Topic: The real disastor that could happen (forking Bitcoin)... - page 6. (Read 4840 times)

I don't think 2 Mb blocks will require any significant increase in processing time. There will be an increase, but it will probably be negligible. Any ways, most miners are SPV mining so that doesn't affect them at all.

Well that mechanism (marking all older versioned blocks as invalid) is the current standard way to deploy soft forks. I think it will be the same for hard forks as well.

Right, but the split is not going to be 50/50. There will be a skew towards one side, and that skew will be enough to cause one fork to grow faster than the other. That is enough to cause a fork to two blockchains. If the big blocks blockchain is longer, then two chains will exist. If the small blocks blockchain is longer, then there may be a blockchain reorg in big blocks nodes that will force them down to the small blocks blockchain, but, for some period of time in between, it is in fact likely that two blockchains will coexist for some time.

Generally waiting for a few confirmations is a good idea anyways.

but then the flip side is that the whole second doomsday scenario lauda and ciyam suggest, which is that bigger blocks take longer to process.
(yep im using their own disaster theories against them)
and so the smaller miners would by default produce more blocks and so they would gain the blockheight, just by having less data to validate.
2mb miners would need to be ALOT more powerful than 1mb to gain the lead if there was not consensus
so as you said its all about the consensus and hashing power. and not a simple "2mb are evil doomsday".


exactly only in a change to the 'forking mechanism'(your words) to ignore older clients. and where the new 2mb miners have sufficiently more hash power to get ahead of the other miners with less processing time... and enough of the community of nodes not orphaning it. would we see the 2mb blocks win..

so as i said its not a doomsday event as soon as 2mb blocks hit the network. it requires extra things to occur, some nefarious some involving dominance in hashing power and some involving enough node acceptance..

otherwise miners are just wasting more than 10 minutes making blocks that get orphaned if they basically dont get consensus or have enough power to stay ahead of the other miners every time.

i do see exchanges halting their service because orphans can make so called 1confirmed transactions suddenly become unconfirmed again. so they wont want to risk it.. or atleast raise the threshold to a higher number of confirmations before crediting customers with funds.

(sidenote: which is another reason not to trust 0 confirms or 1 confirms if your buying a porsche or a house. the risk of that exact block being an orphan today is about 2%(3 orphans a day(144 blocks) at the moment) the risk of orphans during a blocksize battle could be as much as )

and lastly.. i think that if we ignore the nefarious miner doomsday scenario's..
and stick with logic and greed, miners wont be making 1.005mb blocks until they know consensus has been reached, to protect their revenues from becoming unspendable. .. which is another factor to take into account that its not a doomsday scenario. but more like paranoid hypothesis of nefarious factors all colluding into one targetted agenda

Not necessarily. While that could happen if there was a roughly even split of the hash power, if one side of the fork has more than the other e.g. 75% vs. 25%, then that scenario is no likely to happen. The fork with the greater hash power will extend their chain to become longer than the fork with less hash power. Since their blockchain would be longer, it is considered valid over the other blockchain. However, for not upgraded nodes, that longer chain would be invalid since it would contain blocks larger than 1 Mb.

Furthermore, depending on the forking mechanism, this may not be possible at all. If they use the forking mechanism which invalidates older versioned blocks (as is used now with soft forks), then any blocks produced by the old miners will be invalid because their version numbers are too old. If checkpointing is also used, then this scenario is not possible since one fork would have a history that the other fork does not. Due to the checkpoints, the upgraded miners would not be able to go back to the other fork which is what you are saying would happen.

+1. As Lauda pointed out, exchanges can halt trading for no reason at all. I mean, look at Mt.Gox. This is all part and parcel of being on the bleeding edge of disruptive technology known as Bitcoin. I believe it was Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises who said "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

That's speculation; it is a possibility but that would probably be temporary. We've seen exchanges halt trading before, nothing special about it.

But what about the prediction of exchanges stopping trades? That would affect every user, since price would take a serious impact, no?

Lauda and Ciyam. are forgetting that Orphans will happen to rejoin any differing chains. thus no long term hard fork.

the only time there would be consistant 2 competing chains that never recombine. is if the implementations hand pick the miners they relay from and ignore the other miners.

EG Core only connects to miners that produce 1mb blocks.. classic only connects to 2mb miners and ignores 1mb miners.
(which is the doomsday scenario lauda and ciyam are pushing.. intensionally)

otherwise if they do get blocks from any random miner.. the orphaning part of the block game will sort out forks and re-align the chain.
also 2mb implementations are able to accept 1mb blocks because the rule is not >1mb <2mb...   its just 0 to 2mb (anything in between)
so dont fall for the crap that 2mb implementations wont see blocks from 1mb miners.

again that would only happen if 2mb implementations naferiously ignored 1mb completely. (which is not the case in a simple 2mb increase clean code)

the only losers will be the miners that jumped the gun and made bigger blocks before consensus was reached. and so their orphaned blocks become unspendable.

easy explanation without waffle..(A and B=1mb miners, C=2mb miners, all implementations read blocks from all miners)


so lauda and ciyam. try your fear mongering again.. but add in the context of orphaning.. to show its not as disastrous as you seem to want to make it appear

If the hard fork was done properly it would not cause a split but rather an upgrade, that's how the system evolves. With a high and reachable consensus threshold (e.g. 95%) and a long time period for upgrading, essentially almost everyone would be on the chain and there is a minimum risk of damage. In this scenario miners on the 2 MB chain would not risk anything since everyone else is mining it too (unless some impose soft limits again).

Sorry, I'm in trouble understanding the split. If the existing chain is C, and it forks in C1 and C2, there will be miners supporting C1 and others supporting C2. I can see that all coins in C will appear in both chains, but won't the transactions after the fork be mixed between C1 and C2, so some will be duplicated, and some may be lost.

Another thing I don't understand. It obviously takes longer to build a 2Mb block than a 1Mb block, as submission time seems to be important to miners, why would any miner risk losing his slot by building a 2Mb block?

Chain A splits into Chain A (1 MB) and Chain B (2 MB). If you had coins on Chain A now you will have coins on both chains. The problem with the minority chain is the huge difficulty that the remaining miners will be faced with.
It will be, but that won't matter in the case of a hard fork if you're stuck on an old version.

Surely that would not be possible. Won't some transactions appear in both chains, and some old bitcoins be spent in different transactions in each chain. Am I correct in assuming that only the longest chain will survive? What will happen to the shortest chain additions? Will they be deleted and the process start again?

Here is another newbie question? If one chain contains blocks up to 1Mb and the other contains all those blocks plus the 2Mb blocks, won't the 2Mb chain be longer no matter who accepts the proposals?

You won't. Because you don't need to. That's the beauty of Bitcoin

They are in it for profits so why wouldn't they just allow trading between the two different chains and make lots of fiat money in the process?

I guess the obvious answer to the above question is that most exchanges are inept.

So if the chain does fork, how will we know it has happened, and how will we know who has "won".

Getting pretty desperate compelling there. Add 2+2=4 to your lie list ploz.

Vocal support means nothing as previously said. Here's just an example of Classic supporters on twitter:
2 MB blocks are urgent, Segwit is complicated, Bitcoin will die without it. - Pretty simple lie.

https://twitter.com/JihanWu/status/694080283407069184
https://twitter.com/slush_pool/status/694128642725679104

^^

Thanks for making Mr. Godwin cry

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”  ~ Joseph Goebbels

“In the primitive simplicity of their minds, they will more easily fall victim to a large lie than a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves, but would be ashamed to tell a lie that was too big. They would never consider telling a lie of such magnitude themselves, or knowing that it would require such impudence, they would not consider it possible for it to be told by others. Even after being enlightened and shown that the lie is a lie, they will continue to doubt and waver for a long time and will still believe there must be some truth behind it somewhere, and there must be some other explanation. For this reason, some part of the most bold and brazen lie is sure to stick. This is a fact that all the great liars and liars’ societies (meaning the Jewish press) in this world know only too well and use regularly.” ~ Adolph Hitler
Page 205 Mein Kampf

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” ~ Joseph Goebbels

The "economic incentive" tells you only what you want to hear. From a technical perspective 2 MB blocks make absolute no sense in comparison to Segwit.

Gavin even said something about not wanting to maintain it (IIRC) and Jeff has a different agenda. He believes that we should do a hard fork so that we have experience with doing one and I agree. However, I don't agree with the current proposal at all.

These developers are actually ones that have contributed with various improvements to the infrastructure. What have Classic "developers" created? Nothing.

It has the same support as XT had from Slush. They said they would support it until they didn't.