BIP 16 / 17 in layman's terms

[Inaba]

No, a forking of the chain would lead to dilution and confusion and nothing good will come of that.

You never want to hear someone utter "Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?  Dang..."

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[allten]

No, a forking of the chain would lead to dilution and confusion and nothing good will come of that.

You never want to hear someone utter "Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?  Dang..."

I understand what you are saying, but a fork in the Bitcoin chain is already in its future.
No matter how much complaining you or anyone else does, it's gonna happen.
My suggestion is that we should embrace it and help it, sure the learning curve on an already very difficult system to understand get a little higher, but the users will manage.

"Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?" and this is a problem because? This is where individuals have the opportunity to influence each other to support the best, most efficient system.

Lots of fear with my suggestion; do you really have a problem empowering people to make a different choice?

Just to be clear; I also have skin in the game. I mining on the bitcoin chain. I buy a few dollars of bitcoins everyday; yet, I'm not scared one bit!

[interlagos]

No, a forking of the chain would lead to dilution and confusion and nothing good will come of that.

You never want to hear someone utter "Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?  Dang..."

I understand what you are saying, but a fork in the Bitcoin chain is already in its future.
No matter how much complaining you or anyone else does, it's gonna happen.
My suggestion is that we should embrace it and help it, sure the learning curve on an already very difficult system to understand get a little higher, but the users will manage.

"Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?" and this is a problem because? This is where individuals have the opportunity to influence each other to support the best, most efficient system.

Lots of fear with my suggestion; do you really have a problem empowering people to make a different choice?

Just to be clear; I also have skin in the game. I mining on the bitcoin chain. I buy a few dollars of bitcoins everyday; yet, I'm not scared one bit!

There is a difference in forking the current chain and creating an alt-chain.
In the first case you create confusion and it will only work if everybody migrates to the new fork letting the old one die.
Alt-chains are different in that they have their own blockchain from the beginning and they usually have its own brand.

[rjk]

I understand what you are saying, but a fork in the Bitcoin chain is already in its future.
No matter how much complaining you or anyone else does, it's gonna happen.
My suggestion is that we should embrace it and help it, sure the learning curve on an already very difficult system to understand get a little higher, but the users will manage.

"Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?" and this is a problem because? This is where individuals have the opportunity to influence each other to support the best, most efficient system.

Lots of fear with my suggestion; do you really have a problem empowering people to make a different choice?

Just to be clear; I also have skin in the game. I mining on the bitcoin chain. I buy a few dollars of bitcoins everyday; yet, I'm not scared one bit!

Uh, no, forks cannot coexist, its either one or the other, and if either of them find out about the other, the shorter fork's transactions/blocks are discarded completely. You might be thinking of alt/scam coins, which can and do coexist, but are not worth any appreciable amount.

EDIT: Beaten by interlagos

[allten]

I understand what you are saying, but a fork in the Bitcoin chain is already in its future.
No matter how much complaining you or anyone else does, it's gonna happen.
My suggestion is that we should embrace it and help it, sure the learning curve on an already very difficult system to understand get a little higher, but the users will manage.

"Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?" and this is a problem because? This is where individuals have the opportunity to influence each other to support the best, most efficient system.

Lots of fear with my suggestion; do you really have a problem empowering people to make a different choice?

Just to be clear; I also have skin in the game. I mining on the bitcoin chain. I buy a few dollars of bitcoins everyday; yet, I'm not scared one bit!

Uh, no, forks cannot coexist, its either one or the other, and if either of them find out about the other, the shorter fork's transactions/blocks are discarded completely. You might be thinking of alt/scam coins, which can and do coexist, but are not worth any appreciable amount.

EDIT: Beaten by interlagos

"You might be thinking of alt/scam coins, which can and do coexist"
Well, That's not they way I would personally say it, but ok.

Your post and interlagos are simply pointing out some of the technicals and obstacles that must be considered to make a fork possible and coexist - overcoming these are just a small part of what I was implying when I said "make Bitcoin fork friendly". Some things would need to be changed just like things need to be changed to utilize multi-signatures.

BTW, A fork is very similar to an "alt/scam" chain with one key difference: The coin holder before the fork will automatically own the same amount of coins in both chains.

Like I said before, a fork will happen. Don't know when - might be a decade, but it will happen.
Let's embrace and make it Fork friendly.

The intention of my post here in the BIP 16 / BIP 17 thread was to throw out some ideas and hopefully persuade a few bitcoin programmers to take up this crusade. No one interested? OK, moving on.

.......... Back to BIP 16 / BIP 17.
I don't have a problem supporting either one. Please make it happen. If there's a bug or problem down the road.. well, I'm confident it will be dealt with properly.

[Explodicle]

One could create an alt coin that recognizes the Bitcoin rules and history until a specified time, then the changes activate and the coins part ways. If miners are selfish and split kinda evenly on the issue, they might even be merge mined. You would find yourself owning coins in both chains with the same private key. Hate the new fork? Sell them and reclaim however much value your Bitcoins had prior to the split.

Hopefully such a great schism would attract enough attention from users to prevent anyone from accidentally discarding a key that has coins in the new fork.

Bitcoin is ALREADY fork friendly.

[casascius]

Bitcoin is ALREADY fork friendly.

As much as I hate to say it (I'm promoting a fork), Bitcoin is not fork friendly, for the exact reason Gavin said: when you fork, all the coins in existence can be spent twice, one in each leg of the fork, and everyone on the minor leg of the fork is poised to become a victim.  That's a major problem, you simply can't have that.

The only reason I propose that my fork plan has a chance is because I've rigged it so the leg that's destined to be the old (minor) leg has a way to detect spends on the new leg, an idea that I don't think has ever been seriously considered by the developers before.  Were I Gavin, I would want days at a minimum to wait for inspiration on how such a scheme is could fail or be attacked before even considering acknowledging the idea had merit.

[giszmo]

Pick a BIP and let's roll.

Good idea! Should we flip a coin?

[cunicula]

No, a forking of the chain would lead to dilution and confusion and nothing good will come of that.

You never want to hear someone utter "Do you accept my bitcoins?  Oh, no, you accept the OTHER bitcoins?  Dang..."

This is not so simplistic a matter. There is a major cost to forking (wasted effort on the inferior fork, potential increase in user uncertainty).

Nevertheless, if the benefit associated with picking the best answer instead of the second best answer is sufficiently large, and if there is sufficient uncertainty about which proposal is the best answer, then it will be optimal to fork. Otherwise, it is not optimal.

Here it seems clear that there is major uncertainty about what the best choice is. It is not clear that there are major benefits from making the best choice.

 

[cbeast]

Pick a BIP and let's roll.

Good idea! Should we flip a coin?

You can if you want to, but the client I will use is the one chosen by Gavin and his association of developers.

[fivemileshigh]

It's become painfully obvious to me that at least 99% of btc users are not qualified to offer a valuable opinion on BIP16/17. I do however have one piece of advice, it goes something like this:

I work in an industry with high stakes (lives) and fundamentally constant risk management, and there's one simple rule.

Suppose I have to make a decision between option A and B.

A is generally safer but more costly.

B is generally riskier but more efficient.

It's not feasible to always choose A because we'd go bankrupt. We can't always choose B because literally, people would die. We have to weigh the pros and cons and decide. We use knowledge and experience to make that decision. Most of the time the choice is obvious, either A is required because the overall risk factors are high, or B is preferred because all the risks are known, accounted for and considered well within the system's ability to cope.

Sometimes it's not so clear cut. When in doubt, we always choose A.

What does this mean to Gavin, Luke et all? Basically, since there's such a divide between the 2 of you, the safest option should prevail. The integrity and safety of bitcoin must NEVER be compromised. Bitcoin is the world's first and only free (as in liberty) money, for the sake of our futures please do not blow it.

[Luke-Jr]

BIP 16 is risky because it modifies a lot of code unrelated to P2SH.

BIP 17 is risky because it exposes part of the current system that we don't currently use regularly.

Neither are perfect. I prefer BIP 17 because it mostly leaves the current system alone, and can't introduce new problems.

[fivemileshigh]

BIP 16 is risky because it modifies a lot of code unrelated to P2SH.

BIP 17 is risky because it exposes part of the current system that we don't currently use regularly.

Neither are perfect. I prefer BIP 17 because it mostly leaves the current system alone, and can't introduce new problems.

thanks for the clarification Luke, it helped me.

You guys are best qualified to evaluate both the size of the risks (i.e. potential extent of the damage) and the probability of them happening. If you can come up with such an evaluation and can get Gavin examine it and give his own eval (if he disagrees with yours) it might be a way forward to solve the dispute. When in doubt, safety first.

Best of luck man!

[kjj]

The safety analogy breaks down because people are dying right now while we debate over which of two airbag systems to install.  And the designers of both systems are in agreement that their own system is better and that the other guy's system is going to maybe cause a disaster in the future.  And everyone else is standing around offering their own opinions of highly variable quality about the good and bad points of both systems, most of which are valid to some extent because neither system is really perfect except maybe in the eyes of the designer.  Meanwhile, people are still dying...

[paraipan]

The safety analogy breaks down because people are dying right now while we debate over which of two airbag systems to install.  And the designers of both systems are in agreement that their own system is better and that the other guy's system is going to maybe cause a disaster in the future.  And everyone else is standing around offering their own opinions of highly variable quality about the good and bad points of both systems, most of which are valid to some extent because neither system is really perfect except maybe in the eyes of the designer.  Meanwhile, people are still dying...

...but if the right decision is made would die less of them.

[casascius]

The way I see it, Gavin's airbag comes with Gavin to support it.  Luke's airbag comes with Luke to support it.  And support is an important part of the equation.

Besides, I believe Gavin has already pretty much decided it's going to be BIP 16 and the vast majority of the community supports that.  So, absent a sudden community revolution, that's what it's going to be, particularly when we get signoff from the biggest pools.  It's not even up in the air anymore.

[Luke-Jr]

Besides, I believe Gavin has already pretty much decided it's going to be BIP 16 and the vast majority of the community supports that.

Gavin seems to be ignoring BIP 17 and forcing everyone to support BIP 16 as much as he can, but he is basically alone in actually opposing BIP 17 (not counting people who oppose both).

[Steve]

Besides, I believe Gavin has already pretty much decided it's going to be BIP 16 and the vast majority of the community supports that.

Gavin seems to be ignoring BIP 17 and forcing everyone to support BIP 16 as much as he can, but he is basically alone in actually opposing BIP 17 (not counting people who oppose both).

I'm not sure how you can say such a thing with a straight face.

In any case, one of the beautiful things about bitcoin is that the only thing stopping you from imposing your will on the people is the will of the people.  Get miners on board with BIP17 and that will be our future.

[oOoOo]

Besides, I believe Gavin has already pretty much decided it's going to be BIP 16 and the vast majority of the community supports that.

Gavin seems to be ignoring BIP 17 and forcing everyone to support BIP 16 as much as he can, but he is basically alone in actually opposing BIP 17 (not counting people who oppose both).

You should contact the mining pools and convince them of the superiority of your proposal, just the way Gavin did last week. That way all pools will have a chance to evaluate both based on merit.

If you can make a nice business-style Power Point presentation, or maybe a good youtube vid about all the pro's and con's of both proposals (but keep it professional!), maybe you can get them to support your side..?

You could, perhaps, also prepare a pre-compiled client for instant deployment, or maybe a simple step-by-step instruction of how to enable BIP 17 if you run a pool...
.

[Luke-Jr]

Get miners on board with BIP17 and that will be our future.

It's hard when Gavin makes it seem like I'm the only one who want BIP 17, so the other big pools take the chicken-and-egg position (we won't support it because nobody else does). slush was leaning toward supporting BIP 17, but apparently changed his mind after Gavin linked the still incomplete summary of developer positions implying it was an accurate representation.

If you can make a nice business-style Power Point presentation, or maybe a good youtube vid about all the pro's and con's of both proposals (but keep it professional!), maybe you can get them to support your side..?

I was considering making a video series on the proposals in layman's terms, but I simply haven't had time, nor am I really sure how I'd handle making the actual video (I suppose if it wasn't for the time issue, I could get together with someone else local involved in Bitcoin and have them record it...).

You could, perhaps, also prepare a pre-compiled client for instant deployment, or maybe a simple step-by-step instruction of how to enable BIP 17 if you run a pool...

I'm not aware of any pool running on pre-compiled binaries, but I'd be glad to provide assistance if any need it.