Bitcoin XT 0.11A

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010235.html

by Andrew_Quentin • 11 years ago

60 57 11 years ago

lists.linuxfoundation.org

r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic), so thought maybe you hackers can have a discussion about the upcoming bitcoin fork in regards to the blocksize. Some suggest that bitcoin blocks should remain at 1mb, which currently covers around 200k transactions, a limit that is close to being reached. The vast majority seem to want an increase on this capacity for pretty much obvious reasons. However, some relatively newcomer bitcoin developers argue that increasing it will affect decentralisation, and everyone should use a hubs and spoke system instead. Others argue that as the number of users increases, the number of the blockchain applications increase, the number of nodes and miners increases, thus decentralisation increases. In regards to lightning it is still vapourwear, it requires hot wallets - something which has caused many problems - the hubs are likely to be centralised - and fundamentally users should have a choice. So yeah looks like bitcoin will fork.

gruez• 11 years ago

r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic)

As in, actual censorship about all blocksize discussion, or just about XT?

jamoes• 11 years ago

The #1 story was removed by the moderators. It was an article by Mike Hearn about why he's moving forward with the Bitcoin XT hard fork. [1]

The justification for the removal is that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin, and altcoin discussion is not allowed. [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...

mastermojo• 11 years ago

Can someone explain what is means for bitcoin to be forked?

0x0• 11 years ago

you're fucked, sell your BTC, sell your house

pmorici2• 11 years ago

In some ways it is like an alt coin. The difference between a 'fork' and a alt coin like litecoin for example is that the 'fork' shares the same genesis block and transaction history as the original up until the point of the 'fork'.

Practically speaking if you own Bitcoin prior to the fork I believe it means you will then be able to use your coins on both post 'fork' versions. Once the fork happens you will have to decide which version you want to transact on when you receive new coins.

It remains to be seen which version will survive, or if perhaps both versions will.

toomim9• 11 years ago

Bitcoin, like all monies, is a social protocol. We agree that a coin has value if it follows certain rules.

Some people want to change the rules. But some other people don't want them changed. So now we have two sets of people, the Changers (XT) and the Don't-Changers (Core) who will be following different sets of rules.

So their softwares won't play together in places their rules disagree. This will create a "fork" in the ledger histories. If your coins existed before the fork, everyone will see them. But if you transact them in a way that's incompatible with one set of rules, the transaction will only exist on one side of the fork.

So the public will then have to choose which side of the fork to live on. They will probably want to live on the dominant side. Then the losing side will give up and switch!

Bitcoin-XT actually has a few built-in mechanisms to make this transition graceful. It will only deploy the incompatible rules once it has a 75% majority vote, and is thus confident of success.

therealidiot• 11 years ago

Some of the messages on the mailing list started to feel a little personal

dang• 11 years ago

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746, but it's hard to know whether that one is factual. Since the two threads are closely related, this seems like the one to go with. (This is not based on any opinion about the story itself.)

agorabinary• 11 years ago

I thought gavin and most of the established bitcoin devs were in favor of increasing the blocksize.. so why is this "lightning" system no one has heard about suddenly the new plan for bitcoin core? Whose clout is pushing this through? I was aware of argument about the 1MB limit but I thought the voices in favor of increasing it far outweighed those against.

pmorici2• 11 years ago

I don't think there is any disagreement that the block size will be increased by some amount at some point. It seems to me the major disagreement is by how much and how fast to increase it.

Mike Hearn who seems to be the strongest proponent of the XT 'we need larger blocks asap' philosophy and the person who wrote the blog post referenced in the OP is _not_ a core dev as far as I can tell.

I've seen comments to the effect that he has repeatedly tried to gain more influence in Bitcoins direction over several years and some people posit that this is him attempting to do more of the same by forking and taking the majority with him leaving him with a lot more power over 'new' XT core's development. Hard to say how much if any truth there is to that. The things Mike says make a lot of sense to me.

flarex• 11 years ago

Gavin Andresen, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin project is also very outspoken about the need to remove the block size limit kludge that was originally put in by Satoshi. You can read his series of blog posts outlining the arguments here: http://gavinandresen.ninja

If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.

Natanael_L2• 11 years ago

Lightning Network is a system that merges a collection of transactions over so called payment channels to an LN hub into one on-chain transaction. It is designed to add as few trust requirements as possible vs using standard transactions (a multisignature model is used with the hub to prevent any possibility of direct theft, as one example of a security mechanism).

The idea is that your wallet commits a number of coins to a payment channel at one hub, and then payments to and from other LN users are routed along payment channels across hubs. This means less blockchain bloat, faster verification (you trust the hub to not sign conflicting transactions, because doing so is proud of fraud valid in court and kills their reputation in 5 seconds) and cheap transactions.

It still needs larger blocks, because adding funds to payment channels and taking funds out of then requires on-chain transactions. With millions of users, 1MB isn't enough.

javert• 11 years ago

This is quite helpful, but it does not answer the question of why they don't switch to larger blocks now if most of the devs are in favor of it.

You also have to get the users to switch, in particular miners and exchanges, so therein may lie part of the answer. But I suspect those people will generally follow what the devs recommend. I thought some of the big Chinese miners had said they would accept switching to 8MB blocks. So why hasn't the switch been made?

Andrew_Quentin4• 11 years ago

Two developers, nullc and pieter are against increasing the blocksize at a reasonable rate. Gavin, Jeff Garzik and Mike Hearn wish to increase it by early next year. Following some three months of debate, an agreement could not be reached, so Gavin and Mike are forking Bitcoin to the new Bitcoin XT. The vast majority of users, businesses and miners support Gavin and his bigger blocks, but blockstream, a relativley new for profit company which employs nullc aka Gregory Maxwell and Pieter as well as some other bitcoin devs and is developind lightning and sidechains which they offer as an alternative to increasing the blocksize has managed to stall this process, thus leading to a fork.

maaku10• 11 years ago

Two developers, nullc and pieter are against increasing the blocksize at a reasonable rate.

Careful, what is "reasonable" is what is at issue here. There are legitimate arguments being made on both sides.

toomim9• 11 years ago

It depends on how you define an "established" dev.

The majority of developers of wallets, for instance, are for the blocksize increase.

But the majority of bitcoin-core developers are against it. Gavin and Jeff are the only bitcoin-core committers in favor.

This is explained in Mike Hearn's blog post, as linked in his email on this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d64731...

STRML3• 11 years ago

That's not really true - Garzik has expressed support for a size increase, just more modest than Gavin and Jeff's. And the only other two committers are against both plans. That's hardly a "majority".

altcognito• 11 years ago

I do not understand bitcoin and the blockchain. Isn't your bitcoin tied up in the mathematics the blockchain? Will those who trade away their money on one blockchain be able to retain it on the other blockchain? Will they synchronize the ledger in some way?

Rusky• 11 years ago

The blockchain is distributed, so "other blockchains" are alternate currencies like Dogecoin.

DennisP• 11 years ago

If the chain forks, then in theory you have the same money on both chains, and could spend it differently in each.

In practice, this fork only happens if >75% of miners switch to the new software, and I suspect the whole community would quickly abandon the other fork.

wmf• 11 years ago

The XT developers could probably defend against the "decentralization" argument by implementing IBLT to speed block propagation and ultimate blockchain compression to reduce disk usage before increasing the block size. But that would probably take years and they don't have years, so never mind.

maaku10• 11 years ago

IBLT is basically already implemented and deployed as part of TheBlueMatt's relay network. Improvements to scaling isn't going to come from IBLT.

wfunction• 11 years ago

Seems like the blockchain is forking too...? What happens to everyone's bitcoins in the meantime? Wouldn't this practically destroy the system?

_wmd• 11 years ago

It's been some time since Bitcoin has given me reason to break out popcorn, the next few days should be quite fun to watch. :)

I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either.

While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.

maaku10• 11 years ago

Mike was never really involved in Bitcoin Core, and Gavin stepped down 2 years ago.

toomim9• 11 years ago

Make coined the name "Bitcoin Core".

Gavin is still a core developer. He stepped down from his Leadership position to become "just" a regular core developer.

(I know that Maaku knows this. Just clarifying for the crowd.)

oska• 11 years ago

Gavin stepped down 2 years ago

Gavin stepped down as lead developer on April 7, 2014. [1]

Most people would call that a year ago, or maybe one and a half years ago (rounding up from one year and four months). You purport to be “simply doing fact corrections” elsewhere in this thread. Misreporting basic periods of time does not jibe well with that assertion.

I would not normally be so pointed in my criticism but there is a strong disinformation and censorship campaign going on around this development fork. While that is happening you would do well to be very careful in what statements and ‘corrections’ you make.

[1] http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-steps-bitcoins-lead-d...

themgt2• 11 years ago

Best explanation of how this will work is on their site: "By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes. At that point a waiting period of two weeks begins to allow news of the new consensus to spread and allow anyone who hasn't upgraded yet to do so. During this time, existing Bitcoin Core nodes will be printing a message notifying the operators about the availability of an upgraded version.

If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants." https://bitcoinxt.software/

What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet".

I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it.

Interesting times.

hollerith2• 11 years ago

let users "vote with their feet"

Let's be precise: it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet.

maaku10• 11 years ago

Doesn't matter what miners do.

themgt2• 11 years ago

Right, good point, since it'd effectively be the hashrate making decisions, not "one user one vote", which is maybe not really workable in a standard blockchain system.

Natanael_L2• 11 years ago

They won't stick with changes that the majority rejects, because their mining reward would otherwise become worthless

toomim9• 11 years ago

If you're going to be precise, then it's not just the miners who vote, even though there is code that specifically looks at their vote.

It's also the payment processors, the wallets, and everyone else who connects to the network who needs to validate the larger blocks.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

So...I now have double the coins, but separated onto two chains?

STRML3• 11 years ago

You have the same number of coins, and will continue to until the point that a block is mined on the XT chain that would not be accepted by Core clients. The absolute earliest that could possibly happen is January 25 (Jan 11 activation date + 2 week grace period). But that 2wk grace period only actually activates after 75% of the hashing power globally moves to XT. So at the time XT actually forks, users will have had plenty of notice.

Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

I mean, the coins I hold now (or whatever the fork date is) can be spent on both the XT chain and the Core chain.

pilgrim689• 11 years ago

I may be wrong here but assuming you're broadcasting to both networks, your transaction is valid in both XT and Core so they'd both try to add it to a block.

The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.

Jaystone• 11 years ago

With the Bitcoin price on a steady downward spiral into oblivion, I'd have to say that the XT fork was a really stupid idea. Thanks for scaring all of the investors, you bunch of retards. Smooth move, X-Lax!!!

Bitcoin XT 0.11A

Related Stories