Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 12. (Read 378991 times)

Bitcoin should never be changed. It should remain as unchanged as gold.

Hard fork = altcoin.

Fork off already. I don't care 

It is very misleading claim that bitcoin users do not need to trust centralized authority, in fact every one uses bitcoin is trusting this centralized protocol originally designed by Satoshi: Every miners, nodes, exchanges, merchants, users, no exception

You can use what ever alt-coin you like, but those coins do not have any meaningful value, because they are inflation in cryptocurrency world. In order to have limited total money supply, you can not have more than one coin, otherwise there will just be endless inflation in the name of fork freedom, what is the purpose for anyone participating in such endless money printing game?

And the analogy of Zimbabwe dollar vs US dollar is wrong, since they are two different economy. Now we are talking about increase the money supply in existing ecosystem, equal to double the amount of USD in US.  It is not another alt-coin,  because all the pre-fork coins can be spent on both chains, thus a double of the existing coin supply overnight, but you can not double the economy overnight, so the result is a total crash of the whole monetary system or one of the fork die immediately

Regarding the governance of the protocol, I think it is not very difficult to reach a consensus if it is a simple fact and everyone understand it. However if you go the radical or complex route, then your fork will just become orphaned

You can look at Litecoin, having a different hash mechanism and higher block rate, theoretical higher transaction capacity, why it is still minimum in market capital? Because it is inflation in cryptocurrency world

You are wrong, first of all when Bitcoin splits it does not increase the supply of Bitcoin, that remains the same, they just become two separate currencies. In the same way that the Zimbabwe dollar does not make the US dollar more inflationary, and altcoins do not make Bitcoin more inflationary.

Such a fork can only really take place when there is a fundamental disagreement, I am not sure what you are even suggesting as an alternative, the tyranny of consensus? I even expect Bitcoin to split, if not over this blocksize debate then it will be over something else in the future, I see this as being of political necessity.

If you truly believe that Bitcoin would be broken when there is a split then you should probably leave now, even a minority could bring about a hard fork and a split and there is nothing anyone could do to stop it. According to your own logic Bitcoin is therefore already broken.

It is also wrong that you say that people are forced without their consent, this process of hard forking is exactly what allows Bitcoin to remain voluntary and consensual even when developers make controversial changes, people can choose not to adopt these changes, or conversely introduce changes that the "reference client" refuses to merge. It is this mechanism that ensures the continued decentralization and freedom of the protocol, it protects against the tyranny of the majority and minority, it protects our right to self determination. If it was not for the ability to hard fork and split I would not even be interested in Bitcoin, since for me it is this that solves certain critical governance issues.

The ability to hard fork is the very mechanism that is meant to keep any development team in check. If you think that hard forks and the possibility of splitting are the equivalent to mutually assured destruction, then you basically end up with centralized technocratic control over the protocol by Core. What I am suggesting is decentralized governance of the protocol through proof of work, the ability to hard fork is critical in this conception.

One of the things that I always loved about Bitcoin is the concept of "trust" without centralized authority, and that Bitcoin is freedom. If what you are suggesting is true then Bitcoin would no longer represent these things, fortunately I do not think that you are correct and I am confident that the original vision of Satoshi will triumph.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6306

There are several reasons that makes a hard fork without super majority (e.g. two parallel chains) dangerous


1. It broke the promise of limited total money supply
After each fork, the amount of total bitcoin in the whole ecosystem almost doubled. This is even worse than FED, they never double the money supply in a single day! So people will find out that no matter whatever reason, this bunch of developers are not any more trustworthy than central bankers, they better return to their fiat money and forget about bitcoin altogether


2. Suddenly increased money supply will destroy the long term perspective of bitcoin
Once forked, you have hyperinflation, the promise of long term deflation is broken, the coin value start to drop long term wise, and there is no hope it will pick up again: Who knows some day these guys will bring another fork and double the amount of money supply again?

3. It broke the promise of trustless network
Now people will understand, by forcing a fork without other's consent, you can change any rule in the current system, including the money supply schedule, network communication protocol, or even who can spend your coin. The fate of your bitcoin barely lies in the hands of a few developers, you have to trust them and worship them not ruin the whole thing

Basically a controversial hard fork destroy the trust in bitcoin and then no one will be interested in it any more

And just because of this, anyone who understand a little bit more about bitcoin will strongly against it. So they will prevent the hyper inflation by instantly sell the weaker fork into alt-coin level value and once that coin's value has crashed, miners will immediately leave it due to the loss of mining worthless coins, it will end pretty quick


Jeff supports a hard fork with super majority, I think 2MB is the easiest to reach, or at least everyone can live with (1MB is currently the super majority)

I would not bet on the outcome of such a fork, and I would not be so sure of the outcome either. Having prediction markets for this type of thing is interesting though. I would be happy as long as either side can have the Bitcoin they want regardless of the support that they gain. I do not see any reason why two chains with the same genesis block can not live side by side in peace.

Jeff Garzik does actually support hard forking in order to increase the blocksize, he has also even recently spoken out against Core pointing out some of the same grievances we have. I would recommend that everyone reads this:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html

Lauda, when you firm up your opinion on Bitcoin Unlimited please post. theZerg (Andrew Stone) seems to be running the project and forum with help from several others. In particular Peter Rizun from Ledger. A list of other members is here. It seems to be an interesting experiment but still early days.

This is also why Jeff Garzik call a hard fork an extinction level event

Recently I noticed another post https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3t4kbk/forkology_301_the_three_tiers_of_investor_control/

It says that investors can already bet on the fail of one fork by sign a future contract to sell one coin for another coin at a certain exchange rate before the fork (for example, one contract is based on the sell of 1000 XT coins for 1000 core coins, and the actual execution rate might be 500, so that you get only 500 core coins for 1000 XT coins due to too many XT sell order than buy order). Thus the fate of that fork is more or less already decided even before the fork, to make sure those sure losers giving up the idea of fork (When you know for sure that your fork will die, would you still do that?)

We have a rough website up.  You could start by reading this:

http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/articlesOfFederation

Yes, it is a fork of Core.  And yes the pulls are publicly traceable.  There is a link to the GitHub repo on the download page:

http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/software

And here is a description of the changes that were made to Core (there's only been one BUIP so far):

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip001-unlimited-inspired-extensions-to-the-bitcoin-client.222/

BU is quite possibly the most retarded idea ever and might challenge XT as the worst alt coins of all time.

If this is truly the case and we are talking about chains splitting because of votes, then BU is worse than XT. Then I'm also starting to grasp the idea behind BU. The question is who hired the supporters?

BU is intriguing. Where do I learn more? Is the client a fork of Bitcoin Core? Are all pulls publicly traceable?

Because those who dont allow such huge blocks in their client simply contine on the chain with their choosen maximum blocksize. Although there may be many compelling chains with diferent maximum blocksizes, it doesnt make much sence to using the one what has little support.

At least this is how I understand it, and it is step from today central planning to more freedoom for everyone with the associated responsibility - if you choose wrong blocksize value, you might not be using the chain most Bitcoiners are on.

You are saying that a hard fork is mutually assured destruction? That is hyperbole, the ability to hard fork and split is what ensures the continued freedom of the protocol. If I believed what you did I would instantly leave Bitcoin because I would realize that it was doomed, fortunately I have a different understanding of how this works.

Nice video, finally someone has clearly put this topic on table: If a negotiation failed, then who had the most power will decide. He did not include the exchanges, and also he did not follow the route and dig further into the failed negotiation scenario. Saying everyone have the same power is definitely wrong

Let's analyze each actor's ability to attack another fork and defense against such attack

1. Developers
IMO, developers' can attack a forked chain use spams and special transactions, they can not do too much on a fork's code base that is not in their control. They can defend against a technical attack by committing new rules to deal with spams and false transactions. It is just like virus and anti-virus, a never ending fight but seldom affect the major functionality of a coin

Attack: 2
Defense: 10

2. Miners
Miners hold hash power, a weak chain with less hash power will be easily 51% attacked by the stronger hash power

However, a 51% attack does not affect the bitcoins in cold storage, it will just disturb the transactions in networks, and while those power are used on attacking, the attacking chain will become weaker, so this kind of fight might not be so effective to totally disable another chain

Attack: 5
Defense: 5


3. Exchanges
Exchanges are important, because they can affect the exchange rate to a degree. To be honest, most of the bitcoin's early success is ensured by MTGOX, it had the power to stablize and raise the exchange rate of bitcoin thus quickly gathered lots of fans

If majority of exchanges do not upgrade to the forked version, then that version will never gain any user support (buying expensive ASICs to mine some coin that has nowhere to sell for fiat money?). If only a few exchanges upgraded to a specific version, then the low liquidity there combined with the dump of pre-fork coins from other chains will make its exchange rate quickly drop to alt-coin level

In principle, an exchange can either create bitcoin or fiat money out of thin air, and even stop large withdraw to slowdown the market reaction, thus have certain ability to manipulate the exchange rate against a sell off short term wise. I'm not sure if an exchange will provide the trading for another forked coin, since that gives them chance to crash the exchange rate of that coin, maybe they will do that to show that forked coin is destined to fail

Attack: 10
Defense: 10


4. Investors
Investors are those who hold lots of bitcoins either through mining or through purchasing. Because over 90% of the coins are in the hands of investors, they have the biggest influence of the ecosystem. By dumping their pre-fork coins on the chain that they don't like, they will immediately create a sell pressure hundreds of times larger than average day, thus crash that coin's exchange rate to 0 in a very short time

However, when facing large amount of sell-off from opponents, unless they are super rich in fiat money, they can not defense a sell-off that is hundreds of time larger than normal, so their ability to defense against such attack is limited

You can imagine, if you are an investor holding 7 billion dollars fiat to make sure all the dumps from opponent's fork will be absorbed, the chain that you support will go mainstream. In fact you don't need that much at all, 3 billion is enough, but I guess none of the bitcoiners here have that much capital

Attack: 100
Defense: 5

5. Merchants and payment processors
Since merchant adoption and payment function require world wide transaction, they have to passively follow the strongest chain, they will not use a chain that has lower exchange rate or without super majority, and they won't support fork

Attack: 0
Defense: 0


Many early adopters are both developers, miners and investors, this makes the whole picture very complicated. But anyway, when a negotiation failed, it is not likely we will have a fork, since the power of an exchange rate attack is so huge and the defense is almost none, it is a mutually assured destruction, heavily hurt both chains and the bitcoin game is over

U guise. While we've been going back and forth I just realized that hdbuck has it already figured out.

Thank you, I know that.

My question is still unanswered. How can the 'economic majority' (whatever this is supposed to be) prevent a huge block size that most of the miners and nodes are voting in favor of?

My assumption is correct. I'm glad that it is possible to agree on something. However, it is quite hard to view it differently. To become an engineer one has to change how they think, at some point there is no return.

This is somewhat true. However, I do not see the need for the average user (not saying that you're one) to know exactly what is what and how what works. 99% people have no idea how fiat nor CC's work either.

There's nothing wrong with that; anyone claiming censorship or similar (possibly worse) is a ignorant idiot.

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Some corrections to the post; probably more needed.

bubye goldman sachs coinbase https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

Support for XT was rising too, until people realized it's really a piece of turd.

What we can derive from this is that BU's got something coming its way since it's an even worst proposition.

Oh well.. I guess you people will figure it out eventually