Topic: Mike Hearn talking about theymos and BitcoinTalk forum policy (Read 2866 times)

If you someone doesn't like something about Bitcointalk, they're free to create their own forum and fork the user base. Let the posters decide

Any hard fork is immediately an independent network and therefore competing for resources. Competing blockchains also give overall strength to the cryptocoin community to a point, and do provide some redundancy and opportunity for testing new protocols. I have personally had to oversee hard forks in the Infinitecoin protocol several times in order to patch the original code which was not written with long term use in mind. In that case this was usually not hard to convince people to switch because of technical difficulties in the old fork, so it mostly went off without a hitch. In this case, at this point of time the original core code doesn't have any major deficiencies, so convincing people to move to another fork is in essence more like an altcoin than a hard fork (even though technically it is both, if you accept the definition of an altcoin as being any independent blockchain from Bitcoin.).

Every time this is done you technically run a risk of people not switching over for various reasons, but generally the fork which is smaller will usually atrophy and stop being supported, and the vast majority of the resources will then be focused on the new fork. There is a small chance a competing network could be sustainable, but it is not likely unless it provides significant improvements or builds its own infrastructure. In my opinion this is nothing but an altcoin posing itself as a Bitcoin hardfork (which technically the majority of altcoins are to a degree), so this is largely a semantics game, but with computer protocols some times semantics are important. They want free resources from the Bitcoin core community infrastructure, but don't want to support the protocol the core developers are supporting. You branch off from the blockchain, that's fine, but you have to then provide your own infrastructure. That is part of the burden of making any altcoin.

That being said I think XT should be treated like any other altcoin, and while I don't agree with the divisive way it was deployed, I don't consider it at all a  threat to the Bitcoin core's existence any more than any other altcoin is. At the end of the day Bitcoin has the infrastructure, functional code, and the popular support, that is what counts. In any p2p network consensus is king. In order to have genuine consensus there needs to be a free flow of information. They want to declare the code different for the purposes of its protocol, but at the same time want to pretend it is not an independent blockchain of Bitcoin . In spite of the fact Theymos has a habit of playing fast and loose with his own rules, I think relegating XT to the altcoin category is appropriate, and discussion there should be freely allowed. People who keep pushing the issue as if it is not an alternate chain don't understand the protocol and are only dividing the community with ignorance.

Probably safe to consider it as an alt only when the fundamentals of Bitcoin change. I don't think blocksize is something fundamental that cannot be changed, such as the total supply...


All right, sorry, only noticed it when it was already on Meta.

IIRC I was the one who originally brought it up to the mods, so you can blame me I guess. The problem is that a SSN is considered sensitive private info, while other bits of data such as first/last, address and E-mail are considered public.

Well obviously there is a different division within the community when talking about 1MB vs bigger blocks and talking about Bitcoin Core vs XT. Judging from the number of nodes, only a handful of people support XT (say hello to forking without consent and increasing the total supply).

As I've stated previously in another thread, since this is a privately owned forum, theymos has the right do to as he pleases (to some extend). He has not been censoring anything here, but rather has just advised the staff to move the threads into the appropriate section (i.e. altcoin section).

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Update: Several corrections.

This has been debated for years. As I can see, typically those people in IT branch have little knowledge about how finance and value works, in fact it is totally another group of people like Mark Karpeles and speculators in China drove the bitcoin into current status

The value of bitcoin is decided on exchanges, has nothing to do with its technology, and on exchanges, it is supply and demand rules. A currency's value is based on trust, and trust takes TIME to build up, that's the reason bitcoin worth almost nothing in the first and second years. Any kind of major change in protocol will create confusion and reduce people's trust to this currency and hurt its reputation much quicker than QE did to FED

Once people realize that this is just another version of fiat money with a group of programmers instead of reserve bankers deciding the future of its user, they will trash it like a used game. Politics is the biggest threat for bitcoin, it should be totally forbidden. You never have politics with gold: No kind of Lobbying can change gold's extremely stable property. It is very difficult to move gold, but it holds its value for thousands of years regardless of transportation technology. Stability will build trust and value, without value, you can not build anything meaningful upon it

Similarly, stability will build value for bitcoin, and when it has larger and larger value, all the solutions will arise to enhance it. But currently, people are trying to create value through higher quality of services, this is a wrong mindset showing that they don't understand value. Maybe they have been working like slaves for the whole of their life and they always try to impress others to make money. Have you ever seen FED trying to impress its users with a higher transaction capacity to make the USD more valuable? No, they just print more of it and its value keeps rising. How did they do that? They are extremely cautious, they never make sudden moves, they don't fork USD

I posted it in Bitcoin Discussion indeed.

It seems that theymos doesn't think like you... but yes bitcoinXT can't considered 100% as altcoin.

Pretty interesting article from Mike. This is should have been posted on Bitcoin Discussion tho, I think... Whatever opinions people have on forking and/or Bitcoin XT it shouldn't be censored/considered as altcoin discussion. Bitcoin XT is giving an option for Bitcoin development, and Bitcoin only. I'm not giving any opinion about the issue here, just saying that it was proposed as a Bitcoin improvement (questionable), not a totally different coin, with different specs and different blockchain...

Cant you read ? We already folked the original "bitcoin" before. And all the soft folk terminology bullshit is only used to confuse retards.

Be realistic here please.

There will never be 2 bitcoins..... If you think you can sell your bitcoin on the Bitcoin core chain, you're dreaming.

However since the Paycoin incident, i start to think you can actually start a "community of retards" and sell them your bitcoin..


Cause... all major exchages will choose one blockchain.

I agree... i mean its embarrassing to show the internet Allcocks is my last name.

I think it started from a bastard who is probably insecure about his genital. Whats your last name young boy ? ...... uhhh Allcocks... My name is Biggums Allcocks.

Oh right... you're here for research .... since 2012. How comedy

Tell you what, once you're taking a break, hit me up on PM and i can buy you a nice escort using btc. I think getting laid once in a while can unclog some of your.... thoughts.

Gavin & company have convinced many. In fact, merchants supporting core is less in number...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37y8wm/list_of_bitcoin_services_that_supportoppose/

I think, it would be ideal if merchants support both chains, so that the end user can decide which coin worth how much.

Little bit off-topic here, but the greater fool theory applies to every type of fiat money, so it does not make any sense. There is no such thing called intrinsic value, all the value depends on humans demand, and the demand for money has become the major demand in today's financial market: People already have everything, they just want more money, because more money give them more safety and freedom

Following this thinking, XT coin will worth a little because there is no demand on market, and after the XT fork you will immediately have 10+ million coins on that chain, I don't think that Mike can build a whole ecosystem to withstand that large amount of sell pressure. And when price crashed to cents, the whole mining infrastructure will become a pile of paperweight, they would switch to core chain

When Josh Zerlan complained enough to get the unredacted deposition and his SSN removed from these forums - So much so that it forced a policy changed on these forums.

... and also when we tried to post Theymos' dox to underscore his hypocrisy.

Back on topic.
Well, the difference between soft forks and hard forks is that in cas of the former, only miners must upgrade to avoid a network split. In case of the latter, everyone must upgrade.

Mike gives an example of P2SH soft-fork which is by no means perfect-- IIRC gmaxwell has once said they should've implemented it differently. Soft-forks can be different, but what unites them is that they don't change core protocol values.

P2SH weakens the security of old nodes - over time it came close to SPV security. But I can't see a particular attack vector (apart from Sybil) against them if the majority hashing power is mining compliant blocks. If it was a hard fork, then old nodes could have stayed on a side chain, causing split. Even if all miners switched, we could still arrange an attack by feeding old nodes our old-rules blocks. In the end, the nodes would upgrade, and coins would be recovered, but the damage from split would be substantial, I guess.

It's more interesting with BIP66. It was a pretty trivial change for a soft-fork. Yet we still managed to run into problems thanks to irresponsible miners. Nothing would ever happen if 95% miners actually upgraded.

When did they ever?


~BCX~

Well, apparently the forum doesn't delete doxes any more.

Good, taking my words back. Been a bit emotional here, excuse me.