Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers)

[watashi-kokoto]

In case Blockstream implements something evil, we can always fork the software and circumvent that evilness.

You can put on your tinfoil hat to circumvent that evilness.

[jonald_fyookball]

They've voted 89% in favour of removing Theymos alert key access.

Satoshi's greatest (external) triumph.

I went to town on the Blockstream conflict of interest because of the implications in principle of having a for-profit have any kind of influence on the code. But only because I thought any kind of external influence was bad. Now I realize that not only will there always be external influence, that it's necessary to maintain the code. I have to admit, appeals to change the protocol based on popularity sort of concern me. Shouldn't consensus be based on technical merit?

Bitcoin is not 'governed' by anyone.

That's what I used to think.

How do you think the Blockstream people can coerce me to run their software on my node?

Perhaps you believe that all full nodes are maintained by Blockstream stakeholders?

No. I don't think those things. Was that implied by my post? If it was I should have been more careful.

Ok, perhaps I poorly understood what you meant. But let's say Blockstream has an evil for profit influence on the Bitcoin Core software. In this case, if they introduce something bad that people don't agree with, then there is nothing to coerce the node maintainers to use the bad Bitcoin Core.

In case Blockstream implements something evil, we can always fork the software and circumvent that evilness.

Anyway, I don't think that company has such a large influence on Bitcoin Core development. But one can't know for sure.

What do you think Bitcoin classic is?  We're forking to 2MB because Core thus far hasn't raised the block limit
and we're tired of waiting.  I wouldn't call Blockstream "evil" but I think its safe to say they have their own
agenda.

Why would you think they don't have a large influence on core when
Greg Maxwell is their CTO and Pieter Wuille and Matt Corallo are both engineers there?

[watashi-kokoto]

What do you think Bitcoin classic is?  We're forking to 2MB because Core thus far hasn't raised the block limit
and we're tired of waiting.  I wouldn't call Blockstream "evil" but I think its safe to say they have their own
agenda.

Get lost. You cannot win. Chinese miners are going to DESTROY your unlimited blocks, period.

You have no power over here. Go back to the real world and tell your supervisor that you've failed!

Good luck!

[jonald_fyookball]

What do you think Bitcoin classic is?  We're forking to 2MB because Core thus far hasn't raised the block limit
and we're tired of waiting.  I wouldn't call Blockstream "evil" but I think its safe to say they have their own
agenda.

Get lost. You cannot win. Chinese miners are going to DESTROY your unlimited blocks, period.

You have no power over here. Go back to the real world and tell your supervisor that you've failed!

Good luck!

Uh, no I won't get lost.  I've just as much right to express myself as you do.

You're welcome to make predictions though.  I think they would be
more interesting if you explain why Chinese miners wouldn't support
bigger blocks.

[Lauda]

Uh, no I won't get lost.  I've just as much right to express myself as you do.

You're welcome to make predictions though.  I think they would be
more interesting if you explain why Chinese miners wouldn't support
bigger blocks.

Have you missed the news from today? They have stated that they are staying with Core.

[BitUsher]

Uh, no I won't get lost.  I've just as much right to express myself as you do.

You're welcome to make predictions though.  I think they would be
more interesting if you explain why Chinese miners wouldn't support
bigger blocks.

I welcome your thoughts and contributions. What do you think of the inherent contradictions with Bitfury simultaneously giving a nod of support and attacking Classics principles? I am curious as to your opinion.


1|Jonathan Toomim:2016-01-20 07:11:29:i have misgivings about the vision of the fee market as a way to pay for mining, and i think that fee market + lightning would be terrible for earning fees as a miner

[jonald_fyookball]

Yes I must have missed the news.  Link, Lauda?

Bitusher, I'm confused what you are saying.  What does Toomim have to do with
Bitfury and how/where is Bitfury attacking Classic's principles?

[watashi-kokoto]

Yes I must have missed the news.  Link, Lauda?

Bitusher, I'm confused what you are saying.  What does Toomim have to do with
Bitfury and how/where is Bitfury attacking Classic's principles?

you are funny
Classic REKT

[BitUsher]

Yes I must have missed the news.  Link, Lauda?

Details and context being revealed ....(I look forward to more data confirming before making any judgments)

https://www.bikeji.com/t/3144
http://www.weibo.com/3884337005/De95fs0cx?from=page_1005053884337005_profile&wvr=6&mod=weibotime

The translation:

Yesterday, Jeff(Garzik?), a developer of Bitcoin Classic, took a flight to Beijing from New York, to attend a meeting with the Chinese Bitcoin businesses, including Haobtc, OKCoin, Bitmain, Bither, LIGHTNINGASIC, with the aim of gaining further support for Bitcoin Classic. When talking about Bitcoin Classic's releases, Jeff stated that a hard fork is needed for the upgrading and improvement of the source code(the original Chinese are weasel words and possibly syntactically incorrect), yet(and) without providing a clear long-term roadmap(about what lies ahead of the 2MB increase?), which led to almost universal dissatisfaction among those present, whom further expressed their withdrawal of support for Bitcoin Classic, and the need to reach a wider consensus within the community before a decision can be made.

An article with more details will come out soon... lets wait and verify before making any judgements.

Bitusher, I'm confused what you are saying.  What does Toomim have to do with
Bitfury and how/where is Bitfury attacking Classic's principles?

Bitfury on the other hand gave a quick nod of approval to classic than quickly wrote this article which contradicts Classics Principles -
https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/keep-calm-and-bitcoin-on-4f29d581276#.lsa4ml1p6

Bitcoin Is Not an Electronic Payments System Like PayPal
You simply need an additional system operating on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain (with the Blockchain acting as a settlement layer)

Do we hear XT/BU/Classic proponents stressing the importance for tx to be spent on payment channels or on the main chain? From what I hear the sentiment is high volume on the main chain to directly pay the miners instead of a settlement system like Bitfury and core propose.

As the Bitcoin network continues to evolve, transaction fees need to grow in order to maintain a high level of security within and for the network.As BitFury has outlined in our white paper on Bitcoin security incentives, the transaction fee market is currently actively developing....
Overlay networks, such as Lightning and sidechains, can successfully deal with this challenge while in-service ledgers already do.

Do we hear XT/BU/Classic proponents stressing the importance for tx fees be raised and a fee market being created? Notice how he stresses the cheap tx's will be on the sidechains and payment channels like LN , and not on the main chain like being proposed by XT/BU/Classic proponents .

Bitcoin Transaction Processing Is Not Presently Clogged

Do we here this clarification from XT/BU/Classic proponents, or from Core proponents?

As the Scaling Bitcoin conferences have shown, miners are generally in support of cautious increases of the block size limit — just not abrupt increases — because such sudden change could undermine the foundation of the Bitcoin network.

Could that Abrupt increase be referring to a hard fork?

Mass Rule is Not Appropriate for Bitcoin

The pipe dream of some in the Bitcoin community is to govern the system by having ordinary users vote for changes by adopting the corresponding full node software. This approach is not only impractical, it is also not desirable.

This directly refutes the Bitcoin Classic And Bitcoin Unlimited governance model.
.

[jonald_fyookball]

Ok I saw the article about Jeff Garzik flying to Asia
and talking to "Haobtc, OKCoin, Bitmain, Bither, LIGHTNINGASIC".

I'll wait for the official story,but it seems like
Bitfury supporting classic is a much bigger
deal.  They are a major pool.

Bither and Haobtc are just wallets from what I can
tell, and Okcoin is an exchange. 

So to me, in the last 24 hours, Classic is winning
but that's just my biased opinion.

[BitUsher]

Ok I saw the article about Jeff Garzik flying to Asia
and talking to "Haobtc, OKCoin, Bitmain, Bither, LIGHTNINGASIC".

I'll wait for the official story,but it seems like
Bitfury supporting classic is a much bigger
deal.  They are a major pool.

Bither and Haobtc are just wallets from what I can
tell, and Okcoin is an exchange.  

So to me, in the last 24 hours, Classic is winning
but that's just my biased opinion.

You are ignoring the deal F2Pool made a couple days ago with core and Bitfurys unclear support (both a nod or support and an article attacking Classic Principles)

Regardless , I may join you and start supporting classic temporarily because a hard fork may be a solution to the problem with mining centralization --

If there were a sustained hard fork, we would support both coins. I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, however, as it would require > 75% of the miners to agree to it. The other 25% mining the old chain would be in a very weak state and would quickly switch rather than risk being attacked by the other guys.

I don't know ... After some consideration I am more sympathetic to Guy Corem's position that competing coins post fork would be great . I would likely buy many GPU's and BTC Core coins as well with an ASICproof algo behind the coin.

http://pastebin.com/B8YQr5TQ

Both coins will surely take a large beating initially, but one would become more decentralized and one more corporate over time. In a way I am somewhat disappointed that the Chinese miners appear to be getting behind core. I may have to switch sides temporarily and support classic to insure this split happens for the good of the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, with all this miner backroom deals with core I don't know if we will have an opportunity for a fork. I now have mixed opinions on the matter.

[Lauda]

-snip-
So to me, in the last 24 hours, Classic is winning
but that's just my biased opinion.

Classic was never wining. Obviously people do not understand the impact of an hard fork and think that such upgrades are easy to pull off. Essentially that breaks any service that does not update in time, and there are plenty of reasons for which one might be unable to update their service. Time and consensus is needed in order to do a successful fork. I've seen neither with Classic (no time as in, trying to push it too quickly).

[Indianacoin]

This is gonna be a war between greater-chain-coins vs weaker-chain-coins. And in many people's opinion, mining included, the weaker-chain mining ceases nearly immediately due to the inability for miners to sell mined coins anywhere.

Also people will not feel safer to adopt Bitcoin classic all of a sudden due to a risk of getting them stuck in exchanges with a huge sell wall!
Why cannot we wait for some time to confirm a transaction rather than making a new coin with speedier transaction? 

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Ok I saw the article about Jeff Garzik flying to Asia
and talking to "Haobtc, OKCoin, Bitmain, Bither, LIGHTNINGASIC".

I'll wait for the official story,but it seems like
Bitfury supporting classic is a much bigger
deal.  They are a major pool.

Bither and Haobtc are just wallets from what I can
tell, and Okcoin is an exchange.  

So to me, in the last 24 hours, Classic is winning
but that's just my biased opinion.

You are ignoring the deal F2Pool made a couple days ago with core and Bitfurys unclear support (both a nod or support and an article attacking Classic Principles)

Regardless , I may join you and start supporting classic temporarily because a hard fork may be a solution to the problem with mining centralization --

If there were a sustained hard fork, we would support both coins. I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, however, as it would require > 75% of the miners to agree to it. The other 25% mining the old chain would be in a very weak state and would quickly switch rather than risk being attacked by the other guys.

I don't know ... After some consideration I am more sympathetic to Guy Corem's position that competing coins post fork would be great . I would likely buy many GPU's and BTC Core coins as well with an ASICproof algo behind the coin.

http://pastebin.com/B8YQr5TQ

Both coins will surely take a large beating initially, but one would become more decentralized and one more corporate over time. In a way I am somewhat disappointed that the Chinese miners appear to be getting behind core. I may have to switch sides temporarily and support classic to insure this split happens for the good of the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, with all this miner backroom deals with core I don't know if we will have an opportunity for a fork. I now have mixed opinions on the matter.

I have very mixed feelings about it. And I still think mining centralization is the biggest problem we have.

[sickpig]

Uh, no I won't get lost.  I've just as much right to express myself as you do.

You're welcome to make predictions though.  I think they would be
more interesting if you explain why Chinese miners wouldn't support
bigger blocks.

Have you missed the news from today? They have stated that they are staying with Core.

is this the news you're referring to:

https://twitter.com/AaronvanW/status/690120783281156097

?

if this is the case:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/41zk79/chinese_pools_withdraw_their_support_for_classic/cz6etuv

So I just read the entire essay and the thread and it seems like this is at most just a personal opinion of the HaoBTC COO, who seems to be fairly biased and uninformed on several issues. The account posting the essay admitted in the comments when pressed that "the essay just expresses my personal views and is not an official statement from HaoBTC."
Something seems fishy here, but whatever the case these guys don't seem very professional.
Personally I would want official confirmation from HaoBTC on their website or a corroborating account from /u/jgarzik before I took this seriously.

[jonald_fyookball]

interesting about F2Pool.

But things seem to be changing fast in general.
who knows what news will hit tomorrow?

[Peter R]

Bitcoin is governed by the code people freely choose to run.

It's not that simple. Your oversimplification comes from one of the requirements of effective propaganda. Simple enough to be understood by the masses. What do they want? They want democracy, they want to feel they have the power. Tell them what they want to hear.

Bitcoin is not 'governed' by anyone.

The word 'governed' probably has the wrong connotations.  Perhaps it is better to say that the "evolution of the network is decided by the code people freely choose to run."

There is no block size limit--it is a shared dream from which we're now waking up from.

The current block size limit comes from the current consensus rules. Changing it requires creating a blockchain fork, like cloning bitcoin and hoping to kill the original.

Arguably, it is impossible to know with certainty what the current consensus rules are, other than by creating blocks and seeing if those blocks are accepted into the longest chain.  We can't know for sure what code the economic majority is running--we could ask them or they could tell us--but they could lie.  Proof-of-work is where we "put our money where our mouth is," as it were.

[watashi-kokoto]

The word 'governed' probably has the wrong connotations.  Perhaps it is better to say that the "evolution of the network is decided by the code people freely choose to run."

The word governed is the correct world. This is what are you guys for? To govern Bitcoin?

Arguably, it is impossible to know with certainty what the current consensus rules are, other than by creating blocks and seeing if those blocks are accepted into the longest chain.  We can't know for sure what code the economic majority is running--we could ask them or they could tell us--but they could lie.  Proof-of-work is where we "put our money where our mouth is," as it were.

Go ahead grandpa. Mine that 8MB block today.

[valiz]

There is no block size limit--it is a shared dream from which we're now waking up from.

The current block size limit comes from the current consensus rules. Changing it requires creating a blockchain fork, like cloning bitcoin and hoping to kill the original.

Arguably, it is impossible to know with certainty what the current consensus rules are, other than by creating blocks and seeing if those blocks are accepted into the longest chain.  We can't know for sure what code the economic majority is running--we could ask them or they could tell us--but they could lie.  Proof-of-work is where we "put our money where our mouth is," as it were.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/consensus/consensus.h

Code:

/** The maximum allowed size for a serialized block, in bytes (network rule) */
static const unsigned int MAX_BLOCK_SIZE = 1000000;
/** The maximum allowed number of signature check operations in a block (network rule) */
static const unsigned int MAX_BLOCK_SIGOPS = MAX_BLOCK_SIZE/50;
/** Coinbase transaction outputs can only be spent after this number of new blocks (network rule) */
static const int COINBASE_MATURITY = 100;

Changing these requires creating a blockchain fork, like cloning bitcoin and hoping to kill the original.

The longest chain is not the same as the longest valid chain.

What is your definition of 'economic majority'?

[sgbett]

What is your definition of valid chain?

The one that everyone agrees is valid or the one where a small minority refuse to accept things have moved on.

The longest chain, will invariably be the longest 'valid' chain by definition. The longest chain (discounting for luck/variance) is the one with most hashing power. The longest *defines* valid.

So the word valid is redundant, and using it doesn't make any sense.

If a >1MB block gets mined and that chain stays longest (because the majority build on top of it) then sorry dear, it was tonight.

Until it does we watch and wait, and people continue to post drama on the internets.