Topic: A Core Defense Strategy (Read 1427 times)

Why would you actively work to divide the community? If the majority supports XT, why continue to fight the majority? Regardless of your views, one cannot argue that the wrong blocksize is more detrimental to Bitcoin than dividing the community. I dont understand how one can believe such stubbornness is beneficial to the network.

So, your solution to a forked blockchain is to fork it into three pieces instead of two?

XT will create a block that is bigger than CORE or CD will accept.
CD will create a block that is lower difficulty than CORE or XT will accept
CORE will create blocks that both XT and CD will accept as long as it can create the blocks faster than XT or CD.  If it can't create blocks fast enough, then its blocks will simply be orphaned and ignored on the faster systems.

You may be right about this. It's easy to imagine a future in which Coinbase is the norm, tracking coins and closing accounts. Whitelisting addresses associated with government identities and blacklisting those that are not. That may be what's required to go mainstream and XT may be a first move in that direction. All I can say is that I won't be a part of it, and I won't call it Bitcoin.

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg09971.html

The same is true with XT indeed but mainstream adoption of bitcoin have always been part of the plan. If you want a niche coin there are plenty of them out there. Big players that have invested millions in bitcoin related companies are on the side of mainstream adoption and XT has made the first move in that direction.  

>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.


Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of
freedom for several years.

Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled
networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be
holding their own. 

Satoshi

There are different markets that have different needs. If the intended market is mainstream online payments, PayPal and Visa already serve this market quite well.

I don't see why defend Core if Core XT better serves the needs of the market. Can you enlighten me?

Someone?

I don't see why defend Core if Core XT better serves the needs of the market. Can you enlighten me?

Someone?

In case you missed it   Hearn's Bitcoin XT is out. If it gets 75% of the hashing power, it will fork away from the Core chain. Part of their argument is that if this happens, everyone who is against XT will surrender and abandon the Core chain.

In June I posted a topic analyzing the possibilities for the Core chain to continue with a minority of the hashing power:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/optimal-hard-fork-survival-strategies-1097608
tldr: It's doable, but difficult.

An interesting counteroffensive is "Not XT":
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/not-bitcoin-xt-1154520
It's a client that pretends to be for the fork when it actually isn't. The idea is that when the fork happens, the XT fork will actually have less than 75% hashing power. Presumably Core would have enough hashing power to survive, and possibly even enough to outrun the XT chain.

The "Not XT" fork gave me another idea for a counteroffensive. There could be a "Core Defense" fork. I'll call it Bitcoin CD, or just CD. This fork would not vote for XT, but would keep up with the votes for XT. If the 75% threshold is met, CD will respond by dropping the difficulty by a large amount (perhaps after or during the 2 week XT grace period). For example, there could be a one time difficulty drop so that the CD chain could easily continue with only 5% of the hashing power.

If such a Bitcoin-CD fork were created and deployed, then it changes the dynamic of the votes for XT. Right now people are voting for XT under the assumption that it will kill the Core chain. If CD got even a very small percentage of mining support, it would make it clear that if XT reaches 75%, then there will definitely be at least two chains. Most people agree that if more than one chain survives it will be a bad situation. This might incentivize miners not to help XT reach 75% in the first place.

(I don't think XT will reach 75% of hashing power anyway, but thought I'd share the Bitcoin-CD idea.)

Why would you actively work to divide the community? If the majority supports XT, why continue to fight the majority? Regardless of your views, one cannot argue that the wrong blocksize is more detrimental to Bitcoin than dividing the community. I dont understand how one can believe such stubbornness is beneficial to the network.