Funnily enough it is not China that is wanting to fork Bitcoin but Gavin and Mike (the US and the UK).

As usual - the Chinese are never the ones to "start a fight". Instead they'll just sit back and decide how to best profit (as they always do).

So - my other point is that >50% of the power comes from China and not one of the major China CEO's signed that document (about BIP 101).

Therefore my guess is that BIP 101 is not going to succeed (as the Chinese will just quietly kill it).

Then the decision (about block size) is 100% up to the miners not up to the "other nodes" as was being suggested by others (my earlier point).

Maybe you guys "just don't get it" but I no longer run a "full node" because I live in China and the bandwidth doesn't work (so I would think that pretty much no-one in China runs a full node on a home-grade internet connection).

Although I am only using "home internet' I am sure that others in China would also have problems trying to run full nodes due to the controls of the internet here (so you are simply not going to see any Chinese nodes able to handle GB blocks with any reasonable speed).

You might have missed my earlier post - but if the requirements (such as bandwidth) for running a full-node become too much then no-one is going to run one other than a miner.

Thus the consensus will be according to the miners as the SPV nodes (everyone else) will simply accept that.

So a vote for "huge blocks" is basically a vote to reduce the consensus decision to a very small group of miners.

In regards to this whole blocksize debate I think one further thing needs to be stated and that is "what are the Chinese miners going to do?".

The Chinese miners account for more than 50% of the hashpower so in effect it is really up to them what will happen (as much as that probably galls all westerners).

My guess is that they'll remain silent about the issue but will decide one way or the other and we'll find out about that early next year (so all the grandstanding going on now will actually amount to nothing).

(by "miners" I am meaning "mining pools" of course)

Okay - yes I get what you mean now.

I think that there might have been a BIP to do just that also.

But understand that as less and less people run full nodes the miners will actually end up more in control (eventually I think all consensus will be decided by the miners only as there is no economic incentive for non-miners to run full nodes).

Huh - what on earth do you mean?

You do understand that a "full node" that is not mining has "no stake in the game" don't you?

You either keep running a full node or you don't (according to how much bandwidth you have) but no-one is going to care one way or the other (it is basically irrelevant whether or not you run a full node if you are not mining).

If you end up pushing the developing countries into a situation where they have no miners at all (so all just running SPV clients) then I wonder how much they'll end up actually trusting Bitcoin (as that is something controlled by those with high speed internet in the rich developed countries).

So we are seriously concerned now that 32 MB is going to become an issue in the next year or two so we should be thinking GBs per block?

If the point was to have all the world's txs on Bitcoin then it seems odd that only the part of the world that has the very best internet will be able to use it in a few years.

Thus - we want GB blocks that the developing world can't handle - therefore we don't want the developing world to use BTC.

Bring on the alts then I say.

So vote for a hard fork to later introduce a soft fork vs. just one hard fork.

Hmm... I think I prefer BIP 100 in that regard (the less forks the better).

As it came first (of all the BIPs to do with blocksize) exactly how is it a compromise (i.e. it can't be a compromise to the other BIPs so what is it a compromise to)?

Having increases just being automatic based upon a non-scientific theory about the increase of bandwidth doesn't seem like a better idea to me.

Getting the miners to vote on it at least makes sure you don't have any big troubles (if they are struggling to handle the bandwidth then they would vote not to increase until they had good enough hardware and connectivity to do so).

The problem is that the issue isn't actually a technical one except perhaps that of scaling (which when we are talking about the future is full of unknowns).

I think that BIP 100 is a more intelligent approach as it allows the miners (the only people that really matter in regards to block sizes) to vote between themselves as to when an increase should occur (rather than just relying upon a theory that bandwidth will increase much like processing power).

In regards to the bandwidth increasing theory I would invite people to just look at Australia - they were going to implement "fibre to the home" for the NBN rollout initially but under a change of government are now no longer doing this (reducing the bandwidth considerably). So bandwidth really doesn't work like processing power as it is "political" (so anyone making a theory that bandwidth increases will work just like processing power is living in a Utopian world).

So it comes down again not to being technically better but being more "pushed" which is the bullying style tactic that was taken by Gavin and Mike.

Personally I don't like bullies - so I back BIP 100 on principle (even though its author doesn't think much of me).

This whole XT thing actually reminds me of when Gavin tried to kick out Luke-Jr (calling him "poisonous" from memory which was back when BIP 16 and 17 were the issue).

I wouldn't say I am a fan of Luke-Jr myself but I disagree with these sort of "social manipulation" style tactics which is basically how I see the current situation.

What is the emergency?

That Gavin and Mike are impatient to sack the Bitcoin Core devs and go work for big business?

(I am being rather overly cynical of course - but I really don't see that there is any emergency)

Again - I'll just point out that during the "stress testing" spam attacks I had no problem at all sending BTC txs with zero fees (so those trying to suggest we should panic about solving a problem in getting txs through are just full of shit).

True - but if some of the major pool operators are not aware of BIP 100 then that would be a shame (it seems none of those CEOs were aware of it).

Strange that you guys didn't notice BIP 100 well before BIP 101 (as I am pretty sure that it had appeared weeks before).

Anyway - now perhaps send your newfound information to the bunch of CEOs that have all backed BIP 101 to see if they will also back BIP 100.

Yes I am pretty sure "headers first" has already been implemented (in 0.10.0) I just wasn't sure about the limits in regards to the block size (and wasn't meaning to get into the whole block size debate thing).

Got it - so blocks are not sent as a single network message now (I haven't kept up with the latest changes)?

I thought it was 32MB (and was later reduced to 1MB) - are you sure no limit?