Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 211. (Read 378997 times)

And those who think they can wait forever are delusional. Time = money, you are about to experience it the hard way.

+1

I'm really trying to keep an open mind here, and debate this honestly. But that is just laughable. The idea basically guarantees that bitcoin will be broken into competing blockchains in the future.

This is not the last controversy bitcoin will have. It is not the last hard fork bitcoin will have. Those who think we can solve all of tomorrow's technical problems today are simply naive.

I am out of mind while you are delusional 

Did I read that right? We should lower consensus threshold as Bitcoin grows so as to make it more easy to achieve consensus!?!

You're out of your mind 

I did say "or so"

Can't be bothered to run the numbers, but the point is that it is possible to trigger hard fork with significantly less than 75% hashing power.

One correction here: it's nearly impossible to trigger it with 50% hashpower. But there's one uncertainty: NotXT.
I can even imagine an attack vector here, arising from the fact that the hard fork can't resolve itself: if the 1Mb chain has more hashpower (even 50-50 would work due to variance), it will orphan XT blocks, while it doesn't work the other way. So, XT miners would be wasting their  hashes unless they mine sub-1Mb blocks.

That's a theoretical attack, but in case of a significant ideological split because of XT it certainly can happen.

BIP66 is a good example of how and why this works well.

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34199290/


Hard forks are not supposed to be easy to carry out. That is intentional.

Consensus is far more important than pushing forward with controversial changes to the protocol that a large proportion of the community does not support. Competing blockchains become a legitimate concern in this context.

That's a dicey situation. Consider that the hard fork is triggered with 50% or so of the hashing power only, with a lucky run to momentarily hit 75%. There may be an immediate push to mine on the chain that is supported by exchanges, but a) can we assume that all exchanges will support the same fork? and b) is this enough to tip the balance towards one chain or the other?

Consider that that some miners are playing the long game -- not concerned with the immediate ramifications of mining on a smaller 1MB block chain if they believe that the 8MB chain will inevitably be invalid. Consider that some miners will be politically motivated towards one chain or the other, regardless of economic incentives (this cannot be ruled out, especially considering that miners still have very high profit margins).

Consider that in a 70-30 or 60-40 or 50-50 split, it may not be immediately clear which chain will win. By splitting hash power to two (or hypothetically more) chains, the relative hashing power of each miner increases (and therefore, so does their incentive to keep mining on the same chain as they have been, post-fork).

There are game theory considerations here. And there is no such thing as a 100% sure thing as an economic incentive as guarantee of consensus -- particularly when you use lower and lower thresholds to trigger the hard fork. How do you feel about using 51% hash power as a trigger for a hard fork? Why or why not?

There are many ways in which economic incentives are inefficient. Consider the blockchain stress test. There are disincentives in place to discourage such spam, but here we are. In fact, that's another consideration as to why it's so dangerous to allow for exponential capacity growth, particularly when it is not tied to actual real transaction growth. There may be incentives that arise in the future for bloating the blockchain, and yet we would continue to scale until forced by circumstance (mass orphaned blocks, successful double spend attacks, etc.) to soft fork the limit back down.

Are you talking about achieving consensus pre-fork or post-fork? If it's the former, I don't see how XT can get any meaningful consensus, except by pushing it with force, and then real consensus can only be reached post-fork. If it's the latter, it perfectly fits my point.

Litecoin and any other altcoin is a bitcoin fork. See? it can work out

Thing is 75% of miners is not the same as 75% of bitcoiners, and im not even talking 95% of them.. ^^

If the big miners want to play that power grabbing game, they'll loose quite a lot of money mining some cheap altcoin before eventually crawling back in the real game...  that is within the economic valid majority.

These numbers are a standard by according to who? The larger bitcoin grows, the more opposite views it will encounter and the less easy it would be to achieve consensus. Targeting a 95% is IMO too high and only guarantees to block any possible changes.

That's because you don't think the "economic incentive to achieve consensus" actually works as it should be. I think the opposite.

Actually, a fork could happen and consensus could not be achieved, which is one good reason why the 75% threshold is far too low. 95% is the standard. 75% is only half the hashing power with a lucky run. This is what people mean by two, or multiple chains. If consensus isn't achieved nearly immediately, we run a greater and greater risk of having competing chains.

The fork can happen whenever there's a divergence in consensus.

Yeah, that is why the two most notorious pseudo-libertarians started their own Altcoin. Yet parts of their worshippers seem to sense that they are on a lost path, so they still hang around in the main Bitcoin forums instead of relocating to the Hearndresencoin-headquarters or at least use the kindly provided Altcoin section of this forum.

Open Competition will always have a future in an open environment. The censors and the followers on their slime trail will be the losers, since Bitcoin is not a currency for pseudo-libertarians.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12305293

No. Because the fork can't happened without a consensus either ways.

saying "Forking Bitcoin is not a attack on Bitcoin" is an attack on consensus.

Forking Bitcoin is not a attack on Bitcoin.