Fork off

[Anduck]

This text, as I see it, has a lot errors. Poor.

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[Stephen Gornick]

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two sides look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

[newIndia]

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the risk themselves and begin to dump them at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged blockchain gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork which had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two chains look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

I have a few Qs...

1. Even If all miners accept the fork, can it sustain unless majority of nodes do not update themselves ?

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

[QuestionAuthority]

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two chains look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

I was thinking more about the opposite direction. For the sake of argument let's say MP owns all of the unknown hash rate and 35% of the known. He has no intention of upgrading and there ends up being two legitimate bitcoin chains. What do you suppose the outcome of that would be? A lot of money lost I'm sure. Just as Slush and eleuthria lost money during the .7 to .8 upgrade someone else would too. But that was fixed quickly by the dev team in a rather frenzied session of downgrading and damage control. What would happen if half of the current mining power decided not to cooperate?

[Stephen Gornick]

I have a few Qs...

1. Even If all miners accept the fork, can it sustain unless majority of nodes do not update themselves ?

On the technical side, you only need enough nodes using the software that implements the hard-fork to ensure that post-fork blocks get propagated.  But even if *nearly* all miners accept the fork, even if you only had something like 10% still hashing without the changes implemented you'ld still get a block every two hours -- frequently enough to include most high-value and high-fee transactions.   [Edit: (i.e., sustainable for anyone using a node without the hard-fork changes).]

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

[danielpbarron]

I have a few Qs...

1. Even If all miners accept the fork, can it sustain unless majority of nodes do not update themselves ?

On the technical side, you only need enough nodes using the software that implements the hard-fork to ensure that post-fork blocks get propagated.  But even if *nearly* all miners accept the fork, even if you only had something like 10% still hashing without the changes implemented you'ld still get a block every two hours -- frequently enough to include most high-value and high-fee transactions.

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

Here's another way to go about it:

It should be possible to create two transactions that each spend the same output, each into different addresses, and broadcast one to each of the two chains. Then you can safely deposit your real bitcoin into MPEx or some other sane service provider, and send your gavincoins into whatever exchange is stupid enough to honor them. Here's the really neat part: you could then withdraw the "bitcoin" and see if the exchange foolishly sends your funds from an output that hasn't been pre-split. If they did, split the real bitcoin out, rinse, and repeat.

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two chains look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

I was thinking more about the opposite direction. For the sake of argument let's say MP owns all of the unknown hash rate and 35% of the known. He has no intention of upgrading and there ends up being two legitimate bitcoin chains. What do you suppose the outcome of that would be? A lot of money lost I'm sure. Just as Slush and eleuthria lost money during the .7 to .8 upgrade someone else would too. But that was fixed quickly by the dev team in a rather frenzied session of downgrading and damage control. What would happen if half of the current mining power decided not to cooperate?

If the fork actually happens, this is gonna get settled the way most things usually do. Through betting. If you're not the betting type, just make sure you have the private keys to your funds, and don't spend them until the dust settles. If you are the betting type, split your coins; sell one, buy the other.

[Flashman]

I have a few Qs...

1. Even If all miners accept the fork, can it sustain unless majority of nodes do not update themselves ?

On the technical side, you only need enough nodes using the software that implements the hard-fork to ensure that post-fork blocks get propagated.  But even if *nearly* all miners accept the fork, even if you only had something like 10% still hashing without the changes implemented you'ld still get a block every two hours -- frequently enough to include most high-value and high-fee transactions.

Nice, then everyone is happy, bitcoin remains useful, MPCoin is for 1,000 MPCoin txes with insanely high fees.

[GermanGiant]

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

Looks like the after fork situation is like a mining war

[cbeast]

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

Looks like the after fork situation is like a mining war

Devs, Miners, Traders: they are the three branches of Bitcoin Government. They check and balance each other. Traders and miners have ruled too long. Their power is waning. It's time for devs to bring hope and change to the Bitcoin community. Then we can come back stronger.

[brg444]

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

Looks like the after fork situation is like a mining war

Devs, Miners, Traders: they are the three branches of Bitcoin Government. They check and balance each other. Traders and miners have ruled too long. Their power is waning. It's time for devs to bring hope and change to the Bitcoin community. Then we can come back stronger.

Have you looked at the hash rate chart lately... I don't see the miners conceding any power.

[tvbcof]

Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.

And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.

The Economic Majority is who the miners work for: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.

Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay).    If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead.   So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases.  That immediately kills fungibility.  The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount.  Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball.  The writing is then on the wall.  Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.

Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two sides look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize.  I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.

I'm not sure I go along with this thesis which strikes me as a little simplistic in this day and age.

Firstly it assumes that miners are driven to much by economics and to little by politics than is probably true.  I'm sure that most of the miners who count these days have every likelihoods of looking out days or weeks into the future and taking a monetary hit for a future enduring reward.  That is, keeping the system operating in a way which benefits them...whatever that might be.  But wait, there's more...

For a long time now it has occurred to me that sitting on a pile of BTC is a very good proxy for mining, and that is even more the case if miners cannot see more than a few feet in front of them.  It would be trivial for someone with BTC to simply buy the coinbase for 100-on-the-dollar (so to speak) and eliminate the risk to a miner of mining the wrong chain.  Many of whales got involved at about the time when a days worth of mining (at the 50 BTC coinbase) cost an average coder two weeks of wages or less, so it is pretty certain that there are people with the resources to keep an arbitrary chain going for some time.

Thirdly, I would be highly surprised not to see some entities having bizarre network, power, and legal problems at an inopportune time should a war break out at this phase of the game.  Bitcoin has enough potential at this point that various tangential actors (state, corporate, etc) might have a significant interest in the outcome.  Just a guess on my part.

[cbeast]

2. If all miners do not accept the fork, then there will probably be 2 blockchains for some time. At that period of time, wont all coins be spendable twice on 2 different chain ?

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.    I personallly will not have a single millibit remaining on any exchange or e-wallet at the time of the fork if there is any hint of dissent like this.  I will only accept payment transactions that confirm on both sides, ... which can only happen if the transaction had no UTXOs tainted with post-fork coinbases.   Maybe after a week or two and there's essentially nobody remaining mining the original side of the fork will I be willing to accept post-fork coins.

Looks like the after fork situation is like a mining war

Devs, Miners, Traders: they are the three branches of Bitcoin Government. They check and balance each other. Traders and miners have ruled too long. Their power is waning. It's time for devs to bring hope and change to the Bitcoin community. Then we can come back stronger.

Have you looked at the hash rate chart lately... I don't see the miners conceding any power.

Hash rate is declining, but sales and development of mining equipment is falling faster. There is a lag, but the loss of investment in new equipment leads to mining consolidation. Hash rate is declining and will continue to do so with falling price due to traders. Any political posturing by miners is an empty threat because they only hurt themselves. New development will bring the long term traders back along with new mining competition and decentralization.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.  

If you are on one fork then you wouldn't even see txns using coninbase inputs from the other fork.   Your fork would simply see the txns as invalid no different then if someone right now made up a bogus input (or a coinbase with 100,000 BTC reward) and tried to send you imaginary bitcoins.  Invalid is invalid.

[Flashman]

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.   

If you are on one fork then you wouldn't even see txns using coninbase inputs from the other fork.   Your fork would simply see the txns as invalid no different then if someone right now made upa bogus input and tried to send you imaginary bitcoins.

Shhh, MP thinks different LOL

[cr1776]

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.   

If you are on one fork then you wouldn't even see txns using coninbase inputs from the other fork.   Your fork would simply see the txns as invalid no different then if someone right now made upa bogus input and tried to send you imaginary bitcoins.

Shhh, MP thinks different LOL

It is somewhat humorous that he doesn't understand that.

[oblivi]

The debate is getting pretty headed about the fork.. I thought we would be able to achieve a consensus for Bitcoin's sake.

[tvbcof]

Yes, that's why it will be so dangerous to accept payments from anyone that includes coins tainted with post-fork coinbases.  

If you are on one fork then you wouldn't even see txns using coninbase inputs from the other fork.   Your fork would simply see the txns as invalid no different then if someone right now made up a bogus input (or a coinbase with 100,000 BTC reward) and tried to send you imaginary bitcoins.  Invalid is invalid.

My read of Gornick's sentence is that tainting would happen on a particular chain.  That is to say, and transaction containing a coinbase input or derivative thereof (post-fork) on the same chain would be considered 'tainted' (and destroy fungibility _on that chain_.)

[flyup]

We've already handled a fork years ago... when changing database cores.

It's no big deal.

[QuestionAuthority]

We've already handled a fork years ago... when changing database cores.

It's no big deal.

Yeah, it's no big deal. Until they send Pieter Wuille to make a thread telling us all what went wrong. lol

[johnyj]

It will not be as easy as it looks like, especially now when the hashing power is much more distributed between different pools and farms. But we will first see what kind of consequence a fixed 1MB block size will bring when transactions pass 4000 per block

If the system works bad without larger block size (many transactions will get queued forever due to more and more transactions entering the queue), the first reaction from pools and farms will be reducing the payout transaction frequency, for example from 3 transactions per day to 1 large transaction per day. This will give the effect that equals to raising the block size by 3 times, and should be good for another couple of years. Merchants still need to process the transactions from buyers (They could use "Refill your bitcoin reserve and spend later" type of practice to reduce the real transactions happened on chain every day, but for consumer this is not convenient, unless there is a bonus for that reserve, and merchant becomes banks: Risk)

At mean time, the number of users will likely to increase at a speed of 2X per year, so the reducing of trade frequency can only delay the problem a little bit, not a permanent solution

My guess is that the 1MB block size limit will not be raised until 1GB bandwidth and 10TB hard drive has become the norm in average home