Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 216. (Read 378999 times)

And what is the point of keeping the blockchain so decentralized it is not even useful for no one? Who will run a node of a useless blockchain? If most transactions are driven off chain, will transaction fees will be enough to ensure strong enough security? I seriously doubt it.

Great insight on this point by Peter Todd:

https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/634808169978462208

I second this. IMO the more choices the market has, the better chance it has to make the right decision in a purely decentralised approach.

Carlton, I'm gonna take your advice here  

I think what VeritasSapere is getting at is that Bitcoin's greatest point of centralization is presently Development:




Solex made in interesting observation here:  Node count has actually increased with the release of Bitcoin-XT.  If we had even more competing clients to choose from, perhaps we would see a further increase in node count as people ran nodes to express the vote for the direction the protocol should take.  In my opinion this would be a very big positive because it could simultaneously increase node count AND decrease development centralization around Core. 

You're doing a good job arguing your points successfully, but I don't know whether engaging people who are happy to present such willfully dishonest arguments is genuinely productive in the long term. It suggests that these people and the arguments are worth addressing. Unfortunately the dishonest arguments cannot be separated from the others of a single participant, but we could separate those participants who use dishonest strategies from the debate. I don't address them.

That's not what I said at all. You're just setting up another straw man argument. People should have freedom to use whatever client they want. I'd love to see more competition in that sense, too. But it's our job as a community to root out bad implementations that encourage trust, and to discourage their use. That's our right and duty. You accusing me of having an "extremely centralizing point of view" for what amounts to critical thinking is laughable. What's happening here is continued use of populist arguments in response to legitimate criticism.

As a result of populist tactics, people overwhelmingly believe that the one alternative presented is the only option. But there isn't only one alternative (the 1MB status quo) -- that's just a populist straw man argument, used to rile people up in support of their proposal.

Yes, I support increasing the block limit size limit and I think there are more sensible implementations than BIP 101 -- including those that haven't been presented yet. I'm just not willing to opt in favor of the first and only option for a hard fork when I think it could lead to disastrous problems down the road. No one has the technical foresight to predict all the problems that could occur when scaling bitcoin 8000x. It could be simply disastrous for network security, and it's so insulting that people think we have all contingencies covered, today, six years into the bitcoin project.

I think this debate is being rushed and people feel forced into the only option they see. That's a mistake. There is less urgency than people are making it out to be. We won't be maxing out the limit on average for another year. Even if we had a fee market temporarily, it really wouldn't be the end of the world. That's far preferable IMO to rushing a contentious fork -- there are many different stakeholders to consider.

Now that the stress test put the question at the forefront of issues facing the community, I hope to see more discussion, more skepticism of the idea that there are only two options (1MB status quo or 8GB endgame) -- there are endless potential solutions, including more gradual ones that allow us more time to deal with the issues that will come with scaling over time. And you have the audacity to say that I therefore have an "extremely centralizing point of view?" Mischaracterization after mischaracterization. Straw man after straw man. Throw a buzz word in and you can't lose, right?


I am glad that you can agree that it is centralizing. However, since it depends on third party trust, it is by definition a trust-adding feature. If you were the only person running a standard XT node, that would still be true.

I'm glad you bring up "practice." That's exactly the thing. This is about theory, and defining bitcoin as trustless. There is a decentralized solution before you which offers no less network security -- nodes can deprioritize IPs that are maliciously attacking them without any centralized list. I don't understand why this is a question at all.


Distrusting XT or BIP 101 =/= trusting the Core development team. That's another blatant mischaracterization that keeps being throw around. Please keep the discussion honest.


Yeah, someone posted the perfect retort to that:


Indeed, like simply having nodes deprioritize IPs that are actively attacking them. This is a simple, decentralized solution that requires no third party trust. Why aren't XT supporters at least lobbying Gavin Anderson and Mike Hearn to change this? Rather than arguing that it's "innocent?"


Come again?


Could you elaborate as to why this makes a difference?

Other options do exist, and others may come still yet. There are just no other options that are in a position to prematurely fork bitcoin.

What you are saying here is the equivalent of saying that people should not be trusted with the freedom of choice. To think that we should only have one "official" client because people are not capable of making the right choice for themselves is an extremely centralizing point of view.

I suppose that I do think that increasing the blocksize is more important then the specifics of an optional DDOS protection feature within Bitcoin XT. I can agree that there is an aspect of centralization with uploading IP addresses for this purpose, However this should not be considered as a trust adding feature as you claim it to be, since it is optional and rather innocent in practice. Furthermore placing our trust in the Core development team is a far more dangerous form of centralization then compared to anything else that is within the Bitcoin XT client.

You do realize that this feature was only added as a direct response to XT nodes being DDOS from TOR? Furthermore this feature is disabled by default unless the node in question is being directly attacked, in which case it would be better to have this feature compared to not having it at all right? Since without this feature the full node would not be able to connect or function whatsoever. This feature is also disabled when connecting through TOR by default. So I personally do not think it is a big deal. Certainly not enough of a reason to stop supporting XT especially since other options for increasing the blocksize do not exist yet.

BIP 100 came before BIP 101

I wouldn't go that far, but yes.

No chance for the 1MB-Blockians/Blockers. They'll be forked out of the game before the halving event in July 16.

Quote of the week:

'I don't know why he's invoking "blockstream" there'

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12269236

Mike Heam on the defensive:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/an-xt-faq-38e78aa32ff0

Deep in denial:


LOL REKT

Organ of Corti demonstrates XT as written will inevitably fall into NotXT's trap:

http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2015/08/bip101-implementation-flaws.html

#R3KT

Yeah, that's the standard answer. Assuming bitcoin is forked to BIP 101 and XT becomes mainstream -- unlikely, I know -- what percentage of people do you think will use the standard XT client with standard settings? You, I and everyone reading this knows that the vast majority of users will not be compiling their own code. It's up to the community to make people aware of such controversial patches to prevent XT from becoming the norm in the first place (as unlikely as that is).

To be clear, you don't actually deny that a third party uploading a list of deprioritized IP addresses is a centralized, trust-adding feature, do you? But I assume it's okay, because the apocalypse will happen if BIP 101 isn't implemented yesterday....right?

First of all I never said that you should not distrust anyone. I said that you should never have to trust a developer of a Bitcoin client that is open source. I think that the DDOS protection feature within XT is innocent, however I do not even need to argue that point, because it does not matter what we think about it in terms of consensus. Since only the block size increase is fundamental to the protocol in terms of it causing a hard fork, It makes the other changes within XT optional. Since anyone can create their own client and make it behave in any way they would want as long as it is consistent with the fundamental rules of the protocol, the only fundamental rule that is changed within XT is the increase of the block size. You can turn off, any of the extra patches contained within Bitcoin XT inside of the client itself. There is even an alternative version of XT that does not include any of these other changes and only increases the block size. You could even run a patched version of Core that implements BIP101, which would then be compatible with XT after the fork if the miners reach consensus.

https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/tree/only-bigblocks

This is only a problem if people grant affirmative trust. By default, we trust no one. Expressing distrust of Gavin and Hearn is not problematic at all. Hearn has a history of pushing proposals that are very antithetical to bitcoin, and that would put its fungibility (and therefore any value attributed to bitcoin) at great risk. Gavin's opinions show that he lacks the technical foresight to plan for all contingencies in scaling bitcoin's capacity by 8000x over 20 years, and his rhetoric around the XT project make it clear that he values his personal vision of a scaled consumer payment protocol far above consensus.

When it is clear that our ethics and beliefs (political or technical) are at odds, distrust has a fine connotation.

The problem I see is more so this-- People have largely been persuaded in favor of increasing the block size limit, but since XT/BIP 101 is the only implementation that can be hard forked at this time, people conflate their support of increasing block size with support of XT. In many cases, it's clear that this has resulted in blind trust of Gavin and Hearn, particularly exhibited when people defend centralizing / trust-adding features that are built into XT.

Here's a good post that spells out why the TOR IP list issue -- even though substantively not a problem yet -- is legitimately controversial. It is a centralized solution based on trust that is completely unnecessary. Yet it is clear as day from the rhetoric around here that XT supporters are justifying this as a non-issue -- no matter how antithetical it is to bitcoin -- because they are so loyal to XT.

If there is no discussion or debate about Bitcoin governance how would we even know if there was an issue with it in the first place? In political terms you have contradicted your self again.

I think that you are correct about opening the political pandoras box, however once the pandoras box has been opened it can never be closed again.

Bitcoin is a trust less protocol, one of the great innovations behind Bitcoin is that we can achieve trust without centralized authority. However when people start thinking in terms of who they should trust for the development of the Bitcoin protocol then we are already in trouble, since this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how Bitcoin governance should work. Similarly to how a democracy functions within a nation state, it can be undermined if the majority of the population becomes apathetic and ignorant of these political realities.

Yes, because hijacking the debates using politics is a poison for the mind and a terrible distraction from productive work. There is no issue with Bitcoin governance hence there should be no discussions or debate about it.


  You seem very dense.. I'm using the terms because these XT clowns have opened the political pandora box like some idiots who don't know any better.


There is no contradiction. I am against making this a political debate but that doesn't mean I can't express my disappointment when ill-advised people turn this issue into one. Coups and revolution necessarily mean somehow is behind them, who are these people and why should we trust them? For someone who likes talking about politics so much it seems to me you are sorely lost as to how Bitcoin works in that sense.

"We don't need no reconsideration of Bitcoin governance." Oke, so you think we should not consider the political aspects of what is happening here, because according to you this should be a purely technical debate.

"XT has turned it into a governance coup on the premise of "decentralizing"." development and "inclusion"." Then how come you are using terms like "governance coup"? Even though these are political concepts.

Can you see the contradiction in what you have said here?

Since if this was a coup we certainly should consider the political aspects of what is happening here, so that we can be better informed on what side we should be on. Because sometimes coupes or revolutions are necessary, and this should also certainly be true for Bitcoin, after all that is why this political mechanism already exists within the Bitcoin protocol itself. Since it is required in order for Bitcoin to remain truly free and decentralized.