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

[Fatman3001]

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. 

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

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.

Anecdotal evidence suggests they were hesitant after Jeff spoke with them. But none of them has officially withdrawn their support. Antpool is even at r/btc asking them to hurry up releasing classic.

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 Classic hasn't been released yet.

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.

https://bitcoinclassic.com/

If you look at the list at Bitcoin Classics website there are a lot of heavy hitters.

https://github.com/bitcoin-core/website/issues/50

Few big players have voiced support for Core. At least I couldn't find many, maybe you see something I can't see (sry, there's bitmynt). Exchanges like Huobi, Bitfinex and Kraken are probably waiting to see which side of the net the ball lands.

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. 

And you wonder why people are frustrated with Core?

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.

Bitcoin unlimited clients will work as long as they're set to 2MB/2MB+. I'm not sure how XT will deal with this, but it shouldn't be a problem for them to implement a 2MB version if they want to keep pusing for their own solution.

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.

You can't be serious? If that's not a joke it's the worst "slippery slope" argument I've ever heard.

[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.  

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

According to "ShadowOfHarbinger" it was released days ago, but he is full of crap and might be lying.  

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.

https://bitcoinclassic.com/

If you look at the list at Bitcoin Classics website there are a lot of heavy hitters.

Not a lot.  There are a few who took VC money from the same people.

https://github.com/bitcoin-core/website/issues/50

A much longer list than the one on the "Bitcoin Classic" site.

Few big players have voiced support for Core. At least I couldn't find many, maybe you see something I can't see (sry, there's bitmynt). Exchanges like Huobi, Bitfinex and Kraken are probably waiting to see which side of the net the ball lands.

Or they just don't care about the drama, and will stick with standard bitcoin.

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.

And you wonder why people are frustrated with Core?

Yes.

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.

Bitcoin unlimited clients will work as long as they're set to 2MB/2MB+. I'm not sure how XT will deal with this, but it shouldn't be a problem for them to implement a 2MB version if they want to keep pusing for their own solution.

Currently Unlimited has more support than Classic, XT has much more support than both of them, and Core dwarfs them all.  Support for larger blocksize forks have dwindled since the bitcoin developers agreed on a roadmap which scales much better than the alternatives, and avoids a hard fork.  On January 1st there were almost 750 nodes trying to fork vs 4879 nodes running Bitcoin Core.  The number of Core nodes is increasing, and the number of fork nodes is decreasing.  Looks like most people are pushing for the Core solution.

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.

You can't be serious? If that's not a joke it's the worst "slippery slope" argument I've ever heard.

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect.  Whyat do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

The reason why so many fork supporters run a full node is obvious: If the fork happens, there is no other way to be sure to use the correct altcoin than by running a full node supporting the altcoin they want to use, and not even that will work if the standard bitcoin fork comes back ahead of their altchain.  Yes, the coins will become worthless.  People use bitcoin as a currency for transactions and storage of value, not for the drama.  When the coins can't be used reliably without keeping up with the drama, people are going to jump ship.

[johnyj]

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.

Tell me then, why would someone invest money in a monority chain with 25% of hash power, just to make a hard fork permanent and destory the value of it?

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)

Invalid blocks are invalid, no matter how many miners build on top of the invalid blocks.

Until they cheat the old nodes to believe that they are valid, which is exactly the soft fork do. SW blocks are invalid for example, they are definitely not bitcoin blocks, but they cheat old nodes to believe that they are still valid. Unfortunately, the moment they start to cheat the old nodes, old nodes will also accept invalid SW blocks that they can not identify, that's where you get your hard fork

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

The July 04 fork IS a hard fork, a few nodes with majority of hash power mined the longest chain, and the consensus did not regard that longest chain to be valid. The rule says that the longest chain should be the correct chain, but consensus says it is not. This is a perfect example that consensus decide what is bitcoin, not code. It is similar in 2013 fork, consensus decided 0.7 is bitcoin, not 0.8, so that even 0.8 have more hash power and the longest chain, it is not bitcoin

Like you said, fork happens every day, because there is constantly disagreement in the network, but that is unavoidable, unless you want to have a communism type total domination disallow any kind of different voice, fork will always happen. You might remember that when we had the first reward halving, there was a hard fork that is permanently mining 50 bitcoin forever, but that did not create the situation you described, it just died like any other hard fork due to no major consensus

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

According to "ShadowOfHarbinger" it was released days ago, but he is full of crap and might be lying.  

Classic code has been available for compilation and test for a few days. It is not an official 'release' ( but is probably what will be the rc)

These are the nodes (like mine) which show up in bitnodes.

Release dates to follow.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect.  Whyat do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

SPV clients which connect to full nodes can detect a likely hard fork by connecting to several full nodes and ensuring that they’re all on the same chain with the same block height, plus or minus several blocks to account for transmission delays and stale blocks. If there’s a divergence, the client can disconnect from nodes with weaker chains.

SPV clients should also monitor for block and transaction version number increases to ensure they process received transactions and create new transactions using the current consensus rules.

source

[hdbuck]

the sugar daddy of bitcoin: http://qntra.net/2016/02/popescu-offers-condition-for-accepting-future-hard-forks/

http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol/

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

the sugar daddy of bitcoin: http://qntra.net/2016/02/popescu-offers-condition-for-accepting-future-hard-forks/

http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol/

She's getting menopausal. Bullish for Classic.... 


[disclaimer: No, I didnt read the rantarticle, but I'm not wrong, am I?]

[hdbuck]

the sugar daddy of bitcoin: http://qntra.net/2016/02/popescu-offers-condition-for-accepting-future-hard-forks/

http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol/

She's getting menopausal. Bullish for Classic.... 
[disclaimer: No, I didnt read the rantarticle, but I'm not wrong, am I?]

lmao, whatever makes you feel good kiddo.

[Fatman3001]

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.  

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

According to "ShadowOfHarbinger" it was released days ago, but he is full of crap and might be lying.

You mean the statement he linked to: "Source code is out there. Binaries/release soon." ?

I'm not sure what to say. Looks pretty unambiguous to me.

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.

https://bitcoinclassic.com/

If you look at the list at Bitcoin Classics website there are a lot of heavy hitters.

Not a lot.  There are a few who took VC money from the same people.

https://github.com/bitcoin-core/website/issues/50

A much longer list than the one on the "Bitcoin Classic" site.

hmmpfff..... not really the point, but:

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3

Look! They have 288, Core has 136!

That was useful.

Few big players have voiced support for Core. At least I couldn't find many, maybe you see something I can't see (sry, there's bitmynt). Exchanges like Huobi, Bitfinex and Kraken are probably waiting to see which side of the net the ball lands.

Or they just don't care about the drama, and will stick with standard bitcoin.

Whatever standard bitcoin will be.

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.

And you wonder why people are frustrated with Core?

Yes.

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.

Bitcoin unlimited clients will work as long as they're set to 2MB/2MB+. I'm not sure how XT will deal with this, but it shouldn't be a problem for them to implement a 2MB version if they want to keep pusing for their own solution.

Currently Unlimited has more support than Classic, XT has much more support than both of them, and Core dwarfs them all.  Support for larger blocksize forks have dwindled since the bitcoin developers agreed on a roadmap which scales much better than the alternatives, and avoids a hard fork.  On January 1st there were almost 750 nodes trying to fork vs 4879 nodes running Bitcoin Core.  The number of Core nodes is increasing, and the number of fork nodes is decreasing.  Looks like most people are pushing for the Core solution.

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

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.

You can't be serious? If that's not a joke it's the worst "slippery slope" argument I've ever heard.

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect.  Whyat do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

The reason why so many fork supporters run a full node is obvious: If the fork happens, there is no other way to be sure to use the correct altcoin than by running a full node supporting the altcoin they want to use, and not even that will work if the standard bitcoin fork comes back ahead of their altchain.  Yes, the coins will become worthless.  People use bitcoin as a currency for transactions and storage of value, not for the drama.  When the coins can't be used reliably without keeping up with the drama, people are going to jump ship.

You're welcome to call Bitcoin Classic/XT/Unlimited an altcoin if you want.  It does make it difficult to take your call for less drama serious though. I just hope you make it clear to your customers that you're selling coins from an obsolete husk of the Core project when the time comes.

I don't know what will be done to SPVs if it gets as far as you seem to believe. I'll leave that to people smarter than me. But I do know that these technical difficulties are far more manageable than trying to recoup the lost competitive advantage if we allow Bitcoin to be held back until Core is done with their "Roadmap". You're from Norway, so you must know the dangers of relying on technology that doesn't exist yet. Do you remember "The Norwegian Moon Landing" at Mongstad?

[sturle]

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.

Tell me then, why would someone invest money in a monority chain with 25% of hash power, just to make a hard fork permanent and destory the value of it?

People will mine on the correct chain for profit.  It is the one most of the users will use.  More than 90% of nodes are currently running Core.  Just a month back less than 87% of all nodes ran Core.  Which means the users are running Core, and will want Core coins.  People will SPV wallets are more than 90% likely to connect to a Core chain, and only see Core coins.  The value will dwindle, but Bitcoin is still the coin of choice for more than 90% of the users.

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)

Invalid blocks are invalid, no matter how many miners build on top of the invalid blocks.

Until they cheat the old nodes to believe that they are valid, which is exactly the soft fork do. SW blocks are invalid for example, they are definitely not bitcoin blocks, but they cheat old nodes to believe that they are still valid. Unfortunately, the moment they start to cheat the old nodes, old nodes will also accept invalid SW blocks that they can not identify, that's where you get your hard fork

Huh?  The bitcoin blocks are still valid bitcoin blocks when segwit is deployed.  Transactions with a segregated witness will have the signature in a separate chain, but this does not change the validity of the block.  The blocks and the transactions in the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.

Only upgraded nodes will know how to check the validity of transactions where the spent txout is from a transaction with segregated witness, but this won't be a problem.  It won't activate until at least 95% of the hashrate support it.  Any chainforks will therefore be short, and can not be hard.

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

The July 04 fork IS a hard fork, a few nodes with majority of hash power mined the longest chain, and the consensus did not regard that longest chain to be valid.  The rule says that the longest chain should be the correct chain, but consensus says it is not. This is a perfect example that consensus decide what is bitcoin, not code.

The rule says the longest chain is only correct if it follows all the rules.  Simply being the longest is not enough.  The stupid miner announced support for BIP66 without actually supporting it.  He lost money, and was probably thought a lesson.  All nodes, both old and upgraded, were on the correct chain as soon as it overtook the malicious chain.

The August 2010 fork, which was much longer, was even correct according to the current consensus at that time.  Unfortunately this was non-intentional, and a new version was rushed out to mine out the chain with the malicious block at low difficulty.

It is similar in 2013 fork, consensus decided 0.7 is bitcoin, not 0.8, so that even 0.8 have more hash power and the longest chain, it is not bitcoin

Of course, even though Gavin wanted to hard fork even then by defining the 0.8 behaviour correct.  That would have been disastrous.  I remember the other developers spent some time convincing him.

Like you said, fork happens every day, because there is constantly disagreement in the network, but that is unavoidable, unless you want to have a communism type total domination disallow any kind of different voice, fork will always happen. You might remember that when we had the first reward halving, there was a hard fork that is permanently mining 50 bitcoin forever, but that did not create the situation you described, it just died like any other hard fork due to no major consensus

Correct.  No consensus make hard forks die.  Which is why all the current Bit-altcoins are stillborn, and very few actually run them.

[sturle]

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect.  Whyat do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

SPV clients which connect to full nodes can detect a likely hard fork by connecting to several full nodes and ensuring that they’re all on the same chain with the same block height, plus or minus several blocks to account for transmission delays and stale blocks. If there’s a divergence, the client can disconnect from nodes with weaker chains.

SPV clients should also monitor for block and transaction version number increases to ensure they process received transactions and create new transactions using the current consensus rules.

source

In the madness of someone intentionally hardforking with little support and only a few nodes, there is still a very high chance of a SPV wallet getting on a different fork.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

Huh?  The bitcoin blocks are still valid bitcoin blocks when segwit is deployed.  Transactions with a segregated witness will have the signature in a separate chain, but this does not change the validity of the block. The blocks and the transactions in the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.

This is completely wrong. The segregated tx's are absolutely invalid to present nodes. A nasty hack to make them appear as "I dont know what to do with this, so I will assume its valid" does not mean a tx is valid. They will remain UNVALIDATED by nodes that are not upgraded.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect.  Whyat do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

SPV clients which connect to full nodes can detect a likely hard fork by connecting to several full nodes and ensuring that they’re all on the same chain with the same block height, plus or minus several blocks to account for transmission delays and stale blocks. If there’s a divergence, the client can disconnect from nodes with weaker chains.

SPV clients should also monitor for block and transaction version number increases to ensure they process received transactions and create new transactions using the current consensus rules.

source

In the madness of someone intentionally hardforking with little support and only a few nodes, there is still a very high chance of a SPV wallet getting on a different fork.

Madness, in that scenario, is a choice, not a condition.

[sturle]

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

According to "ShadowOfHarbinger" it was released days ago, but he is full of crap and might be lying.

You mean the statement he linked to: "Source code is out there. Binaries/release soon." ?

I'm not sure what to say. Looks pretty unambiguous to me.

When the source code is out, it is released.  You don't need binaries for that.

https://github.com/bitcoin-core/website/issues/50

A much longer list than the one on the "Bitcoin Classic" site.

hmmpfff..... not really the point, but:

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3

Look! They have 288, Core has 136!

That was useful.

Except the people on this issue are mostly unnamed shills, not named identifiable people.

Few big players have voiced support for Core. At least I couldn't find many, maybe you see something I can't see (sry, there's bitmynt). Exchanges like Huobi, Bitfinex and Kraken are probably waiting to see which side of the net the ball lands.

Or they just don't care about the drama, and will stick with standard bitcoin.

Whatever standard bitcoin will be.

Standard bitcoin is well defined in Satoshi's paper.  Diversion from consensus is not allowed.  Only bugfixes and more restrictions have been allowed, and Satoshi did many of those himself.

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

The source has been released, and this means the software has been released.  Don't fool yourself.

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

You can't be serious? If that's not a joke it's the worst "slippery slope" argument I've ever heard.

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect. What do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

The reason why so many fork supporters run a full node is obvious: If the fork happens, there is no other way to be sure to use the correct altcoin than by running a full node supporting the altcoin they want to use, and not even that will work if the standard bitcoin fork comes back ahead of their altchain.  Yes, the coins will become worthless.  People use bitcoin as a currency for transactions and storage of value, not for the drama.  When the coins can't be used reliably without keeping up with the drama, people are going to jump ship.

You're welcome to call Bitcoin Classic/XT/Unlimited an altcoin if you want.  It does make it difficult to take your call for less drama serious though. I just hope you make it clear to your customers that you're selling coins from an obsolete husk of the Core project when the time comes.

I do make it very clear that I sell Bitcoin and no altcoins.  I always did.  I link to bitcoin.org in my FAQ.

I don't know what will be done to SPVs if it gets as far as you seem to believe. I'll leave that to people smarter than me. But I do know that these technical difficulties are far more manageable than trying to recoup the lost competitive advantage if we allow Bitcoin to be held back until Core is done with their "Roadmap". You're from Norway, so you must know the dangers of relying on technology that doesn't exist yet. Do you remember "The Norwegian Moon Landing" at Mongstad?

When Core is done with their roadmap, the SPV problem will at least be solved by the fraud proofs included in the segwit proposal.  This makes the world a bit safer for SPV wallets.  Segwit has a testnet, and works, btw.  Many wallets have it implemented already.  You are welcome to test it.  Join #segwit-dev on Freenode to discuss.

[sturle]

Huh?  The bitcoin blocks are still valid bitcoin blocks when segwit is deployed.  Transactions with a segregated witness will have the signature in a separate chain, but this does not change the validity of the block. The blocks and the transactions in the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.

This is completely wrong. The segregated tx's are absolutely invalid to present nodes. A nasty hack to make them appear as "I dont know what to do with this, so I will assume its valid" does not mean a tx is valid. They will remain UNVALIDATED by nodes that are not upgraded.

No, it is correct.  Transactions with a segregated witness will be completely valid to present nodes.  They will look like a normal "anyonecanpay" transaction.  Non-upgraded nodes will not generate special segwit addresses, and therefore will not receive transactions to segwit addresses.  They are just transactions to other people which you don't have the private key to.  You can't import those addresses to an old wallet either.  But transactions to segwit addresses will still be recorded by old nodes, and included in their UTXO set.

Very old nodes cannot fully validate all constraints in any recent block, because they don't know about them.  This has always been the case.  Still the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.  In case of a hard forking change, the new blocks will not be valid to older nodes.  Segregated witness is not a hard forking change.

Try it out yourself.  The testnet is open.

[Fatman3001]

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

According to "ShadowOfHarbinger" it was released days ago, but he is full of crap and might be lying.

You mean the statement he linked to: "Source code is out there. Binaries/release soon." ?

I'm not sure what to say. Looks pretty unambiguous to me.

When the source code is out, it is released.  You don't need binaries for that.

This is getting beyond stupid. But I used to respect you so I'll play along.

The entire quote:

"#Bitcoin Classic tree tagged for the first beta ("classic-0.11.2.b1")
Source code is out there. Binaries/release soon."

Most people will wait until the final binaries are released.

https://github.com/bitcoin-core/website/issues/50

A much longer list than the one on the "Bitcoin Classic" site.

hmmpfff..... not really the point, but:

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3

Look! They have 288, Core has 136!

That was useful.

Except the people on this issue are mostly unnamed shills, not named identifiable people.

Ok, now we're back to the "quality" of the backers. Then show me the heavy hitters!

Few big players have voiced support for Core. At least I couldn't find many, maybe you see something I can't see (sry, there's bitmynt). Exchanges like Huobi, Bitfinex and Kraken are probably waiting to see which side of the net the ball lands.

Or they just don't care about the drama, and will stick with standard bitcoin.

Whatever standard bitcoin will be.

Standard bitcoin is well defined in Satoshi's paper.  Diversion from consensus is not allowed.  Only bugfixes and more restrictions have been allowed, and Satoshi did many of those himself.

"They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism."

I am glad we agree.

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

The source has been released, and this means the software has been released.  Don't fool yourself.

Bitcoin Classic hasn't been released yet.

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

You can't be serious? If that's not a joke it's the worst "slippery slope" argument I've ever heard.

I have tried to get an answer to what I think is the biggest problem here many times, but you keep ignoring it:
SPV wallets, which most people use, will connect to a random fork and spend and receive conins on a random chain every time they connect. What do you think the users loosing coins due to this will do?  Run to buy coins from the chanfork which is mos popular this week, or get the f out of Bitcoin before it is too late?

The reason why so many fork supporters run a full node is obvious: If the fork happens, there is no other way to be sure to use the correct altcoin than by running a full node supporting the altcoin they want to use, and not even that will work if the standard bitcoin fork comes back ahead of their altchain.  Yes, the coins will become worthless.  People use bitcoin as a currency for transactions and storage of value, not for the drama.  When the coins can't be used reliably without keeping up with the drama, people are going to jump ship.

You're welcome to call Bitcoin Classic/XT/Unlimited an altcoin if you want.  It does make it difficult to take your call for less drama serious though. I just hope you make it clear to your customers that you're selling coins from an obsolete husk of the Core project when the time comes.

I do make it very clear that I sell Bitcoin and no altcoins.  I always did.  I link to bitcoin.org in my FAQ.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of time to argue semantics when you're in front of the judge if a fork should happen. It's not obvious that everyone will agree with your terminology.

I don't know what will be done to SPVs if it gets as far as you seem to believe. I'll leave that to people smarter than me. But I do know that these technical difficulties are far more manageable than trying to recoup the lost competitive advantage if we allow Bitcoin to be held back until Core is done with their "Roadmap". You're from Norway, so you must know the dangers of relying on technology that doesn't exist yet. Do you remember "The Norwegian Moon Landing" at Mongstad?

When Core is done with their roadmap, the SPV problem will at least be solved by the fraud proofs included in the segwit proposal.  This makes the world a bit safer for SPV wallets.  Segwit has a testnet, and works, btw.  Many wallets have it implemented already.  You are welcome to test it.  Join #segwit-dev on Freenode to discuss.

I hope Core replies with a 2MB/Segwit hard fork. It seems like a clever piece of technology. But I wasn't talking about Segwit. Segwit will only get us so far.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

Huh?  The bitcoin blocks are still valid bitcoin blocks when segwit is deployed.  Transactions with a segregated witness will have the signature in a separate chain, but this does not change the validity of the block. The blocks and the transactions in the blocks are perfectly valid to all nodes.

This is completely wrong. The segregated tx's are absolutely invalid to present nodes. A nasty hack to make them appear as "I dont know what to do with this, so I will assume its valid" does not mean a tx is valid. They will remain UNVALIDATED by nodes that are not upgraded.

No, it is correct.  Transactions with a segregated witness will be completely valid to present nodes.  They will look like a normal "anyonecanpay" transaction.  

Are they "anyonecanpay" transactions?  Yes or No? Of course they are not.

If they are not, then how can you say "they have been validated"?  The transaction has been misrepresented, it is something completely different to what the node thinks it is, yet you maintain that as correct.   Nodes will essentially be SPV clients with respect to segwit transactions. That is the fraud of this so-called "soft-fork" plan. Which, of course, has already been discredited by Peter Todd.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

I hope Core replies with a 2MB/Segwit hard fork. It seems like a clever piece of technology. But I wasn't talking about Segwit. Segwit will only get us so far.

Is there any possibility, has there been any suggestion, that this could actually happen?

[Fatman3001]

I hope Core replies with a 2MB/Segwit hard fork. It seems like a clever piece of technology. But I wasn't talking about Segwit. Segwit will only get us so far.

Is there any possibility, has there been any suggestion, that this could actually happen?

Of course not, but hope springs eternal.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

I hope Core replies with a 2MB/Segwit hard fork. It seems like a clever piece of technology. But I wasn't talking about Segwit. Segwit will only get us so far.

Is there any possibility, has there been any suggestion, that this could actually happen?

Of course not, but hope springs eternal.

Optimism: