I've been reading through the debates on these forums and other places.
I'm not sure what I'm missing but I'm confused why one of the original dev's have done this and did not simply stay with core and try and make the changes there? Was he forced out or couldn't make the changes he wanted or something else?
It seems that forking the coin in such a way is a dangerous move. The fact that it has a different name to me makes it FEEL like it is an alt-coin that's trying to take over by introducing the coin as a fork. The only difference is it has one of the original devs of bitcoin involved?
Thanks in advance to whoever can clear things up for me.
Developers of Bitcoin Core were unable to reach consensus about increasing the blocksize limit during some 3 years of discussion. This led Gavin to make
his own implementation with Mike Hearn (Bitcoin XT), which includes his improvement proposal for a hard fork (BIP 101.) Seems like the plan has worked to some extent and the blocksize debate is moving somewhere.
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That is not right, BitcoinXT was there long before BIP 101. Most people get this wrong ...
Well Gavin is barely active on the forum, it seems he is more active on the mailing lists and reddit. I think what happened is clear already. There wasn't consensus and Gavin was tired of the blocksize increase (and other BIPs) being ignored so they (Mike too) went the XT route, too bad they ruined it with all the extra code, now no one wants to trust XT. Also I don't like the idea of an insanely big blocksize which is what would happen with XT or BIP101.
Indeed.
I too am in favor of larger blocks but not too large.
The end result according to XT will be 8GB blocks.
That means that the trustless becomes depending on trust (on third party) because I doubt that we will have anywhere near as half as nodes as we have today.Centralization is unavoidable down that road.
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This argument never made sense to me.
So, we have 3000 nodes instead of 6000. How does this matter? If you use a SPV you are looking at a handful of nodes anyways.
Besides: There is no incentive to run a full node for most people.
Have you ever looked at this map:
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ ?
There aren't many nodes in countries with bad bandwidth, today.
All this talk about full nodes in Africa and China has nothing to do with reality.