Bitcoin Is About to Fundamentally Change

[MicroGuy]

"Bitcoin is heading towards a hard fork in the road. Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin’s most important developers, announced today that he will move forward with a controversial code update that will leave miners and Bitcoin services on either side of an irreparable divide.

The plan, proposed earlier in May by Andresen, addresses worries that the Bitcoin network won’t be able to handle the load of large-scale adoption because of a predetermined hard cap on the size of "blocks," the name for the packets of transaction data that miners upload to the blockchain, the publicly viewable ledger of all Bitcoin transactions.

The solution he’s proposing is to increase the size of blocks from one megabyte to 20 with a code update. This means that fewer blocks would be uploaded to the blockchain overall, easing network congestion. But in doing so, it will also split the blockchain into two versions using the different block sizes, and miners and services will be forced to choose between them."

Full Story: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-is-about-to-fundamentally-change

[Alley]

Would it be a good idea to remove all coins from any exchanges and pit them in cold storage before the fork?

[achow101]

The solution he’s proposing is to increase the size of blocks from one megabyte to 20 with a code update. This means that fewer blocks would be uploaded to the blockchain overall, easing network congestion.

That is not true. The only thing that would change the number of blocks being discovered and broadcast is the difficulty and the hashrate, not the blocksize. This update would only ease network congestion by allowing more transactions to be added to a block and thus reducing the UTXO set. It could then increase confirmation times if transactions are not being confirmed due to not being added into a block because of the large UTXO set.

Get your facts right.

[Nancarrow]

To be fair, the OP is only quoting an article there, so it's they who really deserve the facepalm.

Having said that, HOW MANY GODDAMN THREADS DO WE NEED?

[repentance]

Would it be a good idea to remove all coins from any exchanges and pit them in cold storage before the fork?

Given that exchanges shouldn't be used as wallets in the first place, the answer is yes regardless of what happens with the forking.

[Alley]

Coins are kept on exchanges for day trading purposes.

[LiteCoinGuy]

To be fair, the OP is only quoting an article there, so it's they who really deserve the facepalm.

Having said that, HOW MANY GODDAMN THREADS DO WE NEED?

5-6 per day, so alot FUD 

[Elwar]

I'll just start posting the truth on all of these FUD threads.

Here is Gavin's question on a discussion board:

What do other people think?


If we can't come to an agreement soon, then I'll ask for help
reviewing/submitting patches to Mike's Bitcoin-Xt project that implement a
big increase now that grows over time so we may never have to go through
all this rancor and debate again.

I'll then ask for help lobbying the merchant services and exchanges and
hosted wallet companies and other bitcoind-using-infrastructure companies
(and anybody who agrees with me that we need bigger blocks sooner rather
than later) to run Bitcoin-Xt instead of Bitcoin Core, and state that they
are running it. We'll be able to see uptake on the network by monitoring
client versions.

Perhaps by the time that happens there will be consensus bigger blocks are
needed sooner rather than later; if so, great! The early deployment will
just serve as early testing, and all of the software already deployed will
ready for bigger blocks.

But if there is still no consensus among developers but the "bigger blocks
now" movement is successful, I'll ask for help getting big miners to do the
same, and use the soft-fork block version voting mechanism to (hopefully)
get a majority and then a super-majority willing to produce bigger blocks.
The purpose of that process is to prove to any doubters that they'd better
start supporting bigger blocks or they'll be left behind, and to give them
a chance to upgrade before that happens.


Because if we can't come to consensus here, the ultimate authority for
determining consensus is what code the majority of merchants and exchanges
and miners are running.


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Gavin Andresen