Stop fuckin' around, fork the son-of-a-bitch already.

[exstasie]

Hard forks are good.  Stop crying.  They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best.  Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain.  On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains.  Make good decisions thereafter.  No harm, no foul.  

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Hard forks only work when a majority of the community is willing to change over to whichever chain they agree to use; if they don't agree on using the same one then everyone just gets confused and it is more detrimental than beneficial if everyone is splintered across multiple chains.

If the miners and devs can reach a consensus then we can switch, but until then there isn't much that can be done.

To be clear, the issue is not consensus of miners and devs. The issue is consensus of all Bitcoin users, which includes miners and presumably also includes devs. But the stakeholders in a hard fork are much more diverse than simply miners and devs. Miners ought to be following users out of rational incentive to mine the most highly valued chain. Miners shouldn't be provoking a hard fork themselves -- this is seen by many as an attack on users (attempting to leverage hash power to force users to migrate networks).

[franky1]

Hard forks are good.  Stop crying.  They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best.  Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain.  On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains.  Make good decisions thereafter.  No harm, no foul.  

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Hard forks only work when a majority of the community is willing to change over to whichever chain they agree to use; if they don't agree on using the same one then everyone just gets confused and it is more detrimental than beneficial if everyone is splintered across multiple chains.

If the miners and devs can reach a consensus then we can switch, but until then there isn't much that can be done.

To be clear, the issue is not consensus of miners and devs. The issue is consensus of all Bitcoin users, which includes miners and presumably also includes devs. But the stakeholders in a hard fork are much more diverse than simply miners and devs. Miners ought to be following users out of rational incentive to mine the most highly valued chain. Miners shouldn't be provoking a hard fork themselves -- this is seen by many as an attack on users (attempting to leverage hash power to force users to migrate networks).

and now you know why im sick of devs flatly refusing to even code anything for core (well luckily luke is/should be doing it)  and try their best to throw anything not core (many different implementations) off the bus (now it seems blockstream employee are trying to throw luke off the bus too). because that is a route to centralize users, by only having one implementation.. which then has a ripple effect of only one implementation for miners and merchants.

meaning devs becoming the controllers of consensus and everyone has to bow to their wishes

[yayayo]

Hard forks are good.  Stop crying.  They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best.  Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain.  On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains.  Make good decisions thereafter.  No harm, no foul.  

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Hard forks only work when a majority of the community is willing to change over to whichever chain they agree to use; if they don't agree on using the same one then everyone just gets confused and it is more detrimental than beneficial if everyone is splintered across multiple chains.

If the miners and devs can reach a consensus then we can switch, but until then there isn't much that can be done.

To be clear, the issue is not consensus of miners and devs. The issue is consensus of all Bitcoin users, which includes miners and presumably also includes devs. But the stakeholders in a hard fork are much more diverse than simply miners and devs. Miners ought to be following users out of rational incentive to mine the most highly valued chain. Miners shouldn't be provoking a hard fork themselves -- this is seen by many as an attack on users (attempting to leverage hash power to force users to migrate networks).

Yes, it's about all bitcoin users, but the majority of Bitcoin users will follow that chain which has the greatest consensus among developers and miners. So the argument is to some degree redirected to its starting point. In fact a "provocation" of a hardfork is only seen as a provocation if it proposed by a minority without consensus among the other miners and developers. Clearly it's rational for miners (and even more so for pool operators) to seek consensus on a sustainable solution. It makes no sense to mine on a minority chain.

In my opinion it's very important to have broad consensus (90% or more) when a hardfork occurs. Controversial hardforks have significant destructive potential not only by splitting up the community and thereby the wealth allocation on each coin but especially by undermining trust in future developments. So the psychological effect is even more far-reaching. Without unity, Bitcoin might quickly loose its perception of being a safe haven. People might feel that it's unsafe to store their funds with the currency, because another fork (with further value depreciation) might be just around the corner.

ya.ya.yo!

[Chris!]

When you have fuckall coins, it is easy to make reckless statements like this. The Core developers have ALL the risk on them, if this fails.

They have to consider every little thing, to make sure a hard fork will not cause some vulnerability. We have seen what happened to other

Alt coins, when Air heads decide to hard fork for stupid reasons. We {holders of coins} are happy with slow progress, if it secure our coins.

Exactly! This is easy to say when you have 100k market cap but if you really switch things on their head and you affect $10b worth of assets in the world you're going to pay for it. I can just see the headlines: WWIII because of bitcoin hard fork. Maybe a bit dramatic but we'd talking about people's livelihoods at this point. It's not just a random shitcoin.

[ImHash]

With bitcoin not being forked I'm starting to lose all the confidence I once had in crypto and BTC as the original crypto coin, now talking about forking and making decisions about the E-cryptosystem which revolves around BTC.
We should even make the decision making procedure a consensus operation.

[exstasie]

Yes, it's about all bitcoin users, but the majority of Bitcoin users will follow that chain which has the greatest consensus among developers and miners.

FTFY. That's the point -- a miner-induced hard fork is leveraging users' fear of being on the "minority chain." It leverages an apparent monopoly on hashpower (confirmed transactions) to make users' decision for them. Users will migrate whether or not they agree to the changes out of fear of economic loss.

The only ethical way to hard fork is to allow support to amass organically. That means forking without miner coordination. If users truly do consent to the fork changes, they will migrate to the new system. Miners will follow based on rational incentive.

But using miners to provoke the fork in the first place turns Bitcoin's incentives on its head. Hash power follow users. Not the other way around.

[Wind_FURY]

Hard forks are good.  Stop crying.  They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best.  Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain.  On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains.  Make good decisions thereafter.  No harm, no foul.  

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Do you think the hard fork will go smoothly? I assume your argument is about the XT hard form scenario unless I'm mistaken. But in my opinion it would be better to be cautious and prudent before making major changes in Bitcoin. Look at what happened with Ethereum. What if the same thing will happen again with Bitcoin's hard fork. Then what is supposed to be a champion of cryptocurrencies would now become a failed experiment in consensus. It will be laughable. The core development team should not risk anything that will destroy Bitcoin.

[Harpua]

Remember ETH hard fork? The community and it's price after hard fork?
Maybe better learn from past experience and wait a bit longer.

Who cares about the price?  Why is it an objective to 'get the price up'?  Very stupid.  Let's get the functionality up.  

Let's fork it two times - or three times.  Everyone will have the same tokens on each chain to start with.  Then, one chain will prove to be more reliable and higher performing that the others.  Then Greg Maxwell can go take his Blockstream shitchain with Lightning Liquid side crap to hell where it belongs.  Blockstream wants to own Bitcoin.  I say fork it and let them have their silly side chain project.  The 'other' chain with 8MB will take off and on chain scaling will live forever after.

Only Blockstream gets hurt by a fork.  Fork it!

Exactly. It seems that there is no rush from the devs to do anything, and the fact that Blockstream would be hurt by the fork (probably) would definitely present some kind of correlation going on between them and the devs. There is just no reason why the devs shouldn't be worried about the functionality of bitcoin and to improve it as much as possible, rather than worried about politics, miner threats, and so on.

[Harpua]

Hard forks are good.  Stop crying.  They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best.  Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain.  On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains.  Make good decisions thereafter.  No harm, no foul.  

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Do you think the hard fork will go smoothly? I assume your argument is about the XT hard form scenario unless I'm mistaken. But in my opinion it would be better to be cautious and prudent before making major changes in Bitcoin. Look at what happened with Ethereum. What if the same thing will happen again with Bitcoin's hard fork. Then what is supposed to be a champion of cryptocurrencies would now become a failed experiment in consensus. It will be laughable. The core development team should not risk anything that will destroy Bitcoin.

Honestly, who gives a flying fuck about Ethereum?  Ethereum has a totally different protocol and shouldn't be compared to what the Bitcoin devs are doing, or proposing they should do, with an upcoming hard fork.

[RawDog]

Core's conservative view on hard forks is what has made Bitcoin survive for 7+ years. Look at the ETH/ETC disaster. We must not hard fork unless we have like 99% of support.

How could we ever know that we have 99% support behind a fork? There's no way to measure it. No amount of node voting, coin voting or miner voting can establish that. More to the point, if we are talking about processing power, hash rate of ETH:ETC was 99:1 at one point. Still, the network split. People really underestimate the risks. There is literally no way to ever know how a hard fork will resolve. It's impossible to know.

To be clear, by holding back the fork, Core is preventing the vote.  If we fork, then the true voting can occur. 

Not forking - is the problem. 

In Satoshi's view, a fork is very readily available everyday.  Anyone can fork and forking is good.  Now, the fork action is prevented because of collusion of miners and Core.  With no fork, no consensus. 

So you get what we have right here.  I don't like it any more than you do.  But, that's the way Maxwell wants it, so he gets it. 

Hard forks are necessary and good and they operate to permit everyone to vote on a best system.  Avoiding forks destroys Bitcoin.   

Fork the son-of-a-bitch. 

The only way Maxwell can keep control despite the very large number of people that want large blocks is by preventing the fork by spreading forking FUD and convincing the miners to stay.  He was successful.  Now, we have a system where Maxwell rules - not consensus rules.  It's not Bitcoin any longer.  It's MaxwellCoin

[Lauda]

It seems that it may be the right time to ignore this user before someone starts accepting some of this obviously misleading and false information. Nobody is preventing anything, nor is this bullshit true:

In Satoshi's view, a fork is very readily available everyday.  Anyone can fork and forking is good.  Now, the fork action is prevented because of collusion of miners and Core.  With no fork, no consensus.  

There are several HF proposals, the problem is that nobody wants that crap. Forks are very dangerous for a widely developed system if not properly planned and deployed.

[awesome31312]

Don't feed the troll. It's obvious, just look at his avatar, it's the angry "Bitcoin scam" guy. Find him by Googling "Bald guy mad about Bitcoin", that's how I found him

[RawDog]

It seems that it may be the right time to ignore this user before someone starts accepting some of this obviously misleading and false information.

Go ahead, bury your head in the sand.  That is the normal response from morons who don't want to see anything other than their own stupid ideas on matters.

Fork is not dangerous.  Fork is good.

Fork is an opportunity for everyone to vote.  

Preventing a fork is Greg Maxwell's way to assure Blockstream will soon be forcing everyone to pay 'sidechain fees'.  Preventing a fork assures that Greg Maxwell can continue making all decisions as he likes without regard for the opinions of others.

[Lauda]

Go ahead, bury your head in the sand.  That is the normal response from morons who don't want to see anything other than their own stupid ideas on matters.

False. I'm very open to ideas, this one is just idiotic. It is you who's the ignorant fool trying to push through a catastrophic ideology.

Fork is not dangerous.  Fork is good.

So breaking the whole network infrastructure is good? Sure, let's all vote today and fork it in 28 days. If you can't update your custom implementations in that time-frame, you shouldn't even be a part of the ecosystem. All praise the amazing fork!

Fork is an opportunity for everyone to vote.  

Again, there are several proposals. The problem is that nobody sane wants them.

Preventing a fork is Greg Maxwell's way to assure Blockstream will soon be forcing everyone to pay 'sidechain fees'.  

This is just pure bullshit. Nobody will be forced to pay "sidechain fees".
Isn't it interesting how people would sacrifice the intrinsic blockchain values inherent to Bitcoin, just in an attempt to gain a wider user-base, i.e. bigger market capitalization, i.e. more money?

[RawDog]

Moron.  Unmitigated, complete moron.  

Go ahead, bury your head in the sand.  That is the normal response from morons who don't want to see anything other than their own stupid ideas on matters.

False. I'm very open to ideas, this one is just idiotic. It is you who's the ignorant fool trying to push through a catastrophic ideology.
That you simply declare my idea idiotic does nothing at all to prove that it is.  If you can't mention why it is, then it surely isn't.

Fork is not dangerous.  Fork is good.

So breaking the whole network infrastructure is good? Sure, let's all vote today and fork it in 28 days. If you can't update your custom implementations in that time-frame, you shouldn't even be a part of the ecosystem. All praise the amazing fork!
Fork does not 'break the whole network infrastructure'.  This is just pure nonsense.

Fork is an opportunity for everyone to vote.  

Again, there are several proposals. The problem is that nobody sane wants them.
Sane people are not allow to say whether they want them or not because Greg Maxwell has foreclosed their ability to vote by preventing a fork based on his lack of consensus - about 6 people from Blockstream.  If sane people were allowed to vote - we would have switched to 8MB long ago

Preventing a fork is Greg Maxwell's way to assure Blockstream will soon be forcing everyone to pay 'sidechain fees'.  

This is just pure bullshit. Nobody will be forced to pay "sidechain fees".
You are quite confused.  I don't understand why you think Blockstream won't be charging their side chain access fees.  You must be a sucker to believe that nonsense.

Isn't it interesting how people would sacrifice the intrinsic blockchain values inherent to Bitcoin, just in an attempt to gain a wider user-base, i.e. bigger market capitalization, i.e. more money?
It is you that sacrifices blockchain values when you prevent the fork.  Satoshi wants the masses to choose which is the correct path.  This is essentially a fork.  Satoshi didn't say Greg Maxwell and Blockstream should decide the correct path.  You have a choice: let Greg decide what changes we need, or allow the fork.  The fork is how we vote.  A fork is a proposal of two choices (or more) and people get to join whichever they prefer.  Greg Maxwell says no fork, I'll decide what is right and correct.  What kind of a sheep are you that you decide to let Blockstream dictate all the changes?

[pereira4]

Moron.  Unmitigated, complete moron.  

Go ahead, bury your head in the sand.  That is the normal response from morons who don't want to see anything other than their own stupid ideas on matters.

False. I'm very open to ideas, this one is just idiotic. It is you who's the ignorant fool trying to push through a catastrophic ideology.
That you simply declare my idea idiotic does nothing at all to prove that it is.  If you can't mention why it is, then it surely isn't.

Fork is not dangerous.  Fork is good.

So breaking the whole network infrastructure is good? Sure, let's all vote today and fork it in 28 days. If you can't update your custom implementations in that time-frame, you shouldn't even be a part of the ecosystem. All praise the amazing fork!
Fork does not 'break the whole network infrastructure'.  This is just pure nonsense.

Fork is an opportunity for everyone to vote.  

Again, there are several proposals. The problem is that nobody sane wants them.
Sane people are not allow to say whether they want them or not because Greg Maxwell has foreclosed their ability to vote by preventing a fork based on his lack of consensus - about 6 people from Blockstream.  If sane people were allowed to vote - we would have switched to 8MB long ago

Preventing a fork is Greg Maxwell's way to assure Blockstream will soon be forcing everyone to pay 'sidechain fees'.  

This is just pure bullshit. Nobody will be forced to pay "sidechain fees".
You are quite confused.  I don't understand why you think Blockstream won't be charging their side chain access fees.  You must be a sucker to believe that nonsense.

Isn't it interesting how people would sacrifice the intrinsic blockchain values inherent to Bitcoin, just in an attempt to gain a wider user-base, i.e. bigger market capitalization, i.e. more money?
It is you that sacrifices blockchain values when you prevent the fork.  Satoshi wants the masses to choose which is the correct path.  This is essentially a fork.  Satoshi didn't say Greg Maxwell and Blockstream should decide the correct path.  You have a choice: let Greg decide what changes we need, or allow the fork.  The fork is how we vote.  A fork is a proposal of two choices (or more) and people get to join whichever they prefer.  Greg Maxwell says no fork, I'll decide what is right and correct.  What kind of a sheep are you that you decide to let Blockstream dictate all the changes?

Actually, satoshi said that after version 0.1 or so, the software would start becoming solidified and any alternatives to the "official software" would be a disaster, so it means that if satoshi was around he would be working on Core and rejecting hard fork attempts such as XT, Classic or whatever else is there.

Core is doing a good job, staying conservative is key. The 2MB block size will eventually come when it's the right time.

[exstasie]

In Satoshi's view, a fork is very readily available everyday.  Anyone can fork and forking is good.  Now, the fork action is prevented because of collusion of miners and Core.  With no fork, no consensus.

You have it backwards. Forking is fine -- but only if there is organic support for a fork. What the XT and Classic camps promoted was collusion by miners to force users to migrate. That's the opposite of how Bitcoin's incentives work. If you want to fork the protocol, go ahead and fork it. If users support it, they can migrate to the forked network. Then -- out of Bitcoin's rational mining incentive -- miners will follow, should there be sufficient user support to justify mining expenditure. Using miners to leverage hash rate against Bitcoin users is very unethical. I would oppose any fork (like XT or Classic) on those grounds.

The only way Maxwell can keep control despite the very large number of people that want large blocks is by preventing the fork by spreading forking FUD and convincing the miners to stay.  He was successful.  Now, we have a system where Maxwell rules - not consensus rules.  It's not Bitcoin any longer.  It's MaxwellCoin

How do you quantify those people? I can just as easily say a "very large number of people don't want large blocks." Including me. You can opt of the Bitcoin network and fork at any time. If users agree, they can follow. But don't try to leverage miners against us. That's a variant of a 51% attack.

[franky1]

Go ahead, bury your head in the sand.  That is the normal response from morons who don't want to see anything other than their own stupid ideas on matters.

False. I'm very open to ideas, this one is just idiotic. It is you who's the ignorant fool trying to push through a catastrophic ideology.

Fork is not dangerous.  Fork is good.

So breaking the whole network infrastructure is good? Sure, let's all vote today and fork it in 28 days. If you can't update your custom implementations in that time-frame, you shouldn't even be a part of the ecosystem. All praise the amazing fork!

Fork is an opportunity for everyone to vote.  

Again, there are several proposals. The problem is that nobody sane wants them.

Preventing a fork is Greg Maxwell's way to assure Blockstream will soon be forcing everyone to pay 'sidechain fees'.  

This is just pure bullshit. Nobody will be forced to pay "sidechain fees".
Isn't it interesting how people would sacrifice the intrinsic blockchain values inherent to Bitcoin, just in an attempt to gain a wider user-base, i.e. bigger market capitalization, i.e. more money?

seems lauda has closed his eyes and put on his blockstream nightcap again..
its not about a bigger market capitalization..
its not about more money.

its about increasing the usability.
EG reducing the fee war
EG increasing ability to spend within ~20 minutes without having to fight for priority
EG not treating third world currency weekly wages as 'spam'
EG not treating a transaction fee as 'cheap', when it amounts to more than an hours labour in third world countries
EG not tweaking bitcoin to be reliant on third party management
EG not tweaking bitcoin to not be transparent and independently checkable
EG not scaring people into false doomsdays purely to push users offchain
EG no 2mb doomsdays, then suddenly say 4mb ok.
EG no 4mb is ok but only 1.8x capacity.. because 4x capacity needs to be ignored

[VeritasSapere]

Core's conservative view on hard forks is what has made Bitcoin survive for 7+ years. Look at the ETH/ETC disaster. We must not hard fork unless we have like 99% of support.

Yeah great idea, lets take Bitcoin which has billions of $ investment and split it in two and see what works.  like seriously did you go to school?  

A fork would drive 95% of the people away because thy don't know how to handle that situation.
After the way the ether fork turnd out, even a lot of the smaller traders would resign from the cryptomarket.

Remember ETH hard fork? The community and it's price after hard fork?
Maybe better learn from past experience and wait a bit longer.

Fact check, Ethereum is doing just fine, it has not even lost value for investors, especially if you take the value of ETC into account as well. It even still has a decent amount of volume, so these claims about ETH and ETC are false.

As we've observed with ETH, hard forks can go terribly wrong when rushed. A minority is enough to keep another chain alive. This sets a very bad precedent, both by forking without consensus/reverting events and by rushing a HF.

I disagree, I do not think anything went terribly wrong with the ETH hard fork. I even think that it sets a positive precedent. It gives people more freedom of choice, I can not see anything wrong with that.

These type of splits do in effect enable the core principles of volunteerism within Bitcoin. Everyone can have the Ethereum they want, whether they agreed with the fork or not. I think the same solution is actually ideal for Bitcoin right now, that way these split communities and ideologies can go their own way in freedom.

I'm not saying I'm anti-HF in general, however I'm against irrational decision making with a very limited view point. I think that a HF, with a grace period of 6 months may be plausible and would likely not be against it (dependent on the change-set of course).

I think that Bitcoin will split multiple times, within the next six months. Nobody can really stop it, that is a beautiful thing. I suppose somebody could create a "genesis fork" with a six month grace period, it would most likely not be the first chain to split off the Bitcoin network and gain a significant market share.

How could we ever know that we have 99% support behind a fork? There's no way to measure it. No amount of node voting, coin voting or miner voting can establish that. More to the point, if we are talking about processing power, hash rate of ETH:ETC was 99:1 at one point. Still, the network split. People really underestimate the risks. There is literally no way to ever know how a hard fork will resolve. It's impossible to know.

This is exactly why a hard fork is the best way to resolve such a dispute, since after the split and over the next few years we will see exactly how much demand there really is for such an alternative chain.

[franky1]

snip

they way you see a fork is an intentional split.(controversial). and keeping both side alive..

to me i would call that a controversial fork where a clear defined single direction cannot be established and so extra code is added so the 2 decisions do not rule each other out(blacklisting opposing user agents/flags), which allows both decisions to survive.

a consensual fork is when there is adequate demand and utility that the rules can change without causing a second chain, where the natural consensus mechanism of orphans that would kill off a minority and everyone continues in a single direction of new rules..

in the last year of debate.. the conclusion is that all software implementations should have released a fork code with a consensual activation mechanism. meaning if a high majority desire shows, it activates and then orphans take care of the minority until the minority move over. leading to a single chain.
emphasis high majority desire to move in a single direction

i do not favour controversial forks that add code to force the minority chain to survive. (clams), but that said i also do not favour a certain dev team to veto even releasing code out of fear that everyone would actually show a high desire for it. so abusing the consensus mechanism by not allow users to choose, thus not even giving any new rules a chance.

core fans scream doomsdays of controversial hard forks. but dont realise that core is preventing consensual forks by vetoing a release to ensure the community never get to a healthy majority. thus causing the controversy

so here is the thing.
if cores only worry is a healthy majority.
how about include the hardfork in their softfork code as both require high majority activation parameters. thus when it activates there is no harm because of the consensus mechanism is there to resolve it.