I'm not against bigger blocks. I am, however, vehemently against some minority coercing rather than appealing on merit a change that affects every member of a system for some collectivist notion of "the common good" without everyone's voluntary consent. Great, bigger blocks can fit more transactions, but maybe we should wait until there is full consensus that fees are indeed too high and we all agree to move together to using bigger blocks. Til then...Perhaps we can even work out a dynamic block size schedule based on rigorously proven and acceptedly fair feedback cycles by then and not have to go through the whole process again.
If XT is so great, no one should have to sell it to anyone, people will just switch.
But people won't because there is greater risk cost to switch than to stay until some situation demands full consensus migration. Antifragility.
Activating a hardfork based on what miners do is really bad. You could easily have a situation where 75% of miners support XT but none of the big Bitcoin exchanges or businesses do. Then miners would start mining coins that they couldn't spend anywhere useful, and SPV users would find that they can't transact with the businesses they want to deal with. The currency would be split, and in this case XT would be in a far weaker position than Bitcoin.
The possibility of this sort of network/currency split is what makes XT not a "legitimate hardfork", but rather the programmed creation of an altcoin. A consensus hardfork can only go forward once it has been determined that it's nearly impossible for the Bitcoin economy to split in any significant way. Not every Bitcoin user on Earth has to agree, but enough that there won't be a noticeable split.
Bitcoin is not ruled by miners. In a hardfork, miners barely matter at all. (Softforks are different.) What's important is what the economy does.
If the economy splits without full consensus in either direction, then this may happen:
If that happens, trouble for those on the fork and any businesses/entities that forked over without full consensus.
Its doing my head in now just how much these arguments (that rely on ignorance) keep being repeatedly used to try and scare people.
It ignores the fact that for big blocks to be happening, there must already be 75% of hashing power signalling support for it. When that happens the first big block can be mined, before that bigger blocks are not mined.
So now you have 75% of the network working on a chain that supports bigger blocks and mining bigger blocks, whilst 25% try to mine a chain that only contains <1MB blocks.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out which chain will *very quickly* becomes longest. Everyone using bigger blocks carries on as normal, the orphaned miners on their 'orphaned' chain can continue to try and operate as long as they like but they can't actually affect the longest chain, which gets ever longer. This idea that they have two sets of coins is of no concern to anyone other than them, because they are the only people that recognise their orphaned blockchain. The coins in the new addresses on their orphaned chain cannot be spent on the main chain because they don't exist there.
The only possible attack here is that over the next several months MP will explicitly reject blocks from nodes advertising they are 70010 protocol. For this to have any material effect though, he would need >50% of the current network hashing power to also explicitly reject those blocks, so that people running XT are disincentivised to continue doing so.
With any less than 50% then MP is economically disadvantaging himself, and then it is a question of how big his pockets are (I'm sure they are very, more power to him) and how much he is prepared to risk.
So lets be realistic about what MP can achieve, he has to get >50% to switch to BitcoinMP (i.e. auto reject > 70010 protocol) to kill XT. However, switching to BitcoinMP now increases the risk of any blocks you mine becoming orphaned until >50% are on BitcoinMP too.
Conversely, big blockers need >75% to signal 70010 support to kill core. Upgrading to XT now (or advertising as 70010) has no disadvantage unless BitcoinMP has >50%
What we really need is for someone to knock up mpnodes.com to help people figure out whether there is any advantage to be had explicitly supporting <1MB
In the meantime the majority continues to express ambivalence. Lets see how that pans out.
