Gavin Threatens to Quit Bitcoin Development and Join Hearn's Fork

[tvbcof]

...
I'm saddened to see so many comments saying that it is okay because we will probably be able to profit from this situation.

Need a hankie?

[Cruxer]

It is a bad thing that one person currently has so much influence on the bitcoin perception
 him leaving should not cause more than a small dip on the news, otherwise it has become to centralized around him.

Agree, there are many Bitcoin developers, Gavin is most known one

[kelsey]

@tvbcof


Are you seriously trying to put forth that miners are not in control?

The miners, be they pools or scores of independents are absolutely the ones that will decide.

If enough ASICS in datacenters follow Gavin guess what, that becomes the new legit fork.

Also this is not an "attack", it's an evolution just the way Satoshi intended, with majority ruling.

Evolution is imminent, like it or not you will be part of Gavin and Hearn's fork.


~BCX~

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

I am a proponent of this theory. Bitcoin, like everything else on this planet, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. If there is demand for legacy Bitcoin, we will have legacy Bitcoin. I can promise you that.

yeah right lets not get carried away here and kid ourselves, its not like anyone wakes up in the morning and goes damn I can't get through my day without having some bitcoin.

i'm affraid all cryptos including bitcoins main market driving force is;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

[spartacusrex]

This situation reminds me of that submarine movie, with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman.

Denzel says a nice speech about actions requiring both the captain and himself to agree, he does not agree, and furthermore.. blah blah etc etc..

Then they argue over launching some nuclear weapons. And Gene punches Denzel in the face. Hard.

Consensus. It's a tough one.

Makes Bitcoin's consensus-mechanism-achievements seem all the more impressive.

[fgordillo]

It is a bad thing that one person currently has so much influence on the bitcoin perception
 him leaving should not cause more than a small dip on the news, otherwise it has become to centralized around him.

I fully agree with you, decentralization should be extended to individuals active in the ecosystem... Do you think that, given such a potential dangerous situation for the general Bitcoin project Satoshi should reappear to rebalance individuals' positions and their ascendency within the system? Although, if he didn't do this in 2013 why would he do it now, would his "appearance" show that the community isn't able to autoregulate itself thus its weaker than we all think?

I'm curious to know if you have an opinion on this!

[Rampion]

I believe Gavin did many good things for Bitcoin, but I also believe some of the things he defends are not based on solid grounds - I also believe he did some shady, or at least dubious, things in the past. The fact that he sides with Mike Hearn is very telling, as Hearn always tried to kill bitcoin decentralization and fungibility trying to push awful proposals like blacklisting.

On the contrary, people like Maxwell, Wuille or Peter Todd always convince me with their reasons. I know for sure with whom I'm siding with - the latter group. I'd bet most miners will stand with them too.

[Rampion]

BTW: I'm curious to know if Nick Szabo will comment on this matter. I guess we could assume is Satoshi's opinion

[Amph]

I believe Gavin did many good things for Bitcoin, but I also believe some of the things he defends are not based on solid grounds - I also believe he did some shady, or at least dubious, things in the past. The fact that he sides with Mike Hearn is very telling, as Hearn always tried to kill bitcoin decentralization and fungibility trying to push awful proposals like blacklisting.

On the contrary, people like Maxwell, Wuille or Peter Todd always convince me with their reasons. I know for sure with whom I'm siding with - the latter group. I'd bet most miners will stand with them too.

i find also hilarious that gavin was not doing this for the money, he said it many times, but then he is talking about cashing out before something bad happen

the true is everyone is here to dump for fiat, none is actually going to care about the tech behind bitcoin, maybe only satoshi(but then he would not have mined 1M coins)

p.s. i confused gavin with maxwell, nevermind my first sentence is wrong...

[iCEBREAKER]

What a baby. He's going to throw a tantrum and quit to make his own altcoin? Talk about centralization! Bitcoin is gavincoin already. Bitcoin is completely controlled by Gavin and this proves it.

If Gavin goes, a substantial amount of the hash rate will follow him.

Take notice that not a single major pool has said otherwise.

All it will take is ONE major pool to jump, Bitcoin price will crash and the rest of the pools will switch.

Once any two major pools switch, it's game over for "Legacy Satoshi"

Gavin is going to win has won this tug of war.

Gavin has already lost this tug of war.

His inability to accept a consensus he disagrees with has been exposed.  His duplicity, in the form of spawning XT in spooky/smokey VC backroom deals with no warning on the normal channels, and managerial incompetence have been confirmed.

The Gavinista coup is DOA.  They just don't know it yet.

No effective strategy or device exists to counter Mircea's 'GavinCoin Short' WMD:

http://qntra.net/2015/01/the-hard-fork-missile-crisis/

As the Giga-blockchain and main-blockchain continue to grow from the fork, those actively attacking the Giga-Blockchain will create many transactions that allow their main-blockchain coins to duplicate over to the Giga-blockchain while remaining safely on the main-blockchain. The transactions that succeed can then be used to acquire more main-blockchain coins upon which the cycle repeats. Eventually the blockchain with the most financial resources behind it will continue to grow at a faster pace, while the other slowly, and eventually stops growing altogether.

It will be impossible for the Giga-chain to keep 1:1 parity with the main chain from which it forks, they contain different transaction, although some may overlap. Here a user broadcasts a transaction with inputs originating on the Main-chain, and is eventually included in a block on the Giga-chain, but not on the Main-chain. The coin is essentially duplicated onto both chains.

Those siding with the wrong chain who end up accepting duplicated transactions from the other chain, such as a purchase from an exchange running on the losing blockchain, will lose those coins when the dust settles. No war is without casulties, the Great Blockchain Civil War will be no different.

It is by Lord Satoshi's sublime design Bitcoin grants all possible advantages to its defenders, and places all possible economic and technical burdens on attackers.

[shmadz]

The miners aren't in control here. If the miners make poor choices, they might end up mining worthless tokens.

The miners are in control. They choose which version to use, the new or the old. If enough of them use the new version, then the blockchain forks. If enough of them use the old version, then the blockchain doesn't fork. Either way, most miners will not be mining worthless tokens because the fork will only occur first with a soft-fork when the majority switch, and second with a hard-fork when the super-majority switch. If less than the majority switch, then all miners will still be mining valid blocks and the tokens are then not worthless.

Umm, the fork will have nothing to do with the mining algorithm, correct?

If so, can't we just merge-mine bitcoin and Gavincoin? Like we do already with namecoin?

[RoadStress]

Your defamation campaign against me is going nowhere.  Try harder.

Oh wait, aren't you supposed to be spamming the hardware sub for Spamdoolies?

I am doing my best!

Hardware sub is hibernating. The fun is here where we have MP sock puppet accounts and scammers like you and cypherdoc.

[QuestionAuthority]

Your defamation campaign against me is going nowhere.  Try harder.

Oh wait, aren't you supposed to be spamming the hardware sub for Spamdoolies?

I am doing my best!

Hardware sub is hibernating. The fun is here where we have MP sock puppet accounts and scammers like you and cypherdoc.

Woah, backup, cypherdoc is a scammer now? Gimme the juice!

[wpalczynski]

I believe Gavin did many good things for Bitcoin, but I also believe some of the things he defends are not based on solid grounds - I also believe he did some shady, or at least dubious, things in the past. The fact that he sides with Mike Hearn is very telling, as Hearn always tried to kill bitcoin decentralization and fungibility trying to push awful proposals like blacklisting.

On the contrary, people like Maxwell, Wuille or Peter Todd always convince me with their reasons. I know for sure with whom I'm siding with - the latter group. I'd bet most miners will stand with them too.

i find also hilarious that gavin was not doing this for the money, he said it many times, but then he is talking about cashing out before something bad happen

the true is everyone is here to dump for fiat, none is actually going to care about the tech behind bitcoin, maybe only satoshi(but then he would not have mined 1M coins)

p.s. i confused gavin with maxwell, nevermind my first sentence is wrong...

He needed to keep mining in order to keep the network alive until it caught on.

[not altcoin hitler]

The miners aren't in control here. If the miners make poor choices, they might end up mining worthless tokens.

The miners are in control. They choose which version to use, the new or the old. If enough of them use the new version, then the blockchain forks. If enough of them use the old version, then the blockchain doesn't fork. Either way, most miners will not be mining worthless tokens because the fork will only occur first with a soft-fork when the majority switch, and second with a hard-fork when the super-majority switch. If less than the majority switch, then all miners will still be mining valid blocks and the tokens are then not worthless.

Umm, the fork will have nothing to do with the mining algorithm, correct?

If so, can't we just merge-mine bitcoin and Gavincoin? Like we do already with namecoin?

Just buy "Bitbeans", it's POS too!
Gavin should just become the dev of Bitbeans (if he isn't already) and GTFO already.
I doubt pools will even add his shitcoin for merge mining, honestly.

[HCLivess]

lets just choose the best altcoin and be done with it

[kennyP]

lets just choose the best altcoin and be done with it

NXT, or if you're a PoW devotee, a NXT monetary system currency with minting (i.e.PoW)

NXT is the answer to all your problems guys

[Rampion]

What is quite unexplainable is why Gavin is proposing such an abrupt change: going directly to 20MB blocks. It would be much more rational to have a "slow" approach, ie increasing the block size to 2MB, then to 4MB, then to 8MB and so forth. I'm 100% sure consensus will be much easier to reach in that scenario. 2MB will double the current capacity with no difference at all in overhead for miners and full nodes.

Why in the earth is Gavin proposing such a dramatic change which could have deep implications instead of taking a cautious, slow and progressive approach?

[kano]

I believe Gavin did many good things for Bitcoin, but I also believe some of the things he defends are not based on solid grounds - I also believe he did some shady, or at least dubious, things in the past. The fact that he sides with Mike Hearn is very telling, as Hearn always tried to kill bitcoin decentralization and fungibility trying to push awful proposals like blacklisting.

On the contrary, people like Maxwell, Wuille or Peter Todd always convince me with their reasons. I know for sure with whom I'm siding with - the latter group. I'd bet most miners will stand with them too.

Current blacklisting in effect that I know of is eligius pool and luke-jr pushing his blacklisting bitcoin on the gentoo world where recently anyone who compiled the default gentoo version of bitcoin got blacklisting of luke-jr's choice patched into the code by default.

gmaxwell backs luke-jr in any argument I've had with gmaxwell, no matter what the circumstances, so that sorta makes the "On the contrary" team sound worse since it's already in effect

[Amph]

I believe Gavin did many good things for Bitcoin, but I also believe some of the things he defends are not based on solid grounds - I also believe he did some shady, or at least dubious, things in the past. The fact that he sides with Mike Hearn is very telling, as Hearn always tried to kill bitcoin decentralization and fungibility trying to push awful proposals like blacklisting.

On the contrary, people like Maxwell, Wuille or Peter Todd always convince me with their reasons. I know for sure with whom I'm siding with - the latter group. I'd bet most miners will stand with them too.

i find also hilarious that gavin was not doing this for the money, he said it many times, but then he is talking about cashing out before something bad happen

the true is everyone is here to dump for fiat, none is actually going to care about the tech behind bitcoin, maybe only satoshi(but then he would not have mined 1M coins)

p.s. i confused gavin with maxwell, nevermind my first sentence is wrong...

He needed to keep mining in order to keep the network alive until it caught on.

but it was really necessary to keep the network alive at that time? when he was the only one using it? what's the point?

maybe he should have set the diff at 10 or even 100(instead of 1), at least he would not have mined so many coins, while maintaining the livelihood of the network

[jonald_fyookball]

What is quite unexplainable is why Gavin is proposing such an abrupt change: going directly to 20MB blocks. It would be much more rational to have a "slow" approach, ie increasing the block size to 2MB, then to 4MB, then to 8MB and so forth. I'm 100% sure consensus will be much easier to reach in that scenario. 2MB will double the current capacity with no difference at all in overhead for miners and full nodes.

Why in the earth is Gavin proposing such a dramatic change which could have deep implications instead of taking a cautious, slow and progressive approach?

You could argue that.  You could also argue that we don't want to keep bandaiding this over and over.
If you're gonna use a blocksize increase as a bandaid, do it once so that its big enough we
have plenty of time to find a better solution before asking for another fork.