Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

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Cryptonaut

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Eventful day in bitcoin-land today.. For those of you who havn't been on the computer all day long, there has been an explosion in drama over at http://reddit.com/r/bitcoin.

It started off with Mike Hearn announcing the official 0.11 release of BitcoinXT (a fork of Bitcoin Core with a couple changes), which includes the code supporting larger blocks (specifically 8MB max blocks starting around Jan 2016). Check out Mike's post explaining the situation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitcoin_forking/

The post was top voted on the subreddit, but was shortly removed by the moderators. Throughout most of the day, many posts talking about BitcoinXT or complaining about the censorship were removed and users shadowbanned from the sub. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h5211/censorship/ and also moderator StarMaged attempting to explain himself here https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitcoin_forking/cu4acsy?context=10000

Also interesting is that Satoshi Nakamoto supposedly sent an email out today on the developer mailing list in response to this..... IMO it does not sound like something Satoshi would write it all and is extremely likely to be a hoax, but you can check it out here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html - very bizarre.

Currently there seems to be a bit of an exodus happening on the /r/bitcoin forums, with a lot of users going over to http://voat.co/v/bitcoin and other subreddits like http://reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt. Meanwhile over here at LTB things are so peaceful... :p

For the record, at LTB we support an increase in the blocksize (for fairly obvious reasons), and will always stay on the majority chain, even if that means using an alternative client such as XT for our backend systems. If you are a more casual user and do not run your own Bitcoin nodes or participate in mining, you have nothing to worry about and can just sit back and watch the developer drama unfold.

More info on XT here: https://bitcoinxt.software/

some more good thoughts here https://www.zapchain.com/a/l/what-are-your-thoughts-on-the-blatant-censorship-going-on-on-rbitcoin-regarding-the-xt-software/mcMzBtrKb5

Thoughts?

edit: clarification

Posted on August 15, 2015 at 7:45 PM
Last Edited: August 24, 2015 at 11:38 PM

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• adam

  

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  Some Questions for @Cryptonaut and anyone else with relevant knowledge:

  • Can you talk about how this fork will work and when you expect LTB / Tokenly to make this switch? We'll just be running the new software whenever you get around to upgrading and nothing will change until there is a critical mass? That would imply to me this is a real non-event from our point of view, so long as you switch sometime before the average bitcoin node you'll have a smooth eventual transition.

  • Is there a downside to this change? Are we losing anything?

  • If blocks stayed the same size we know fees would go up as the bid for space becomes more competitive. In BitcoinXT the blocks are going to get bigger, do you expect fees to stay the same as they are now, or do you think they'll decrease as blocks suddenly become a lot less full proportionally?

  I have more questions, this is a very interesting turn of events.

  Posted on August 15, 2015 at 7:58 PM
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• markxmayer

  

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  I'd love to hear Andreas' thoughts on this.

  Posted on August 15, 2015 at 8:09 PM
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• Cryptonaut

  

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  @adam

  For LTB / Tokenly, it's just a matter of having the "addrindex" patch applied to BitcoinXT, which is something that is required for Counterparty servers. I made an enquiry about it here, but if it's not included in officially, we can just do it ourselves. Currently "btcdrak" is the one that has been maintaining that patch, but he is in the same camp as peter todd etc. so I kind of doubt he would be willing to port it over to XT.

  We'll just be running the new software whenever you get around to upgrading and nothing will change until there is a critical mass?

  Correct. The trigger rules for the fork work like this: Sometime after January 2016, when 750 of the last 1000 blocks found have been found by miners running XT (or something protocol-equivalent), a two week grace period is triggered and a network wide upgrade alert gets sent out to all users running older node versions. After the two weeks is up, miners are free to mine blocks greater than 1MB, up to a max of 8MB. The first miner to do this causes the fork, and after that anyone who sitll hasn't upgraded will be left in the dust. Everyone that needs to upgrade has plenty of time and warning to do so.

  Again, only people that run their own Bitcoin nodes even need to worry about this stuff.

  Is there a downside to this change? Are we losing anything?

  No, running XT is actually the safer bet. If the 75% network consensus threshold is never reached then nothing changes and things continue as they are now, but then if it does happen then we are also all good because we would have been switched already.

  If blocks stayed the same size we know fees would go up as the bid for space becomes more competitive. In BitcoinXT the blocks are going to get bigger, do you expect fees to stay the same as they are now, or do you think they'll decrease as blocks suddenly become a lot less full proportionally?

  Fees are already pretty low (were lowered 10X shortly after the price shot up to $1000+, in anticipation of further increases which never happened). I would say most likely fees will stay relatively the same for quite a while assuming the block size increase is successful. Just a guess though :)

  Posted on August 15, 2015 at 8:16 PM
  Last Edited: August 15, 2015 at 8:17 PM
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• adam

  

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  Does anybody want to argue that this attempt at forking over to BitcoinXT is a bad thing?

  It seemed like a lot of people were vocally against raising the block size but I haven't seen much arguing against the fork.

  Right now this seems pretty harmless to me and as a normal user (actually someone running a company that sends lots of bitcoin transactions) it seems like this is a no-brainer in favor of XT. Anybody want to explain the other perspective?

  Posted on August 15, 2015 at 8:59 PM
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• pooktwo

  

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  about 4 hours of mine today was consumed in reading about this. So to my understanding, the way this is being done with 75% of nodes needing to switch over is completely fair. And it shouldn't interrupt any service if it does not pass. If no one wants it, then they will not switch over.

  I expect this to pass, but i am curious on if Chinese miners will start to exit and if they might dump more Bitcoin then they normally would right at the cut over deadline

  Posted on August 15, 2015 at 11:59 PM
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• crainbf

  

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  In terms of the risk, it doesn't matter either way. Both running XT or core will be save and if a switch happens there will be plenty of time for core users to switch later. The only reason to switch to XT now is if you want bigger blocks to happen and to signal that support.

  I don't think there is really a risk of the network splitting. If XT is above 75% then the remaining 25% have at least several weeks to switch over and they'll almost certainly will do so.

  Posted on August 16, 2015 at 2:38 AM
  Last Edited: August 16, 2015 at 12:27 PM
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• Goefells

  

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  I'm also wondering how miners might be able to game the system for a short while? Surely there will be a short time of overlap where OG bitcoins and new XT bitcoins would be mined and could be double spent by the same miner? Still reading into this more to find out exactly how the update will flow out and how miners might game it.

  Posted on August 16, 2015 at 3:54 AM
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• TatianaMoroz

  

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  Hey guys, I would like to know what the hell is this fork thing? I keep hearing about it but seeing as I don't have much to contribute to the technical discussion, I haven't paid much attention. So how would you explain it to a person new to Bitcoin, or to someone non technical? Why is it happening? What are the possible repercussions? Does this mean Bitcoin's price will go down? Seems like a big deal, no? What problem were they trying to solve?

  Posted on August 16, 2015 at 6:10 AM
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• pooktwo

  

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  @tatianamoroz Hey guys, I would like to know what the hell is this fork thing? I keep hearing about it but seeing as I don't have much to contribute to the technical discussion, I haven't paid much attention. So how would you explain it to a person new to Bitcoin, or to someone non technical? Why is it happening? What are the possible repercussions? Does this mean Bitcoin's price will go down? Seems like a big deal, no? What problem were they trying to solve?

  You can start by reading this blog, it explains things pretty well https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1

  Posted on August 16, 2015 at 7:01 AM
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• TatianaMoroz

  

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  Thanks, but I still will want answers to the specific questions in general. Will check this out, thank you :)

  Posted on August 16, 2015 at 7:06 AM
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