That wouldn't work, of course.  Another reason not to worry.  Unfortunately many nodes are behind NAT and/or restrictive firewalls, and cannot accept incoming connections.  Nodes which are on a public IP, and accept incoming connections, often have a hundred or more.

No, not even close.   If you have been using bitcoin for more than a day, you should know there are two concepts called "fee" and "priority".  If ten more people had sent transactions at the same time, and they included a fee at all, or the input utxos had any confirmations at all, the transactions would be included.  I send many of my transactions with a very low or zero fee to mark them as low priority, can wait if the block is full.  They almost never have to wait.

You obviously don't know what dust is, and I doubt you know how transactions are constructed.

A transaction has inputs and outputs.  Each input is a reference to an earlier transaction output by txid and number of an outoput in the given txid.  When an input is spent, the entire input is spent.  When all outputs from a txid have been spent, the txid can be pruned from the utxo set (which is good).

A dust output is an output of just a few satoshis.  So small that including it in a transaction would increase the necessary fee for the transaction more than the value of the input.  I.e. it will never be possible to spend economically, and litter the utxo space forever.  No matter how many such inputs you have, the combined value of them is negative.  Those utxos are called dust.  We don't want transactions containing dust outputs, because those will litter the utxo set, which is kept in memory on all nodes, forever.  

Was that clear?  Faster increasing UTXO set is Gavin's main argument against a block size increase, btw.  Dust is the worst, since it is economically unspendable, and will stay there forever.

0.00099 is far above the dust threshold.  It is 513 satoshis or thereabouts.  The monetary value, even assuming 0 txfee, is much less than one cent.

I have no idea why anyone would consider what you explain there abuse.

Blaming Core doesn't make sense.  They already implemented those features in 0.12!  I personally think the problem is incompetence.  The forks lack competent programmers, and don't know how to merge the fork they made with current Bitcoin.  They made something they think may work on top of some old version, and don't dare to touch it.

The block size is currently not a problem, and won't be for a while yet.  Hard forks will be, especially if the forks keep pretending to be Bitcoin.

Of course.  Can you think of a better use for the equipment?

Adoption?  It that what you call transaction spam?  Do you think 2 MB blocks will reduce the spam in any way?  The blocks will be just as full.

I just had a look.  Of the last 8 blocks, only one is close to full.  1.8 kB left in that one, which should allow for about 9 more non-segwit transactions.  The rest have plenty room.  The blocks which are completely full usually contain a lot of dust transactions, i.e. outputs which cost more in fees tp spend than the value of the output, which won't get mined using a default configurations.  Some miners happily prefer those transactions as long as they pay more in fees.  This is abuse, imho.

Here is a nice infographic which explains why segwit is a much better idea than some panic fork blocksize war.

WTF?  But why?  Finally there is RBF and all the other improvements in 0.12, which are important to users, merchants and exchanges, and Oliver Janssen decides to not support it? Again: WTF is Classic about?  I thought is was a fork to 2 MB block size, not a retardation.

They are clearly just spooking.  Noone in their right mind will run it.  When 90% of nodes use RBF, and 0.12 doesn't even inform about RBF transactions, it would be outright dangerous to use.  I can send a 0-fee transaction to a "Classic" user, insist on getting my money now, and then RBF it.  Even easier than it is now.  With RBF support, I can instead ask the sender to replace it by a non-RBF transaction paying a fee.

I intend to use RBF a lot myself.  I exchange bitcoins all the time, and as long as I have an unconfirmed transaction in the queue, I can just replace it and add outputs as I sell more.  Saving transactions on the blockchain, ensuring faster confirmations for my customers, and not having to use unconfirmed inputs.

And the speed improvements important for IBD?  Why don't they want them?  Or the data limits, etc?  All of those must be essential for a large block fork.

Aqually it should be doable by a lot less than 25%, since you can generate every block a 10 minute to validate block, and it will be very hard for the rest to catch up.  If the fork happens, Bitcoin will already be destroyed, so the investment is already lost.  The only cost is power.

The cow isn't starving.  The blocks aren't full, except during spam attacks which would have filled blocks of any size.  Not even then, since most miners don't produce full blocks under any circumstance.  Normally, e.g. now, it is far between full blocks.  Some miners are quite good at filtering the spam, and confirm even 0-fee transactions in the first block they make even during the worst spam storms.  Doubling the size of the corn field won't help a bit, when you don't do sh*t about the real problem.  Swarm of grasshoppers and birds eating everyting they get.

Again: Non-upgraded nodes don't need to process any more information in those transactions than what will be available to them.  They need to know the complete UTXO set, and if transactions to themselves are valid or not.  And they will know that.

Bitcoin has been designed to work fine without incoming connections.  A non-upgraded node can make outgoing connections to anyone.  All nodes.  Upgraded or not.  Upgraded nodes will accept incoming connections from anyone.  Upgraded or not.  The only change he is suggesting, is to make sure upgraded nodes only make outgoing connections to other upgrading nodes.  My own node currently has 8 outgoing and 104 incoming connections.  Even if my node is upgraded, and all my outgoing connections are to segwit nodes, there is nothing whatsoever stopping non-upgraded nodes to connect to my node, and nothing is splitting the network in any way imaginable.

You are presenting Peter Todds solution to the problem as the problem, which is beyond my imagination that anyone could think of, but that's Reddit..

So how do you explain how they have failed to keep up with the latest improvements in Bitcoin Core, or address obvious bugs in their code, and Oliver Janssen closing a pull request without accepting any discussion about it?

Yes, they are.   SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY is a standard script operation which has existed since the beginning.  They are an important part of many types of smart contracts and colored coins.  You are totaly confused.  Have you been taking the Reddit pill or something?

The client doesn't have to know anything about it.  If it hasn't produced any P2WSH or P2WPKH addresses, it won't receive any payments using segregated witness.  It can validate everything it needs to the way it always did.

I emphasized two important words you didn't read.  An old node can still connect to peers, but will not receive incoming connections from new nodes.  It will receive incoming connections from old nodes, however.  New nodes will only make outgoing connections to segwit nodes, to make sure they can sync with segwit data.

A node will only make 8 outgoing connections.  If most of them are to non-segwit nodes, it will be much harder to get the segwit data.  Peter Todd suggest a solution to this potential problem.

He also suggested a way to make it safe.  You quoted form the solution, but didn't understand it.

Please list the remaining issues, and explain why the issues are more difficult to solve than getting all bitcoin users to switch to a different software maintained by two incompetent brothers and a dictator.

I have no idea what the devs expect, but based on the steady decline of altcoin nodes on the p2p network, I doubt the release of binaries will have much effect on anything.  There are plenty other altcoin nodes to run, which have the binaries ready for download.

Doesn't seem to be a serious attempt then.  Are the Toomins too incompetent to merge the improvements from 0.12?

I am a miner as well, and I am not going to start mining any altcoins.  I doubt you will get many miners to switch.  For a given hashrate the miners will produce exactly as much as before the fork, until the first difficulty adjustment.  No matter which fork you are on.  After that your return will increase a lot.

If everyone switches, including me, consensus have changed.  So far nothing indicates that the altcoins have more than a meager support among users, merchants, exchanges and miners.  There was a pull request on requiring 90% miner support for hardfork activation in "Classic", by request of some Chinese miners, but the dictator of the project, Oliver Janssen, closed it.  He is only aiming for the destruction and control of Bitcoin, and has no regards for the wishes of the miners, users, merchants or exchanges, or sanity.

I wonder how long it takes until a miner do a 51% attack on "Classic" using only 25% of the hashrate (after already scaling off a lot of the competition due to the fork) using the 10 minute block trick.  With 2 MB blocks, you can design a transaction which takes 10 minutes to validate.  In the mean time the malicious miner has a 10 minute head start on the next block.  Victory!  "Classic" hasn't been given much thought.  In the mean time Bitcoin solves the O(n²) problem in segwit, allowing for large transactions which don't take forever to validate.  (XT had a "solution" to this problem, by limiting transactions to 100 kB, a limit which would require another hard fork to remove in the future.  Where the other developers look for elegant, efficient and flexible solutions, Gavin prefers using a mallet.  (In his own words.))
 
Letting the cow die in a civil war isn't much better.

Always, even after segwit has been deployed.  Only the witness is segregated, as the name implies. 

The only thing an old node cannot do after activation, is verify if a transaction to a segwit address is valid or not, as it will always seem valid to an old node.  Fortunately this is of no consequence, since old nodes will never generate that kind of addresses or receive segwit transactions, and the risk of an old node generating a block with an invalid transaction is very small since more than 95% of the hashrate follow the new rules.  A longer chainfork is very unlikely, but as with all soft forks merchants should of course upgrade.  Old nodes can send to segwit addresses, but not spend coins sent to segwit addresses.  Read the BIP.

Why do you think segwit has less datausage?  It doesn't.  When it has been deployed, segwit transactions (i.e. only transactions to the new address types associated with segwit) will have their witnesses recorded in a parallel block of witness data.  The total capacity of the two blocks is 4 MB.  This can be extended by various mechanisms in a later soft fork, or more likely by using sidechains and payment channels.  The latter mechanisms are IMHO better, since they scale better and don't increase the cost of running a full node.

If you are afraid of that getting deleted, you can still read gmawell's very similar proposal from 2012 here.

Of course they are.  They are standard bitcoin transactions, and there are many of them in the blockchain.  They do exactly the same as standard P2PKH transactions, just that the output is spendable by anyone.  There are many of them in the blockchain already.

First of all; segwit, like all soft forks, will only be activated when 95% of the hashrate support it.  Peter Todd has not discredited the plan as fraud.  Exploiting this requires roughly the same hashrate as a 51% attack, and will only apply to segwit transactions.  Someone who invest that much will probably go for the entire cake.  After segwit has been deployed, SPV clients will be much safer to use due to the fraud proof.

So what?  Bitcoin Core is in beta as well.  People still run it.

I hope they are going to upgrade to 0.12 before they release.  0.12 has lots of improvements, e.g. much faster IBD, data usage limiting, the long awaited RBF feature, etc.  It will be hard to convince people to downgrade.

I already showed Localbitcoins.  Perhaps the exchange with the most users in the world.

My points are: Most people don't sign petitions unless they want change.  And a petition which is supposed to be taken seriously better contain names.

You are quoting the wrong paragraph.

By the measure you are using, Bitcoin Core hasn't been released yet.  It is in beta.

Don't be silly.  Altcoin is the generic term for Bitcoin forks.  It been since the first Bitcoin forks/altcoins started to show up years ago, using alternative consensus rules.  It can easily be shown in court.

Segwit has the potential to get us much further, and scale dynamically.  Just increasing the blocksize doesn't scale at all.

There have been many soft forks so far, and it is nothing to be afraid of.  There was an issue with one of them due to a malicious miner who ended up loosing 175 BTC.  A merchant running an ancient version of bitcoin accepted the bad chain and lost on a double spend, but that's the only issue I can remember. 

Hard forks is a completely different matter.  Hard forks don't resolve themselves until 100% of all nodes have upgraded.  Until then Bitcoin will be unsafe to use, and people will lose money.  Even worse is the forking planned by some by releasing various altcoins and try to overtake a majority of the bitcoin hashpower.  In that case even upgrading to the latest version won't resolve the problems.

Wrong.  All transactions are recorded in the block.  Only the signatures are moved.

Wrong.  An old and a new node will have the coins at exactly the same places.  The UTXO set will be identitcal.

Segwit will not be activated until 95% of all hashpower support it, like with all soft forks.

Please educate yourself about segwit and bitcoin in general.  Have you been on Reddit or something?

No, it is correct.  Transactions with a segregated witness will be completely valid to present nodes.  They will look like a normal "anyonecanpay" transaction.  Non-upgraded nodes will not generate special segwit addresses, and therefore will not receive transactions to segwit addresses.  They are just transactions to other people which you don't have the private key to.  You can't import those addresses to an old wallet either.  But transactions to segwit addresses will still be recorded by old nodes, and included in their UTXO set.

Very old nodes cannot fully validate all constraints in any recent block, because they don't know about them.  This has always been the case.  Still the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.  In case of a hard forking change, the new blocks will not be valid to older nodes.  Segregated witness is not a hard forking change.

Try it out yourself.  The testnet is open.

When the source code is out, it is released.  You don't need binaries for that.

Except the people on this issue are mostly unnamed shills, not named identifiable people.

Standard bitcoin is well defined in Satoshi's paper.  Diversion from consensus is not allowed.  Only bugfixes and more restrictions have been allowed, and Satoshi did many of those himself.

The source has been released, and this means the software has been released.  Don't fool yourself.

I do make it very clear that I sell Bitcoin and no altcoins.  I always did.  I link to bitcoin.org in my FAQ.

When Core is done with their roadmap, the SPV problem will at least be solved by the fraud proofs included in the segwit proposal.  This makes the world a bit safer for SPV wallets.  Segwit has a testnet, and works, btw.  Many wallets have it implemented already.  You are welcome to test it.  Join #segwit-dev on Freenode to discuss.

In the madness of someone intentionally hardforking with little support and only a few nodes, there is still a very high chance of a SPV wallet getting on a different fork.

People will mine on the correct chain for profit.  It is the one most of the users will use.  More than 90% of nodes are currently running Core.  Just a month back less than 87% of all nodes ran Core.  Which means the users are running Core, and will want Core coins.  People will SPV wallets are more than 90% likely to connect to a Core chain, and only see Core coins.  The value will dwindle, but Bitcoin is still the coin of choice for more than 90% of the users.

Huh?  The bitcoin blocks are still valid bitcoin blocks when segwit is deployed.  Transactions with a segregated witness will have the signature in a separate chain, but this does not change the validity of the block.  The blocks and the transactions in the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.

Only upgraded nodes will know how to check the validity of transactions where the spent txout is from a transaction with segregated witness, but this won't be a problem.  It won't activate until at least 95% of the hashrate support it.  Any chainforks will therefore be short, and can not be hard.

The rule says the longest chain is only correct if it follows all the rules.  Simply being the longest is not enough.  The stupid miner announced support for BIP66 without actually supporting it.  He lost money, and was probably thought a lesson.  All nodes, both old and upgraded, were on the correct chain as soon as it overtook the malicious chain.

The August 2010 fork, which was much longer, was even correct according to the current consensus at that time.  Unfortunately this was non-intentional, and a new version was rushed out to mine out the chain with the malicious block at low difficulty.

Of course, even though Gavin wanted to hard fork even then by defining the 0.8 behaviour correct.  That would have been disastrous.  I remember the other developers spent some time convincing him.

Correct.  No consensus make hard forks die.  Which is why all the current Bit-altcoins are stillborn, and very few actually run them.

According to "ShadowOfHarbinger" it was released days ago, but he is full of crap and might be lying.  

Not a lot.  There are a few who took VC money from the same people.

A much longer list than the one on the "Bitcoin Classic" site.

Or they just don't care about the drama, and will stick with standard bitcoin.

Yes.

Currently Unlimited has more support than Classic, XT has much more support than both of them, and Core dwarfs them all.  Support for larger blocksize forks have dwindled since the bitcoin developers agreed on a roadmap which scales much better than the alternatives, and avoids a hard fork.  On January 1st there were almost 750 nodes trying to fork vs 4879 nodes running Bitcoin Core.  The number of Core nodes is increasing, and the number of fork nodes is decreasing.  Looks like most people are pushing for the Core solution.

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect.  Whyat do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

The reason why so many fork supporters run a full node is obvious: If the fork happens, there is no other way to be sure to use the correct altcoin than by running a full node supporting the altcoin they want to use, and not even that will work if the standard bitcoin fork comes back ahead of their altchain.  Yes, the coins will become worthless.  People use bitcoin as a currency for transactions and storage of value, not for the drama.  When the coins can't be used reliably without keeping up with the drama, people are going to jump ship.

If a majority of miners do it, they will do it again just for the fun of it.  The coins will be worthless anyway.

I haven't researched this much, since I assume that the vast majority who didn't publicly announce support for any of the four forks, support the current roadmap, but here is one in addition to myself.  From #localbitcoins-chat:
Localbitcoins is one of the largest exchanges (perhaps the largest) by number of users, and one of the largest by BTC volume.

I don't think you will find anyone who support the status quo, if that is what you mean by 1 MB.  The roadmap scales much better than any suggested blocksize increment.