxBlockSize
+ Double MaxBlockSize
+ Else if more than 90% of block's size, found in the first 2000 of the last difficulty period, is less than 50% MaxBlockSize
+ Half MaxBlockSize
+ Else
+ Keep the same MaxBlockSize |
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Hope this selection of articles widens a bit your view on the subject. Thanks! Always love to read different views. |
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a16z Podcast: Hard Forks, Hard Choices for Bitcoin WITH ADAM BACK AND ALEX MORCOS http://a16z.com/2015/09/02/a16z-podcast-hard-forks-hard-choices-for-bitcoin/So in the interest of airing all options for solving Bitcoin’s scaling problem, we invited two more experts from the Bitcoin world, Adam Back and Alex Morcos to share their views on alternate ways to scale the Bitcoin blockchain.
Back is a well-known applied cryptographer, whose longtime focus has been digital currency. Back invented hashcash, a proof-of-work system, which, among its other applications, is used in Bitcoin mining. He’s the cofounder of Blockstream.
Morcos is the founder of Chaincode Labs, based in New York City, and was a co-founder of quantitative trading company Hudson River Trading. He’s more recently become immersed in the Bitcoin world. It seems like both Adam and Alex favour bigger blocks too, they just have a different approach to how to scale. Seriously... who is in favour of 1MB blocks forever? Link please! |
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But almost everybody who voted for BIP101 is supporting XT. If we do separate poll and ask who wants 1 MB block size I'm sure nobody will support it.
For the sake of completeness I Have been searching for arguments online in defense of 1MB. I cannot find any document or video which represents the 1MB forever position. Can anybody please provide a link to such a video/paper/post? |
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Doesn't say much.. apart from "let´s work together" and come to the scaling Bitcoin conference in September.... but at least it's a start. An Open Letter to the Bitcoin Community from the Developers https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21809/open-letter-bitcoin-community-developers/As active contributors to Bitcoin, we share this letter to communicate our plan of action related to technical consensus and Bitcoin scalability.
Bitcoin is many things to many people. However, the development and maintenance of Bitcoin is a human endeavor. Satoshi sought review and cooperation, and the subsequent work by Bitcoin’s developers has made the system more secure and orders of magnitude faster. The Bitcoin developer community is dedicated to the future of Bitcoin, looks after the health of the network, strives for the highest standards of performance, and works to keep Bitcoin secure on behalf of everyone. In the upcoming months, two open workshops will bring the community together to explore these issues. The first Scaling Bitcoin workshop will be in Montreal on September 12-13. The second workshop is planned for December 6-7 and will be hosted in Hong Kong to be more inclusive of Bitcoin’s global user base.
We ask the community to not prejudge and instead work collaboratively to reach the best outcome through the existing process and the supporting workshops. It’s great to already see broad excitement for the event and the high concentration of technical participants attending. Wladimir J. van der Laan
Pieter Wuille
Cory Fields
Luke Dashjr
Jonas Schnelli
Jorge Timón
Greg Maxwell
Eric Voskuil
Amir Taaki
Dave Collins
Michael Ford
Peter Todd
Phillip Mienk
Suhas Daftuar
R E Broadley
Eric Lombrozo
Daniel Kraft
Chris Moore
Alex Morcos
dexX7
Warren Togami
Mark Friedenbach
Ross Nicoll
Pavel Janík
Josh Lehan
Andrew Poelstra
Christian Decker
Bryan Bishop
Benedict Chan
฿tcDrak
Charlie Lee
Jeremy Rubin |
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Surprised to see that Gavin Andresen lead the poll. So many XT shills out there.
BIP101 is not XT. It could still be merged into Core. This is in fact the scenario that all those who have supported BIP101 without mentioning XT are hoping for. Actually if this is a power grab by Mike Hearn, he couldn't have chosen a better battlefield. Almost nobody defends 1MB maxblocksize forever. Core developers should accept BIP101 and fight Hearn's fork over the next technical issue. |
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Seeing how the forces are lining up... I think that the most likely outcome is going to be a fork. With BIP101 gaining majority support and a minority supporting a "classic" small-block Bitcoin.
I used to think a fork was the worst possible outcome... but I am starting to reconcile myself to the idea. It might not be such a bad thing to have 2 coins and let people choose.
After all.. there are hundreds of altcoins... they all seem to co-exist and compete just fine.
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