Wondering out loud: Which should Chinese miners support - Core, Classic or another?

[sturle]

Either the Chinese miners plus dev would start a new fork (with majority hashpower) or they would suffer loss and humiliation as their pull requests were rejected.

Reality check: The Chinese miners (most miners, actually) are in it for the money.  Majority of hashpower isn't worth sh*t if they are mining a worthless coin.  If you are humiliated by a rejected pull request, you should find something else to do.  Seriously.

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[johnyj]

Either the Chinese miners plus dev would start a new fork (with majority hashpower) or they would suffer loss and humiliation as their pull requests were rejected.

Reality check: The Chinese miners (most miners, actually) are in it for the money.  Majority of hashpower isn't worth sh*t if they are mining a worthless coin.  If you are humiliated by a rejected pull request, you should find something else to do.  Seriously.

Yes, miners are mostly profit oriented, from money point of view, they would take the lowest risk approach, either never implement any change since a full block will raise their fee income, or a small change to make sure nothing changes dramatically for their business model

1. Keep the size at 1MB forever, no scaling allowed
2. Higher fee income for miners
3. Miners expand mining operation
4. More competition cause higher difficulty
5. Investors previously get coin from mining have to buy from open market
6. Price rally and attract more users
7. go to 2

At meantime all the small transaction go off-chain, there will be thousands of off-chain services popping up since only those who move more than 10 coins at once can afford high transaction fee like 0.1 bitcoin per transaction (That's 200 btc per block, miners going crazy exactly like ASIC frenzy  )

[sturle]

All chainforks are not hardforks.  Short chainforks happens every day.  Usually because miners can't distribute their newfound blocks fast enough.  This one was caused by a malicious miner not validating blocks, and mining on top of an invalid one.  It disappeared as soon as the correctly validated chain overtook it.  This only show the dangers of one miner controlling too much hashrate.  All nodes, new and old, accepted the correctly validated chain as soon as it overtook the bad chain, and nobody were forced to upgrade anything.  (Those who hadn't upgraded were potentially vulnerable to double spends however, as with all chainforks when you don't require enough confirmations.  This is a good reason for merchants to stay up to date.)

The August 2010 fork was much longer, btw.  That fork was caused by a bug which had to be fixed for the nodes to reject the faulty chain.

A hard fork is different.  In a hard fork where the fork has a miner majority, the two chains will live on in parallel.  Correctly validating nodes will never switch to the fork.  The so-called "Classic", "XT", "Unlimited", etc forks are especially dangerous, since upgrading won't help either.  There will just be different coins, and you have to make a choice of one of them.  Due to incompetent fork developers, you can't even run one of the other coins on the same computer at the same time as Bitcoin Core, since they demand to bind to the same ports.  Constantly keeping up with which fork to use this week is too much for most users, and since their SPV wallets will be rendered useless, they will probably just try to get rid of their coins ASAP.  It would be sad end for Bitcoin, I think.

If some competent developer should think about forking bitcoin, he should start here and get 100% consensus first.  There are many good reasons for a fork.  Forking for a simple block size change is just dumb, and most people see that.

Hard forks are indeed dangerous if there is no major consensus, but if there is major consensus like 80%, then it is safe. Since the minority fork will just become an alt-coin with much less value (hash power decide value due to arbitraging)

Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them.  Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes.  If 80% of hashpower choose to be malicious and mine by non-consensus rules, and 90% of nodes are on the standard chain, some consequenses are:

• SPV wallets have a 10% chance of connecting to a malicious node, users will make transactions on the wrong chain and lose money.
• The 80% will mine worthless coins, since most merchants don't accept them.
• Even upgrading to the latest version of the software won't solve any problems for users.
• You are going to get sued if you sell the 80% coins as "Bitcoin", or refuse to accept bitcoin from the consensus chain as bitcoin.
• Since people lose money and transactions are slow, and the courts are full of fraud cases, both coins will become worthless.

We already have hundreds of alt-coin exists in parallel with much less value but similar code to bitcoin. The reason majority of people don't care about them is because they believe the anti-inflation promise is given by limited total coin supply, so they support only bitcoin to make sure the coin supply is limited in bitcoin ecosystem

Follow the same logic, in the event of a hard fork that bitcoin fork into two chains, majority of people would still support only one bitcoin fork to make sure the total coin supply is limited

You obviously don't understand how Bitcoin works.  Both forks will produce coins at the same rate after a couple of difficulty adjustments, no matter how many are on which side of a fork.

I would never take the risk of touching coins from a hard fork in my business, and have made that clear in my FAQ, since I won't risk getting sued for selling fake coins.

But the problem with soft fork is that it forces minority miners to upgrade if they don't comply with new rules, otherwise they will never be able to mine any coins. This is like communist party throw people with different political ideas into prison to make sure their politics are always widely adopted by every one in the society

The rate of mining coins for every individual miner stays exactly the same just after a fork.  After the first difficulty readjustment, it will become easier to produce coins.  Get the math correct, at least.

Bitcoin community consists mostly of libertarian type of people, and it is unavoidable there will be different views, it is impossible to reach consensus 100%, so when the majority wants to move to a new implementation, the minority miner must have choice to not change, if that fork will be succeed economic wise is irrelevant, the freedom of choice is the most important reason people come here

Users will lose a lot of money because their SPV wallets connect to a node on the wrong chain, they will sell the rest of what they ahave ASAP, and Bitcoin will become irrelevant.  The situation for SPV wallets will improve when segwit is deployed, since segwit provide compact fraud proofs, but only if the SPV wallet and the chain has implemented segwit.

[danielW]

@eric@haobtc

You should really try to communicate with core devs over skype or better yet in person before making a decision.

Too be honest I am surprised you thought Icebreaker was a dev. It suggests you do not even know who the core devs are. There must be a pretty big disconnect between the Chinese community and what is happening in Bitcoin.

[ImI]

Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them.  Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes.

correct. nevertheless thats not the situation we have at the moment. its not 80% hashpower against the rest of the community.

in fact its more like some part of core stands against pretty much everyone else in the bitcoin universe.

miners are in favor of 2MB.

community/users are in favor of 2MB. (i would estimate 80/20 in favor of 2MB)

bitcoin services are in favor of 2MB. that means stamp, coinbase, blockchain.org, bitpay, etc etc

so its basically a minor group of devs against everyone else. and you can also see that from those core devs only a few are really decidedly against 2MB, most of them just try to avoid conflict and go with the others. if you watch closely you will find that gmax and luke are the main force behind the neglectance and stubbornness.

so its basically 20% of the community plus maybe 5 devs that try to force their will on everyone else.

[BitUsher]

Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them.  Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes.

correct. nevertheless thats not the situation we have at the moment. its not 80% hashpower against the rest of the community.

in fact its more like some part of core stands against pretty much everyone else in the bitcoin universe.

miners are in favor of 2MB.

community/users are in favor of 2MB. (i would estimate 80/20 in favor of 2MB)

bitcoin services are in favor of 2MB. that means stamp, coinbase, blockchain.org, bitpay, etc etc

so its basically a minor group of devs against everyone else. and you can also see that from those core devs only a few are really decidedly against 2MB, most of them just try to avoid conflict and go with the others. if you watch closely you will find that gmax and luke are the main force behind the neglectance and stubbornness.

so its basically 20% of the community plus maybe 5 devs that try to force their will on everyone else.

Besides a few payment processors, any evidence to support such claims?
As far as I can tell most users are divided and evidenced by the fact that bitcointalk.org and r/bitcoin have much more activity than other subreddits and forums there is some slight evidence that there are more in favor or Core's proposal.

Looks like most of the payment processors genuinely support Classic and larger blocks but that makes perfect sense being that they principally care about bitcoin being a payment rails system and would benefit if nodes dropped off and where only maintained by them and exchanges.

Exchanges appear split but we haven't heard from all of them.

As far as large investors are concerned , Classic has a few, but most appear to support core's proposal. (Keep in mind that individuals like Core Dev's , theymos, ect... have a ton of coins)

Nodes and mining pools clearly support Core (Of course this may or may not change) -

http://xtnodes.com/

so its basically 20% of the community plus maybe 5 devs that try to force their will on everyone else.

This is so misleading that you should be ashamed to suggest as much... A majority of all bitcoin developers support the Core Scalability proposal.  https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases

[johnyj]

Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them.  Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes.  If 80% of hashpower choose to be malicious and mine by non-consensus rules, and 90% of nodes are on the standard chain, some consequenses are:

• SPV wallets have a 10% chance of connecting to a malicious node, users will make transactions on the wrong chain and lose money.
• The 80% will mine worthless coins, since most merchants don't accept them.
• Even upgrading to the latest version of the software won't solve any problems for users.
• You are going to get sued if you sell the 80% coins as "Bitcoin", or refuse to accept bitcoin from the consensus chain as bitcoin.
• Since people lose money and transactions are slow, and the courts are full of fraud cases, both coins will become worthless.

We already have hundreds of alt-coin exists in parallel with much less value but similar code to bitcoin. The reason majority of people don't care about them is because they believe the anti-inflation promise is given by limited total coin supply, so they support only bitcoin to make sure the coin supply is limited in bitcoin ecosystem

Follow the same logic, in the event of a hard fork that bitcoin fork into two chains, majority of people would still support only one bitcoin fork to make sure the total coin supply is limited

You obviously don't understand how Bitcoin works.  Both forks will produce coins at the same rate after a couple of difficulty adjustments, no matter how many are on which side of a fork.

I would never take the risk of touching coins from a hard fork in my business, and have made that clear in my FAQ, since I won't risk getting sued for selling fake coins.

You obviously do not understand the economy incentives behind people who use bitcoin, only focus on technical details will let you miss the bigger picture. If a hard fork is so easy to destroy bitcoin, it is already dead long ago. It is the major consensus decide what is real bitcoin, nothing else. Please do your home work and make sure you fully understand why a coin's value will be very close to its mining cost (e.g. total hash power)

Notice that a soft fork will also trigger a hard fork (See July 04 fork), but in a totally uncontrollable manner, because in a soft fork you don't know what kind of nodes people are running, and since that hard fork is uncontrollable, you will get much worse result than a prepared hard fork, where everyone knows exactly what will happen

And following your logic, you will get sued because people don't even know which one is bitcoin by then, you are selling fake coins either way. Mining pools already lost lots of money during the hard fork that was caused by July 04 soft fork, they know how that tastes, so they currently strongly against soft fork

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43bgrs/peter_todd_sw_is_not_safe_as_a_softfork/

[ImI]

Besides a few payment processors, any evidence to support such claims?

afaik from those pools, exchanges, payment processors that went public pretty much all supported 2MB. the bitcoin-economy seems to be pretty decided on that matter. i obv wont go and search for every statement, i remember a dicussion at #bitcoin-dev where core devs also agreed that the economy seems to be against them. they blamed it on wrong communications etc.
or in other words, name important players of the bitcoin economy which publicly declared that they wanna keep 1MB. you wont find any.

As far as I can tell most users are divided and evidenced by the fact that bitcointalk.org and r/bitcoin have much more activity than other subreddits and forums there is some slight evidence that there are more in favor or Core's proposal.

to take the activity of btct and r/bitcoin as evidence is a non-argument as its obv that the community has a big lag in switching the places were everybody meets. a much better argument is indeed to look what actually happens on those sites! reddit is a perfect example, whenever a 2MB proposal made it through censorship a few hours it was massively upvoted. especially before r/btc came into play and took away some of its users. so as long as everybody was forced to use r/bitcoin 2MB had HUGE support. at least as long as you take upvotes into account.

here at btct is seems similar, imo 2MB is favorised big time. lets try a survey on that matter. i am willing to bet 1BTC that 2MB will be in big favor...

Looks like most of the payment processors genuinely support Classic and larger blocks but that makes perfect sense being that they principally care about bitcoin being a payment rails system and would benefit if nodes dropped off and where only maintained by them and exchanges.

PP play an important part in the economy, to just wipe them away as unimportant seems a bad idea.

Exchanges appear split but we haven't heard from all of them.

split? afaik not one exchange seems to favor 1MB. we had several announcements an they all declared to welcome 2MB.

As far as large investors are concerned , Classic has a few, but most appear to support core's proposal. (Keep in mind that individuals like Core Dev's , theymos, ect... have a ton of coins)

to look just for "large investors" seems incomplete thinking to me. why not go one step further and ask "what do stakeholders want?" we can only guess about that, but as i see the support in the community be it reddit, btct, blogs etc i see (like i said) the community wants 2MB.
that impression is further strengthened as i read core developers complain that they are not willing to give in to technical inferior solutions just because the majority of the community wants that. that pretty much showed to me that the are aware of to be the minority, but dont wanna let the "mob" rule...

Nodes and mining pools clearly support Core

 

they have no choice to support 2MB yet.

A majority of all bitcoin developers support the Core Scalability proposal.  https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases

yes, they do. but have you been in contact with some of the devs surrounding core lately? many of them have absolutely no problem going with 2MB in case classic will gain majority. they seem much more pragmatic and less ideologized than the die hard group. it seems that basically gmax, luke and one or two others are the reason for this big clash. imo the roadmap is great. go for it! but add 2MB and everybody is happy again.

[funkenstein]

3)  Charge people extra to give you their TX directly and put them in the block.  This is the way things are going eventually as TX relaying appears unreliable and unrewarding.  

Ok but how do you market your service to people?

Website with form, similar to e.g. https://blockchain.info/pushtx

Along with APIs.

The biggest pools will all have these, though there will also be consolidators (third party companies) that will navigate and get your tx submitted for you according to your specifications and ability to pay.

What, you think people gonna maintain multi GB mempool and bandwidth for free even when bitcoin is ubiquitous?

[hdbuck]

Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them.  Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes.

correct. nevertheless thats not the situation we have at the moment. its not 80% hashpower against the rest of the community.

in fact its more like some part of core stands against pretty much everyone else in the bitcoin universe.

miners are in favor of 2MB.

community/users are in favor of 2MB. (i would estimate 80/20 in favor of 2MB)

bitcoin services are in favor of 2MB. that means stamp, coinbase, blockchain.org, bitpay, etc etc

so its basically a minor group of devs against everyone else. and you can also see that from those core devs only a few are really decidedly against 2MB, most of them just try to avoid conflict and go with the others. if you watch closely you will find that gmax and luke are the main force behind the neglectance and stubbornness.

so its basically 20% of the community plus maybe 5 devs that try to force their will on everyone else.

lol that is quite some bold assessments of the what the people want or not.

imho you need to fork off asap so you get the monkey peanuts you deserve.

[sturle]

Both coins will soon get worthless, since people can't use them.  Hashpower is not the same as users or nodes.

correct. nevertheless thats not the situation we have at the moment. its not 80% hashpower against the rest of the community.
in fact its more like some part of core stands against pretty much everyone else in the bitcoin universe.

Where on Earth did you get that idea!?  The number of nodes running bit-altcoins, like "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bitcoin Unlimited", etc, is decreasing, and less than 10% of the total.  If you see at e.g. the "Bitcoin Classic" website, the list of supporters is very short.  The vast majority still run and support standard Bitcoin. 

miners are in favor of 2MB.

Some miners, and I thought most of them pulled their support after talking to Jeff?  I am a miner, and I do not support the destruction of Bitcoin.

community/users are in favor of 2MB. (i would estimate 80/20 in favor of 2MB)

You made that up.  By the number of nodes, it is 5509 against 541 in favor of standard Bitcoin.  Remember that supporters of different forks have a strong incentive to run an alternative implementations, since SPV clients will stop working reliably after a hard fork.

bitcoin services are in favor of 2MB. that means stamp, coinbase, blockchain.org, bitpay, etc etc

Most Bitcoin services support standard Bitcoin.  By any metric.

so its basically a minor group of devs against everyone else.

Again: How did you get this idea?  I have been in #bitcoin on Freenode since 2010, and the support for the current consensus is almost unison.  People are mostly making fun of this sillly forking idea.  It is harder to operate a bunch of shills and sybils on IRC than Bitcointalk and Reddit, of course.  The forkers don't even agree on how to fork.  The current count is 380 nodes running "Bitcoin XT", 103 running "Bitcoin Classic" and 75 running "Bitcoin Classic".  We may end up with four different blockchains.

[moneyart]

I have a bad feeling with this whole topic. The people push the blocksize increase too much. I don't know why it is so important to increase the blocksize. We have time to do this. If the transaction speed is too slow then just increase the transaction fees. If people move to altcoins because the fees are too high then good. We also need altcoin. The more currencies the better.

Why this much aggression? Why not wait until End of 2016 before a hard forking vote?

[hdbuck]

The forkers don't even agree on how to fork.  The current count is 380 nodes running "Bitcoin XT", 103 running "Bitcoin Classic" and 75 running "Bitcoin Classic".  We may end up with four different blockchains.

1Bitcoin, 3 shitcoins.

[moneyart]

The CIA forced Gavin Andresen to visit them and explain how Bitcoin is working. Maybe they manipulated him. This is far off topic but I have a bad feeling. I would like to just stay with Bitcoin core. 

[canth]

The forkers don't even agree on how to fork.  The current count is 380 nodes running "Bitcoin XT", 103 running "Bitcoin Classic" and 75 running "Bitcoin Classic".  We may end up with four different blockchains.

1Bitcoin, 3 shitcoins.

How would XT and Classic both activate when each require 750/1000 blocks to activate?

[sturle]

You obviously do not understand the economy incentives behind people who use bitcoin, only focus on technical details will let you miss the bigger picture. If a hard fork is so easy to destroy bitcoin, it is already dead long ago.

Really?  Tell me then, why would someone invest the kind of money needed to gain more than 50% of the hashrate, just to destroy the value of it?  This is not as obvious to me as it is yo you.

It is the major consensus decide what is real bitcoin, nothing else. Please do your home work and make sure you fully understand why a coin's value will be very close to its mining cost (e.g. total hash power)

The consensus defined in software decide.  A majority of the hashrate is irrelevant.  You cannot change hard parameters, like the number of coins or maximum blocksize, without 100% consensus among users.  Invalid blocks are invalid, no matter how many miners build on top of the invalid blocks.

Notice that a soft fork will also trigger a hard fork (See July 04 fork), but in a totally uncontrollable manner, because in a soft fork you don't know what kind of nodes people are running, and since that hard fork is uncontrollable, you will get much worse result than a prepared hard fork, where everyone knows exactly what will happen

The July 04 fork was not a hard fork.  Chainforks happen every day.  For that reason you should not accept

And following your logic, you will get sued because people don't even know which one is bitcoin by then, you are selling fake coins either way. Mining pools already lost lots of money during the hard fork that was caused by July 04 soft fork, they know how that tastes, so they currently strongly against soft fork

Again: The July 04 chainfork was not a hard fork.  In a real hard fork, they would loose their entire investment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43bgrs/peter_todd_sw_is_not_safe_as_a_softfork/

Funny how you quote this without understanding it at all.  He talks about the dangers of activating a soft fork based on miner consensus alone, since we don't know how many other nodes upgraded.  Can you imagine how that would work with a hard fork? 

Very typical for Reditt, actually.  It is hard to more misinformation about Bitcoin on once place.  Every post which even mention something that resembles a fact will immediately get voted down and out.  I don't go there.  Try #bitcoin on Freenode if you want to discuss with people who aren't trolls as well.

[sturle]

Besides a few payment processors, any evidence to support such claims?

afaik from those pools, exchanges, payment processors that went public pretty much all supported 2MB. the bitcoin-economy seems to be pretty decided on that matter. i obv wont go and search for every statement, i remember a dicussion at #bitcoin-dev where core devs also agreed that the economy seems to be against them. they blamed it on wrong communications etc.
or in other words, name important players of the bitcoin economy which publicly declared that they wanna keep 1MB. you wont find any.

I haven't researched this much, since I assume that the vast majority who didn't publicly announce support for any of the four forks, support the current roadmap, but here is one in addition to myself.  From #localbitcoins-chat:

--- Day changed Wed Jan 20 2016
00:59 < belcher> jeremias and MaxLBC, does localbitcoins.com have a policy on the contentious hardforks which increase the block size? proposed by e.g. bitcoin-xt, bitcoin unlimited, bitcoin classic, or would you only ever hardfork with near-unanimous agreement of all bitcoin's users
08:03 <@jeremias> regarding hard fork, I think localbitcoins is not in the 2mb camp

Localbitcoins is one of the largest exchanges (perhaps the largest) by number of users, and one of the largest by BTC volume.

I don't think you will find anyone who support the status quo, if that is what you mean by 1 MB.  The roadmap scales much better than any suggested blocksize increment.

[hdbuck]

The forkers don't even agree on how to fork.  The current count is 380 nodes running "Bitcoin XT", 103 running "Bitcoin Classic" and 75 running "Bitcoin Classic".  We may end up with four different blockchains.

1Bitcoin, 3 shitcoins.

How would XT and Classic both activate when each require 750/1000 blocks to activate?

[hdbuck]

Besides a few payment processors, any evidence to support such claims?

afaik from those pools, exchanges, payment processors that went public pretty much all supported 2MB. the bitcoin-economy seems to be pretty decided on that matter. i obv wont go and search for every statement, i remember a dicussion at #bitcoin-dev where core devs also agreed that the economy seems to be against them. they blamed it on wrong communications etc.
or in other words, name important players of the bitcoin economy which publicly declared that they wanna keep 1MB. you wont find any.

I haven't researched this much, since I assume that the vast majority who didn't publicly announce support for any of the four forks, support the current roadmap, but here is one in addition to myself.  From #localbitcoins-chat:

--- Day changed Wed Jan 20 2016
00:59 < belcher> jeremias and MaxLBC, does localbitcoins.com have a policy on the contentious hardforks which increase the block size? proposed by e.g. bitcoin-xt, bitcoin unlimited, bitcoin classic, or would you only ever hardfork with near-unanimous agreement of all bitcoin's users
08:03 <@jeremias> regarding hard fork, I think localbitcoins is not in the 2mb camp

Localbitcoins is one of the largest exchanges (perhaps the largest) by number of users, and one of the largest by BTC volume.

I don't think you will find anyone who support the status quo, if that is what you mean by 1 MB.  The roadmap scales much better than any suggested blocksize increment.

buut butt social media

[sturle]

The forkers don't even agree on how to fork.  The current count is 380 nodes running "Bitcoin XT", 103 running "Bitcoin Classic" and 75 running "Bitcoin Classic".  We may end up with four different blockchains.

1Bitcoin, 3 shitcoins.

How would XT and Classic both activate when each require 750/1000 blocks to activate?

If a majority of miners do it, they will do it again just for the fun of it.  The coins will be worthless anyway.