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August 13, 2015, 10:37:16 PM
Last edit: August 14, 2015, 04:52:11 AM by TECSHARE |
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Any hard fork is immediately an independent network and therefore competing for resources. Competing blockchains also give overall strength to the cryptocoin community to a point, and do provide some redundancy and opportunity for testing new protocols. I have personally had to oversee hard forks in the Infinitecoin protocol several times in order to patch the original code which was not written with long term use in mind. In that case this was usually not hard to convince people to switch because of technical difficulties in the old fork, so it mostly went off without a hitch. In this case, at this point of time the original core code doesn't have any major deficiencies, so convincing people to move to another fork is in essence more like an altcoin than a hard fork (even though technically it is both, if you accept the definition of an altcoin as being any independent blockchain from Bitcoin.).
Every time this is done you technically run a risk of people not switching over for various reasons, but generally the fork which is smaller will usually atrophy and stop being supported, and the vast majority of the resources will then be focused on the new fork. There is a small chance a competing network could be sustainable, but it is not likely unless it provides significant improvements or builds its own infrastructure. In my opinion this is nothing but an altcoin posing itself as a Bitcoin hardfork (which technically the majority of altcoins are to a degree), so this is largely a semantics game, but with computer protocols some times semantics are important. They want free resources from the Bitcoin core community infrastructure, but don't want to support the protocol the core developers are supporting. You branch off from the blockchain, that's fine, but you have to then provide your own infrastructure. That is part of the burden of making any altcoin.
That being said I think XT should be treated like any other altcoin, and while I don't agree with the divisive way it was deployed, I don't consider it at all a threat to the Bitcoin core's existence any more than any other altcoin is. At the end of the day Bitcoin has the infrastructure, functional code, and the popular support, that is what counts. In any p2p network consensus is king. In order to have genuine consensus there needs to be a free flow of information. They want to declare the code different for the purposes of its protocol, but at the same time want to pretend it is not an independent blockchain of Bitcoin . In spite of the fact Theymos has a habit of playing fast and loose with his own rules, I think relegating XT to the altcoin category is appropriate, and discussion there should be freely allowed. People who keep pushing the issue as if it is not an alternate chain don't understand the protocol and are only dividing the community with ignorance.
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