Topic: Not Bitcoin XT - page 9. (Read 21886 times)

This is crazy...

He is the owner of the /r/bitcoin subreddit. They still heavily filter and censor the debates there.

He and 3 other top mods deliberately censored all post regarding XT, critiscsism of core devs and blockstream and unleashed propaganda against it. It's a known fact, search the relevant threads on reddit.

No, It's a fork of the "bitcoin core" implementation and implemented BIP101.

If the ecosystem chooses it and it reaches super majority, then it raises the blocksize limit, otherwise no blocksize increase will take place.

Calling it an altcoin is dishonest and a blatant lie. It's the same network, hashpower and users!

As long as there is no consensus, BXT is in fact an altcoin.


Correct! Everybody can create his own coin to play with. The rest of the community should not care about those coins.

AFAIK most or all of the BitcoinCore developers work for Blockstream.  Their "team" page lists Adam Back (President), Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Matt Corallo, Mark Friedenbach, Rusty Russell, Patrick "Intersango" Strateman, Jorge Timón, and Glen Willen. There may be others.  Luke Dash Jr works for Blockstream as contractor.  Peter Todd works half-time for Viacoin, an altcoin that claims to be bitcoin done right (e.g. 25 times faster confirms).

Blockstream got 21 million USD of venture capital from a mix of investors.  Obviously Adam and Greg must have described to the investors some business plan, that must have involved some mix of sidechains, perhaps the Lightning Network, the fee market and fee increases, turning bitcoin into a settlement layer for high-value transactions, etc..  Presumably they relied heavily on the prediction that the network would become congested in early 2016 and the fee market would then arise.

It is therefore quite likely that, if the block size limit were to be lifted, even if only to 2 MB, their "business plan" would collapse.  For 2 or 3 years at least, there would not be any fee market, and there would not be any need for an overlay network of any type. 


Luke tried to convince me a few weeks ago that the protocol is so complicated that the only safe way to use it is by using the BitcoinCore implementation; and that disaster would occur if one used an implementation that did not have exactly the same quirks and bugs.  However, that is bullshit.  You can write your own code from scratch, or take either the Core or the XT implementation and patch them as you like.  If you make any mistakes, only you will be affected.  If you don't like Mike and Gavin, you can take the Core code and add the patches of XT that implement the 8 MB limit.  I saw on reddit a claim by someone that he had already built one.

The point is that bitcoin and bitcoin forking do not require consensus and a single implementation.  What Mike and Gavin are doing is normal and bitcoin should not care.  Bitcoin's robustness does not come from preventing forks, but from each player choosing whether to play the game
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I trust thermos more than Heam.  At least Trolltalk doesn't spy on and (arbitrarily) blacklist its users.  XT does:

Bitcoin XTs Tor IP blacklist downloading system has significant privacy leaks.

BS. Calling XT an altcoin is just retarded.

Do you think Bitcoind is an altcoin too?

Bitcoin is the set of rules that the network follow, it can be XT, core, whatever.

Opensource code and transparency matters.

Currently the core dev team cannot be trusted due to conflict of interest (Blockstream).

No forums can be trusted which is controlled by thermos.

The current controversy proves you wrong.

BTW it is not only the miners (75% of them) that decide! A valid solution might be that > 75% of the miners will mine BXT but > 75% of the users keep using BTC. This is the outcome if you have no consensus!

These developers have decided to ditch Bitcoin

http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths

You get to watch Muslims do it right now.

You are correct, and I have echoed your logic after seeing it during discussions of the last stress tests, that if the max block size limit is raised, then the actual block sizes will not necessarily be raised.

I do certainly agree that the block size needs to be increased for largely the same reasons as you list above. Plus the amount of resources required to run a full node would hardly be additionally burdensome, especially considering the advancements in technology since 2010.

Based on what I have read, there are some conflicts of interest with the core developers in that they have an employment relationship with a company who stands to profit if Bitcoin were to become more centralized with a 1 MB max block size. As a result, some of the core dev's income stands to be diminished/reduced/terminated if they were to support a larger block size, and the max block size appears to be unlikely to be increased in Bitcoin core.

My primary concern with BitcoinXT is that it will change the protocol without first achieving a consensus. They could possibly change the protocol without first having the support of the various exchanges, and payment processors. If Bitpay (for example) does not accept BitcoinXT for payment, then any customer of a website/merchant who is using Bitpay is unlikely to be able to pay with BitcoinXT coins.

A concern of mine is that since it is not clear that exchanges/payment processors will immediately accept BitcoinXT coins, then holders of BitcoinXT coins will have difficulty finding value in their BitcoinXT coins. The same is true for Bitcoin coins, if the exchanges/payment processors will no longer accept Bitcoin coins after XT forks the network. However, if none of the major exchanges/payment processors publicly states support for either XT or Bitcoin, then it will be very unclear as to which will end up succeeding. As long as this is unclear, there is the possibility that major exchanges/payment processors will not accept any crypto deposits until it is clear which will be successful. Or they could say that they will only accept deposits if a transaction is confirmed on both the Bitcoin and XT networks, which would mean that inputs that never deviate between the two chains would have greater value then inputs that have been spend on one chain but not the other.

Many of those "major economic players" as well as 4 of the 5 largest miners have expressed support for increasing the block size limit to 8 MB, in some form.  That is not yet support for BitcoinXT, of course.  If the Core devs had some respect for the community, they would cede and raise the limit in the Core too; and then the crisis would be resolved.  

Need I remind everybody that it is LIMIT that is being increased, not the block SIZE? The limit has been 1 MB since 2010, but the average block size is still 450 kB, and has never hit the limit until the recent "stress tests".  

So, if the limit is increased to 8 MB, either by Core and/or by XT, it would make no difference until mid-2016, when the average block size is expected to be ~800 kB.  Thereafter, the difference will be that, with 8 MB, the average block size will continue growing slowly,  in the measure that adoption continues to increase (perhaps to 1.5 MB in mid-2017, 3 MB in mid-2018, etc.); whereas, with 1 MB, there would be recurrent traffic jams starting in mid-2016, and adoption would stop growing.

Cry me a river. Maybe you should grow a pair !

This is defiantly not a good idea.

The controversy behind BitcoinXT is doing nothing more then causing uncertainty regarding the future of Bitcoin, and NotBitcoinXT is only adding to that certainty. Assuming that the network actually forks, it will take up to two months before it is clear if BitcoinXT is going to be successful or if it will die off (this is based on the time it will take for the Bitcoin difficult to retarget after 75% of miners stop mining on the Bitcoin network).

Making the potential fork even more controversial and adversarial is going to threaten the fungibility of Bitcoin (immediately after the fork and until it is clear if XT is successful or not), and will cause people to be afraid to use and accept Bitcoin.

My prediction is that major economic players will choose to accept neither Bitcoin or XT until it is clear which will be successful and this will only cause damage to the overall adoption of Bitcoin

SC/LN alone are not a complete solution to scaling, but if successful, they will scale "bitcoin itself" in some very important ways.

The sentence you quoted appears to be a statement of fact. It doesn't sound to me like he's judging whether the fact is "okay" or "wonderful".

Gavin and Mike have the right to do what they did, and each client has the right to choose which version of the software to run.

Just as some jerk created NotBitcoinXT, another jerk could create NotBitcoinCore -- a version of BitcoinXT that accepts puts out blocks with the Core stamp, but actually accepts block with more than 1 MB, and may generate them if there is enough stuff in the pool.  What woudl be the point of doing either, I don know.

However, I must concede that this initiative already made two valuable contributions to the project.

One, it underscored the silliness of the idea of blockchain voting.  That is the typical hacker mentality at work: use a complicated programming solution to avoid a simpler one that requires human interaction.  The right way to do a protocol change is to describe the intended change to the major players and users, listen to their opinions, try to convince them, find a solution that they could all agree to (that is what 'consensus' means to normal people), then formalize the proposal, and confirm that it will be accepted by the majority of affected people.  Only  then post the code that will implement the change, programmed to be activated at a fixed block number, a couple months in the future.

That is what Gavin and Mike did. That is what the Blockstream hackers are quite incapable of doing.  And that is what the Blockstream devs mean when they accuse Gavin and Mike of "populist tactics".  And, finally, that is why the Blockstream devs like soft forks: because they allow changes to be implemented without having to explain and justify them to the community.  (That is also why they did not program a grace period in the BIP66 fork: because the purpose of the grace period is to send alerts to all clients still running the old version -- and they did not want to do that.)

Two, the NotBitcoinXT initiative prompted this message from Alan Back, Ph. D., to the bitcoin developers' mailing list:


So Adam Back, Ph. D., thinks it is okay (if not wonderful) that nodes lie to the bitcoin community in order to preserve Blockstream's exclusive control of the protocol.  

Think of that before trusting your savings to a system whose security strongly depends on the integrity of the BitcoinCore implementation.

The thing is, we don't need Bitcoin's freedom from lousy bankers for every transaction under the sun. All we need is for the system to exist and function so that when we do need it's properties, it is available to us.

I think using Bitcoin to buy a Happy Meal is like using a chain saw to cut down a dandelion.

Theymos is the creator/mod of /r/bitcoin, a section of reddit ("subreddit").  As such he has substantial freedom to decide what gets posted and who gets banned.  

However there are some general reddit rules for mods (e.g. he should not moderate topics in which he has a financial interest, or ban people who did not violate any rules), and there are clais that he violated those limits.    

But those who are unhappy with it have moved to /r/bitcoin_uncensored or /r/bitcoinxt.  He has no authority over these.


The Blockstream devs have admitted already that Sidechains are not a solution to the scaling problem.

LN is a large-scale payment system to be built using Payment Channels.  Think of a Payment Channel as a length of pipe, and LN as an oil refinery.  What has been implemented so far is a two tanks with a pipe between them.  The other details of the refinery are still only at the vague ideas stage; and no one knows whether the refinery will be economically viable.  Indeed, there are several back of the envelope calculations indicating that the LN will be as viable as a balloon made of reinforced concrete.

Even if the LN can be designed and implemented, even if it were to be viable, it will not be "bitcoin itself", not even remotely.  

Bitcoin was designed to be a peer-to-peer payment system that did not require a trusted third party.   The only reason why Satoshi designed and implemented it was because no such thing existed, and he thought that he had figured out how to build one.  

The LN will depend totally on trusted intermediaries -- the hubs.  Even though in theory anyone could set up a hub, or any two parties could set up a payment channel between them, in practice that will not be possible, for many reasons.  The hubs will necessarily be large companies that will have to be registered, licensed, comply with AML/KYC, etc.  They will charge significant fees on top of the fees of the bitcoin network, and will have lots of control over the clients' payments.  For one thing, they will be able to block payments and freeze funds for months, block payments between specific clients (whose identities they will know), and may even be able to divert payments or steal coins.  Almost like the current banking system -- only much more inconvenient and expensive.

I am sure that Satoshi would not have spent a couple of years creating bitcoin, if it had to end up that way.  One thing that the world does not need is another lousy banking system.