-MarkM-
I believe the bip's will cause a hard fork. They change the rules for adding blocks in certain situations. We shouldn't take it lightly. It would be very bad if iXcoin splits in two.
The block number at which they come into effect would be many months into the furure though wouldn't it?
I do agreee though that it is crazy to muddy up the merged mining test with such extraneous stuff.
We need merged mining. BIPs are way the heck less important, not worth aborting the moving to new codebase for.
Basically we should port what IXCoin already was to the new codebase first and make sure that works, before adding new BIPs or coloured coins or anything else that IXCoin doesn't already have/do. Well the memory fix stuff from I0Coin of course, since if it wasn't for the need of all merged mined coins to get that fix we wouldn't be in any hurry to update to new code at all. We don't want to break stuff we just want to fix the RAM problem the merged mined coins all had in common.
-MarkM-
Agree with you that the BIPS or colored coins will have to wait. That is why I had originally thought of doing this with the next release of Bitcoin. But it appears that there is so much legacy here that we are forced to be conservative.
How much more bounty do we need to get iXcoin upgraded to 0.8.6 without the BIPs plus anything else needed so all the miners will start using it? The latest 0.8.6 beta is like 95% complete. It should just need a few tweeks. Is it the bounty we're waiting on or something else?
It really is up to the pools to take the existing code and run it on their servers.
Anybody can make use of the 0.8.6 client if they want. Worse case is the BIPS filter out certain transactions, but that is a non-issue really. It all depends on what transactions the pools add to a block.
I for one don't give a damn about all this 'conservative' talk about forking... that make sense with a coin like Bitcoin... but a coin like IXC that's just trying to stay afloat? Total B.S. in my opinion. Same kind of idiotic logic with IXC owners keeping all coins to themselves and sending just scraps for donations.