Topic: Decentralized decision making, hashing toward a better bitcoin - page 3. (Read 4631 times)

14% of the nodes are buying it as of today.  That's up from 0% a little over a week ago.  Let's see how much of the hash power is buying it two months from now...

Big players that need scaling for their operations will and won't care about you and I opinions for their products to go mainstream.

That is if anyone actually plans to move to XT, which they don't.

Seriously wake up Peter, no one is buying it. XT is DOA and support only by a circle jerk of /r/bitcoin exilees running pretendnodes on 15$ VPS accounts.

It is fair to say only a very irrelevant amount of full nodes holding the entire Bitcoin blockchain are actually running XT as we speak

BIP101 activation requires support from 75% of the hash power (which itself requires broad support from network nodes, Bitcoin businesses and the user base). Do you think it is reasonable that >25% of hash power would "play games" by faking their support (assuming that's what you're getting at)?

When the longest chain is then later abandoned, you can lose a lot of money being on the longest chain. You do remember the fork in 2013, don't you?

Switching to XT is the conservative decision, as illustrated in the figure below.

Larger blocks do not make it easier to come to consensus, they make it harder. An 8MB block will take longer to propagate, making it more likely that small forks and orphans occur. Also since you are now locked into exponential growth, in two years my well connected mine in northern Europe can mine and quickly propagate 16MB blocks which will take longer for the Chinese miners to download and validate, giving me an advantage (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) and also an incentive to pack blocks full of junk transactions (which is necessarily a bad thing) - if the nodes are all following the rules of bip101 they have to accept my garbage filled 16MB blocks, as they are perfectly valid. 

By allowing these much larger blocks to be created, you increase the effectiveness of selfish mining and thus, increase the incentive to act in a malicious manner.  Satoshi might not have realized a block size limit was necessary when he was drafting the white paper, but it sure didn't take him long to implement one once the network was up and running.

For anyone who is still struggling to understand why bigger blocks might not be such a good idea, I thought this was a nice, succinct, and humorous explanation of XT from a rather unlikely source.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-23/what-bitcoin-xt-primer-everyone

Enjoy. 

That is not a question... No miners will make any significant switch unless they get equally significant node support

Yes that's true, and a real point,,, that's why I quickly mentioned there will have to be enough XT nodes to support that  its like which would come first the nodes or the miners/hash lol chicken or the egg 

I think they would grow together....

@TerraMaster
But still miners need the majority of the nodes, and the nodes of exchanges, payment processors ecc ..

Even if the 99% of the miners will chose to be on BIP101, but the majority of nodes will still with the old block format, the 1% of miners are going to make a lot of money, because only their blocks will be validated from the network (the majority of nodes/services/users)

So miners have a lot of power, but still they need to follow the will of the market.

Anyway, I think that the market will converge on the BIP101

I think you're gonna get your increase.  

Don't get your hopes up for any 8 mb blocks or exponential increase though  

Definitely prepare to say goodbye to Gavin & Mike  

By the way, the fork will be determined when 75% of the blocks found by miners (750) of the last 1000 found. Not 75% of the nodes.

If all miners tonight pointed to slushes pool offering XT core mining, the next 750 blocks its over. Well almost, but that will become the fork at that time. So yes miners do really control that. (vote) Now enough nodes should be in place as well to handle the work also on XT.  

From Gavin:

Deployment shall be controlled by hash-power supermajority vote (similar to the technique used in BIP34), but the earliest possible activation time is 2016-01-11 00:00:00 UTC.

Activation is achieved when 750 of 1,000 consecutive blocks in the best chain have a version number with bits 1,2,3 and 14 set (0x20000007 in hex). The activation time will be the timestamp of the 750'th block plus a two week (1,209,600 second) grace period to give any remaining miners or services time to upgrade to support larger blocks. If a supermajority is achieved more than two weeks before 2016-01-11 00:00:00 UTC, the activation time will be 2016-01-11 00:00:00 UTC.

Block version numbers are used only for activation; once activation is achieved, the maximum block size shall be as described in the specification section, regardless of the version number of the block.

Hahaha.  Let's see how it all pans out, shall we?

That's too bad.... Old dogs do indeed lose the will to fight 

Thank you.  I also recognize that you are intelligent.  I also believe that you are young.  I think I may have had a view more inline with yours a decade ago. 

Economic majority reflects the ownership of important stakes in either Bitcoin, its mining network, and to a lesser extent the exchanges & services infrastructure.

As far as the two most important are concerned : owning a shitload of Bitcoin and or possessing a significant portion of the mining network I feel confident enough to say that those who share one or two of these criterias don't hang on reddit and therefore their "sentiment" is not reflected there.

To be quite honest I don't see how any smart person (I consider you are one) can view reddit as anything more than some group think cargo cult full of loud but absolutely irrelevant voices.

I think we're saying similar things but using different words.  You also seem to discredit the community at /r/bitcoin as "powerless," whereas I think their sentiment reflects the desires of the economic majority.  Time will tell, I suppose...

Thank you for the polite reply.  

I agree that changing a consensus rule about what constitutes a valid transaction should be extremely hard.  We all agree that Alice shouldn't be able to move coins without a valid signature, Bob shouldn't be able to create coins out of thin air, and Charlie shouldn't be able to spend his coins twice.  

I disagree that this applies to the size of the block.  The reason I disagree is because Satoshi already designed a way for us to come to consensus on what "appropriately sized" blocks are.  From the white paper (paraphrased):

- Nodes assemble valid transactions into a block and work to find a proof-of-work.

- Nodes express their acceptance of a new block by mining on top of it.

- The longest chain composed of valid transactions is "Bitcoin."  



By making it easier for nodes to "express their acceptance of a block" (e.g., for blocks larger than 1 MB), we are making it easier for the network to come to consensus according to the original design of Bitcoin.  Thus Adam's proposal is simply Bitcoin playing out the way it was designed.

(There is no mention of a block size limit in the Bitcoin white paper.)
 
 

Stop trying to nuance the discussion using "vote" as if this somehow ties it to democracy somewhere down the road.

It is not a vote. It is a decision. A show of strenght. Power. You might not like it expressed as such but that doesn't particularly matter. In short, it is the people with the most resources and, yes, the most influence amongst their wealthy and powerful peers who will ultimately decide where the ship sails. No, influence as in "popular amongst reddit derps" is not valued nor accounted for.


There are several public forums where people might want to "express their free choice". I'm not sure what's the point of somehow tying this into the system as if this would somehow legitimize the process.

To be fair I'm not even sure what it is OP is proposing. Seemed to me like a one hash, one vote miner governance which is quite honestly absurd.

As long as their free choice does not change the fundamental rules that the consensus network agrees on, they can run whatever client they like. XT, core, electrum, armory, etc... but when it comes to making a change to the fundamental rules of consensus, I would argue the best approach is to make this process as hard as possible.

Making a change like bip 101 that involves ballooning the block size to 8MB and eventually to 8GB is reckless and can bring about problems and attack vectors that we can't know or predict. They (Gavin and Hearn) are spreading fear and panic and preying on your fear of what might happen if we don't change [1] while they pay no heed to all to the consequences and real danger that could occur from such a drastic change to the fundamental rules that balance incentives and keep bitcoin secure.

[1]even though we've seen from the spam attacks that it's not a problem and bitcoin deals with full blocks just fine... In fact, it may even be desirable to be in a constant state of full blocks so that a fee market can emerge. Remember that the miners must continue to get paid as the reward continues to diminish)