Nobody also wants to be on the minority branch. Gavin just did a great piece about what
would happen if the network split 80/20.
Check it out:
http://gavinandresen.ninja/minority-branches (TL;DR: Nothing would really happen)
Many people, me too, think he is wrong.
He has perfect understanding of how things would work after the fork,
do you ?
Keep your religion out of this. Neither Gavin or anyone else have presented any convincing proof of how a hard fork would develop. Just pure speculation. The only thing certain is that total chaos will prevail until difficulty has caught up. Mostly because some people are mad enough to run SPV clients, and a block size increase will make it harder to run a full node at the same time. Miners want their coins to have some value, and the value will drop significantly if most wallets become useless overnight. Fortunately, since segregated witness is under heavy development by a lot of of very talented people, and only a very few people and fewer merchants and almost no developers support the altcoins, I am not very worried. The segwit testnet has lots of activity, and there is a
segwit block explorer as well. Why risk Bitcoin because some small minority og users and merchants want a worse solution based on untested software which doesn't exist yet?
He is actually right, I can understand it (I am a technical person, though not Bitcoin developer).
Hell, even Bitcoin Core/Blockstream developers can also surely understand it, but I am not sure if any of them is
willing to admit that.
They may be too deep with their heads in the bullshit, propaganda & manipulation web they have created.
I don't understand why you are so against Blockstream? The developers working for Blockstream aren't trying to break consensus in any way. They do that the rest of the developers and the community want them to do. I have never seen Blockstream trying to force anything through, and there are often disagreements among them. E.g. about the removal of the priority system in Bitcoin Core (not a fork of any kind).
I will stick to Bitcoin, and if people will exchange the bitcoins they bought (...) businesses wanting to switch to an
altcoin based on different consensus rules, the great majority will stick to Bitcoin.
I don't think you understand how things work in Bitcoin network function at all.
Once Bitcoin Classic wins, Bitcoin Classic becomes Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core stops being
Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core will be *THE* altcoin you are talking about.Sorry, when a coin operate according to different consensus rules, it will be an altcoin by definition. This is pretty much the definition of an altcoin. The blockchain will fork into two different blockchains, and there is no way the Bitcoin blockchain will accept the altcoin chains.
Bitcoin this agreement is defined in
the
software.
No, this is not what I was asking.
Let me rephrase the question: "how do you think consensus looks in Bitcoin world" ?
Sorry, I don't understand your question. Consensus is not a physical object you can look at.
So basically now he claims that consensus is what minority (Blockstream) wants. He has lost it and is completely mad
with power.
I don't see how what
you think someone else claim is relevant at all here. (Read again – what he wrote is not
what you think he claims.)
Oh, it is extremely relevant.
- Adam Back
is the president of Blockstream.
- Adam Back
lies and manipulates, as clearly proven above- Adam Back
condones censorship.
- Adam Back
has clear conflict of Interest as previously proved in this thread.
- Adam Back
wants to cripple the Bitcoin network for his personal (his company) gain.
So yeah, it has everything to do with what is happening here, because anything that man says can be now treated as
bullshit and/or manipulation of the topic for his gain.
Sorry. I am completely not interested in your conspiracy theories. I haven't even read what he is supposed to have written in this thread. I understand he is going to stick with Bitcoin, and not create some altcoin, which is good.
Nope, I read it again - with
context and I still think my argument stands.
Please explain your point further because I don't understand what you think I am misunderstanding.
You misinterpret the general agreement among all bitcoin nodes as a wish from a specific "minority". Which is
actually the opposite of what he actually wrote: "
majority MUST NOT be able to override minority" I.e.
consensus is not what a minority wants, neither what a majority wants.
Let's sum it up.
- Consensus is NOT what majority wants
- Consensus is NOT what minority wants
Loigically, the only thing left is that
Consensus, according to Adam Back, is what a
strictly selected group of people wants. And that is exactly what I have stated.
WTF have you been smoking? Can I have some?
The general agreement is written in software. Nobody can change it. Not Adam Black, not the Toomin brothers, not you, not even Satoshi himself. Any change will require cooperation among all users running a full node.
Consensus is based on the agreement
which was there from the beginning. Neither Bitstream or any short list of merchants, can overrule the general
agreement which define Bitcoin and the bitcoin blockchain. Neither can a majority.
Soe logically by what you are saying is:
- Majority cannot override "consensus"
- Users cannot override "consensus" (
they are the majority !)
So everything checks out. Blockstream / Bitcoin Core are the ones who define consensus. That is exactly the same I have
said.
Consensus was defined
long before Blockstream was created, and even before most of the existing developers had even heard about Bitcoin, and there are no plans to change it. (Except for a few small groups calling themselves "Bitcoin Classic", "Bitcoin Unlimited", "Bitcoin XT", "Bitpay Core", and a heck of a lot of other scamcoins.
You can do anything and you can even fork Bitcoin in any
way you want.
If you can convince the majority of the network that your fork is the best and that giving 1000 BTC to poor children is
the right choice and network will install your client then by all means - your client will be considered the "true"
Bitcoin, and the previous client will be made obsolete and nobody will use it.
You don't get it. Since this would change the general agreement, it would require cooperation from all bitcoin nodes.
Not just a majority.
This is incorrect, and this is not how Bitcoin network work.
You are actually talking about how soft-fork would work.
With hard fork, you can quickly & easily split 2 incompatibile parts of the network, so the one majority chooses
becomes "the Bitcoin", and the other one is abandoned and dies.
The separate chains coould obviously work as separate coins, but that is very difficult to maintain and therefore
highly unlikely.
- Gavin knows this
- Jeff knows this
- All Core devs know this
The problem is whether they are willing to honestly admit this, because - as clearly proven above -
some of them are
lying bastards completely full of shit.
Again: WTF are you smoking? Miners don't define consensus. They don't have the power to change the consensus rules. They may add new rules, but that's all. A fork would be a malicious attack on Bitcoin, but it can be worked around. Most importantly it won't affect Bitcoin nodes in any other way than slower than usual confirmation of transactions for a while. Users of SPV clients may suffer heavy losses, on the other hand, but who cares about them.
Are you telling me you don't support this!? Why do you hate children? Do you kill babies for a hobby?
![Shocked](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/shocked.gif)
Stop this offtopic now.
I have proven that you are incorrect. That is all here.
You haven't presented a valid proof of anything whatsoever.
Actually the explanation there is just a longer version of mine. Read it again, and see if you can understand it.
ROFL! Read it again. "To implement a hardfork, without a blockchain-fork, all users must switch to the new
protocol consensually."
How many bitcoin blockchains do you think is adequate? At least we will get rid of SPV clients by hard forking into
many chains, but unfortunately you would then have to rely on either wallets talking to some central trusted node, or
that everyone run full nodes locked to one specific blockchain. (You don't want to risk another chain to take over if
they gain more mining power.)
Old nodes will work just fine after a softfork, but merchants should upgrade. SPV clients are mostly safe after a
softfork as well, but both old nodes and SPV clients may see unconfirmed transactions which aren't valid. (In a
hard fork the invalid transactions would confirm in some chains, and the SPV client will see it differently depending
on
which node it connects to.)
Oh, now I get it.
You and me are talking about 2 different things.
You are all the time talking about a soft-fork "consensus".
I am talking about what happens when hard fork, not soft fork is performed.
Sorry. You have misunderstood. Read again. I am beginning to understand why other intelligent people here are ignoring you.
Hard fork is a clean cut. Soft fork is messy, because - as you say - it requires everybody to migrate to the new
system, otherwise there may be problems.
Yes, a hard fork is a clean cut. It is how all altcoins have been created. No relation to Bitcoin, except for a similar name.
No, a softfork does not require everybody to migrate. That's the beauty of a soft fork!
By the way, this is reason why what Core devs are trying to do is dangerous. They are trying to upgrade the
network using soft-fork which requires much greater "consensus" than hard forks do.
Really? So what you are saying, is that if only a amall part of the network, let's say a majority of the miners and a few merchants switch to a different consensus agreement by e.g. creating a few million extra coins for themselves, the rest won't have to agree and upgrade their software? They will just automatically begin using the new coin? No, you don't understand the difference between a soft an a hard fork
at all. No wonder you are confused about this.
A chain fork is a split into two or more chains. In a hard fork the old nodes won't accept the new blockchain, and you need
100% consensus. Otherwise they will live on as two or more different blockchains using different consensus rules. If you want to end up with one single fork,
all users,
100%, will have to switch to the alternative ruleset, which may contain anything. A softfork doesn't change the existing conensus. It only add new restrictions in a backwards compatible way, so old nodes don't have to upgrade unless they want to use new features. As long as the new rules has a majority among miners, a chain fork is impossible.
Why don't you think it is dangerous to render SPV wallets unusable, btw? While a soft fork cannot lead to loss of coins, a hard fork will. Is that entirely unproblematic from your point of view?