Why Gavin is so desperate about his fork? Is he hiding something?

[tvbcof]

Nick Szabo is asking the same:

If it seems like the limit is getting hit persistently, and confirmation times are becoming a problem, an emergency limit increase is something that the core devs can patch very simply and quickly.  They can execute such an emergency block size “QE” if you will, at a moments notice.  They have demonstratively done this kind of deployment before, during the one previous hard fork, and with the F2Pool bug.  So what is the rush?

http://wallstreettechnologist.com/2015/08/19/bitcoin-xt-vs-core-blocksize-limit-the-schism-that-divides-us-all/

The rush is that there is something that Gavin and Mike are hiding. They are trying to get this fork pushed through under the guise of bigger blocks, but what's the real update they are hiding? Is it a blacklist?

Perhaps a government entity approached the "chief scientist" of bitcoin with an offer he could not refuse. Something along the lines of "get us in and we'll make sure you or your children will never have to work again". Sounds like a spy movie? Truth is stranger than fiction, and certain folks have A LOT to lose if bitcoin succeeds.

true.

I've never watched 'game of thrones' or whatever, but I understand that the basic idea is the plebs compete for a slot in the more limited upper class.  It struck me when Gavin came back from his meetings with the CFR and got extra chummy with Hearn that he could have been offered a winning hand in such a game.

I've always felt since 2011 since I got involved that at best Gavin was a very mainstream kind of guy who would be most comfortable if 'the authorities' exercised control over aspects of Bitcoin so that the 'bad guys' couldn't use it to 'do evil.'  He has always given me the impression of being rather naive.  I have never agreed with almost any of his priorities when he was still influencing the direction of Bitcoin but I leaned toward writing it off to his native disposition as a rube than to anything more nefarious.

[RGBKey]

-snip-
I've never watched 'game of thrones' or whatever, but I understand that the basic idea is the plebs compete for a slot in the more limited upper class.  It struck me when Gavin came back from his meetings with the CFR and got extra chummy with Hearn that he could have been offered a winning hand in such a game.

I've always felt since 2011 since I got involved that at best Gavin was a very mainstream kind of guy who would be most comfortable if 'the authorities' exercised control over aspects of Bitcoin so that the 'bad guys' couldn't use it to 'do evil.'  He has always given me the impression of being rather naive.  I have never agreed with almost any of his priorities when he was still influencing the direction of Bitcoin but I leaned toward writing it off to his native disposition as a rube than to anything more nefarious.

This is true, I'm not sure we would be able to know if something like this was happening except by observing his actions.

[Carlton Banks]

-snip-
I've never watched 'game of thrones' or whatever, but I understand that the basic idea is the plebs compete for a slot in the more limited upper class.  It struck me when Gavin came back from his meetings with the CFR and got extra chummy with Hearn that he could have been offered a winning hand in such a game.

I've always felt since 2011 since I got involved that at best Gavin was a very mainstream kind of guy who would be most comfortable if 'the authorities' exercised control over aspects of Bitcoin so that the 'bad guys' couldn't use it to 'do evil.'  He has always given me the impression of being rather naive.  I have never agreed with almost any of his priorities when he was still influencing the direction of Bitcoin but I leaned toward writing it off to his native disposition as a rube than to anything more nefarious.

This is true, I'm not sure we would be able to know if something like this was happening except by observing his actions.

Not to mention that there are a multitude of other possibilities, based on the limited facts.

[MarketNeutral]

the problem is that redditors are not seeing any of the negative XT shit. I've posted several things about XT and it was gone before i could even see it under NEW

+1
Reddit is an echo chamber.
There actual dissent is taboo.

[BADecker]

Look at the cryptocurrency list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies. Most of these if not all have their own blockchain. Let XT have its own blockchain, even if it uses the same one as regular Bitcoin for its beginning. Keep Bitcoin pure. Make XT a new currency.

[favdesu]

Look at the cryptocurrency list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies. Most of these if not all have their own blockchain. Let XT have its own blockchain, even if it uses the same one as regular Bitcoin for its beginning. Keep Bitcoin pure. Make XT a new currency.

exactly. it's an altcoin like any other fork of bitcoin and that's how it should be in my opinion. let them do whatever, but don't touch bitcoin with this proposal.

[xhoneyael]

Look at the cryptocurrency list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies. Most of these if not all have their own blockchain. Let XT have its own blockchain, even if it uses the same one as regular Bitcoin for its beginning. Keep Bitcoin pure. Make XT a new currency.

exactly. it's an altcoin like any other fork of bitcoin and that's how it should be in my opinion. let them do whatever, but don't touch bitcoin with this proposal.

thats right let them atleast dream even everybody know that it will not succeed..

[mayax]

Look at the cryptocurrency list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies. Most of these if not all have their own blockchain. Let XT have its own blockchain, even if it uses the same one as regular Bitcoin for its beginning. Keep Bitcoin pure. Make XT a new currency.

exactly. it's an altcoin like any other fork of bitcoin and that's how it should be in my opinion. let them do whatever, but don't touch bitcoin with this proposal.

great point. Xt is an ALTcoin

[umairsaleem019]

maybe he really want bitcoin to succeed unlike many other? it's true that without bigger block bitcoin can embrace a large volume of TX and i'm not talking about the stress test volume that was a joke in comparison with a real big volume that awaits bitcoin if become mainstream

or maybe he know that the volume will rise with the halving and he want to go ahead and make the change before that happen

Why then make increases so aggressive? There are two BIPs apart from Gavin's that are more reasonable and thus more likely to reach wider consensus. Yet he still take the most radical approach. That's not how consensus is reached, that's how the system is put in jeopardy.

Rusty Russel concludes:

Thus I revise my bandwidth estimates; instead of 17% per annum this suggests 30% per annum as a reasonable growth rate.

30% per annum, good. What's the annual rate of increase in Gavin's exponential function? Well, it's 41.4% per annum, which is clearly beyond the pace of technological advances in bandwidth. Not to mention that the past experience doesn't guarantee the future progress.

https://i.imgur.com/GsAmzcd.png

Why not 8 MB? It's not that the blocks somehow magically will be filled up up to 8 Megabytes over night after the fork happened. I mean there would be a lot of transactions needed to do that.

Why artificially constrain bitcoin adoption i ask you? If amazon, for some reason, would allow bitcoin transactions now then bitcoin would be dead instantly. Because the user experience with bitcoin would be that terrible that all these users never would touch bitcoin again.

Bitcoin needs to be open for adoption. And there is no risk in having bigger blocks. Not even spammers will fill them since the costs will be way too high. They weren't full before too so i wonder why so many believe that the 8MB blocks will be full when forked.

[RoadTrain]

maybe he really want bitcoin to succeed unlike many other? it's true that without bigger block bitcoin can embrace a large volume of TX and i'm not talking about the stress test volume that was a joke in comparison with a real big volume that awaits bitcoin if become mainstream

or maybe he know that the volume will rise with the halving and he want to go ahead and make the change before that happen

Why then make increases so aggressive? There are two BIPs apart from Gavin's that are more reasonable and thus more likely to reach wider consensus. Yet he still take the most radical approach. That's not how consensus is reached, that's how the system is put in jeopardy.

Rusty Russel concludes:

Thus I revise my bandwidth estimates; instead of 17% per annum this suggests 30% per annum as a reasonable growth rate.

30% per annum, good. What's the annual rate of increase in Gavin's exponential function? Well, it's 41.4% per annum, which is clearly beyond the pace of technological advances in bandwidth. Not to mention that the past experience doesn't guarantee the future progress.

Why not 8 MB? It's not that the blocks somehow magically will be filled up up to 8 Megabytes over night after the fork happened. I mean there would be a lot of transactions needed to do that.

Why artificially constrain bitcoin adoption i ask you? If amazon, for some reason, would allow bitcoin transactions now then bitcoin would be dead instantly. Because the user experience with bitcoin would be that terrible that all these users never would touch bitcoin again.

Bitcoin needs to be open for adoption. And there is no risk in having bigger blocks. Not even spammers will fill them since the costs will be way too high. They weren't full before too so i wonder why so many believe that the 8MB blocks will be full when forked.

I have answered this question today already, and many times in the past.

On top... you know that the current blocks are not even filled full. They only are full when these spammers act. And there is no reason to assume that suddenly, with 8 Megabyte Blocks, these blocks will be full. Where should all these transactions come from?

There's a perfect reason to assume that blocks are suddenly 8Mb -- if there's a specific attack vector linked to full 8Mb blocks, it will be used. It's not that expensive, especially when fees are gravitating towards infignificant amounts due to big blocks.

Basically, presuming that blocks won't be nearly full is fallacious. We must be sure that the system works well with even full blocks in order to ensure its long-term viability.

[Zyrio]

Since this XT drama began, I was wondering about Gavins desperate efford to force bigger blocksize, even after he obv. realized, that there is a strong resistance against this fork. I mean, he could have simply stepped back and wait for the right time to come up with his idea again. When the current blocksize really turns out to be problematic, then he would have a majority and a consensus.
 
Instead he is knowingly dividing/weakening the Bitcoin community (incl. himself) for his idea.

This behaviour doesn't seem appropriate to me. Is there something more behind it, than just a larger blocksize?

I think he has a big ego. And i don't like the way he did this. But i think the other side of the bitcoin devs are even more dangerous. Wanting to make transactions not confirm in order to create higher fees. Which would mean hindering adoption and a bad user experience. And unfortunately many of these developers would like that because when bitcoin gets more unuseable than their own altcoin, the lightning network will take these transactions over.

It is really a pity how the developers make politics.

Today i have read that one single bitcoin transaction costs so much electricy like 1.75 average us household uses in one day. That is a lot. And we have so many hashpower that we could still secure a hundred time more transactions.

The result for me is that we simply have too many miners. Mining is too rewarding. Which means too many miners want to play in it. And since they want profits they now claim we need to leave the blocksize at 1 Megabyte in order to artificially raise fees. That is stupid. On top it would mean they would have a short term gain but would kill bitcoin in the long run.

There is nothing wrong with the 8MB blocksize. Or even dropping this artificial limit totally. Spamming would be too expensive anyway.

[Mickeyb]

Since this XT drama began, I was wondering about Gavins desperate efford to force bigger blocksize, even after he obv. realized, that there is a strong resistance against this fork. I mean, he could have simply stepped back and wait for the right time to come up with his idea again. When the current blocksize really turns out to be problematic, then he would have a majority and a consensus.
 
Instead he is knowingly dividing/weakening the Bitcoin community (incl. himself) for his idea.

This behaviour doesn't seem appropriate to me. Is there something more behind it, than just a larger blocksize?

I think he has a big ego. And i don't like the way he did this. But i think the other side of the bitcoin devs are even more dangerous. Wanting to make transactions not confirm in order to create higher fees. Which would mean hindering adoption and a bad user experience. And unfortunately many of these developers would like that because when bitcoin gets more unuseable than their own altcoin, the lightning network will take these transactions over.

It is really a pity how the developers make politics.

Today i have read that one single bitcoin transaction costs so much electricy like 1.75 average us household uses in one day. That is a lot. And we have so many hashpower that we could still secure a hundred time more transactions.

The result for me is that we simply have too many miners. Mining is too rewarding. Which means too many miners want to play in it. And since they want profits they now claim we need to leave the blocksize at 1 Megabyte in order to artificially raise fees. That is stupid. On top it would mean they would have a short term gain but would kill bitcoin in the long run.

There is nothing wrong with the 8MB blocksize. Or even dropping this artificial limit totally. Spamming would be too expensive anyway.

Well we will nevertheless lose some if these miners at next halving. For some people, mining will just become unprofitable.

Yes about hashpower. There is so much of it that Bitcoin can even scale 100 times and the network will be well secured. So we can say that Bitcoin is operating with certain loses at the moment, but it won't be "losing" anything when adoption and number of transactions picks up.

This is essentially how every new start-up business operates in the beginning, with loses, counting that will grow in the future.

We will have to find a way to scale Bitcoin in this way or another in order to increase adoption.

[Stief]

It's hard to follow this thread. One side accuses the other side to want to destroy bitcoin. One side with an alternative client and the other with their sidechain.

It simply is not easy. Hearn has dangerous ideas. Gavin in his ways of extortion is no fun too. And many core developers have their own little side project, the lightning network, blockstream. This network will succeed the more transactions will move away from bitcoin to that network. And how can you achieve that more easy than keeping 1MB blocks, making bitcoin expensive, slow and not trustworthy because you don't know if your transaction actually will go through?

This is all a pity.

I'm for a blocksize raise because there is no logical way around it to get a higher bitcoin adoption. I don't like bitcoin-xt but i think it is valid as a form of voting. Though miners would not care about that vote anyway.

I would never want to use bitcoin-xt after bigger blocks are implemented. I would switch back to core. Because hearn is way too dangerous.

And as far as i read practically everyone supporting XT is seeing it the same way.

[hdbuck]

...One side with an alternative client and the other with their sidechain.

not true.

one side is an altcoin the other is bitcoin.

period.

[Q7]

Because bitcoin needs to prepare and anticipate for the future. There's really nothing to hide at all. If we are just complacent and decides to accept way things are, imagine what would happen when it comes to real situation. People are still with the mentality if it ain't broken don't fix it but the fact it's clear whether we want to aceept it or not.

[RodeoX]

Always a secret plan. 
How many of you actually know Gavin?

[SebastianJu]

...One side with an alternative client and the other with their sidechain.

not true.

one side is an altcoin the other is bitcoin.

period.

I think you misunderstood what he wrote. The other admins have their own sidechant, the lightning network. And that network would have an advantage when bitcoin would turn out to be expensive and slow or not unreliable. Because transactions would swith there. Which, by the way, is their argument. We need to take out transactions from bitcoin and leave bitcoin as a high value transaction system.

Surely not what most bitcoiners would want. Or the vision satoshi had with bitcoins.

So yes, both sides have their own altcoin in mind.

[hdbuck]

...One side with an alternative client and the other with their sidechain.

not true.

one side is an altcoin the other is bitcoin.

period.

I think you misunderstood what he wrote. The other admins have their own sidechant, the lightning network. And that network would have an advantage when bitcoin would turn out to be expensive and slow or not unreliable. Because transactions would swith there. Which, by the way, is their argument. We need to take out transactions from bitcoin and leave bitcoin as a high value transaction system.

Surely not what most bitcoiners would want. Or the vision satoshi had with bitcoins.

So yes, both sides have their own altcoin in mind.

Meh, as long as bitcoin does not get highjacked. They can build whatever they want on top of it.

But high value transaction system? Sign me up already.

[box0214]

what is the possbile agenda?

[SebastianJu]

...One side with an alternative client and the other with their sidechain.

not true.

one side is an altcoin the other is bitcoin.

period.

I think you misunderstood what he wrote. The other admins have their own sidechant, the lightning network. And that network would have an advantage when bitcoin would turn out to be expensive and slow or not unreliable. Because transactions would swith there. Which, by the way, is their argument. We need to take out transactions from bitcoin and leave bitcoin as a high value transaction system.

Surely not what most bitcoiners would want. Or the vision satoshi had with bitcoins.

So yes, both sides have their own altcoin in mind.

Meh, as long as bitcoin does not get highjacked. They can build whatever they want on top of it.

But high value transaction system? Sign me up already.

Though the problem starts when they promote 1 MB blocks which will effectively make bitcoin worse for users. Higher fees, unreliability about transactions going through and so on.

You should not create a sidechain, claim that transactions should move from bitcoin to sidechains and to make that possible make bitcoins less useful.

That simply is not ok.

And what about hijacked? Practically no one using xt is a fan of hearn. It is only a vote for bigger blocks. No one wants the other stupid things he wants.