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Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

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• adam

  

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  @omniedge Your answers lead me to suggest that you should consider to openly support one of the proposed Bitcoin core BIPS. Seems BIP 101 (bigger blocks and it includes a scheme to gradually increase the blocksize) works for your need. The majority of developers are not against bigger blocks. They just can not come to consensus with how much and when. There are different BIPS on the table with different proposals for bigger blocks. Other stakeholders such as LTB should express what BIP they prefer. The Core developers are sensible to the Bitcoin community in case they clearly support a BIP proposal.

  I don't want to take a stand on it because it's not my place, I'm not an expert or a developer and I don't want to jump in front of any parade. I just want people to be able to talk about these ideas as we're doing here and for those discussions or the understanding that results from them to guide our course.

  I am not more important than anybody else, I should not have to advertise my opinion as a flagging mechanism for others.

  Jumping to BitcoinXT in the name of preparedness feels excessive. As Charlie Lee stated: "the reason why BitcoinXT is dangerous and irresponsible is because it could potentially destroy Bitcoin and split the userbase into 2 separate Bitcoin networks". Clearly demanded BIPS by the community will avoid that split.

  The thing you're missing is there is no trouble to jump or we wouldn't bother and no trouble to jump back. If the problem gets solved through the normal process, we'll change back and if it doesn't we won't.

  We have no ability to control this process nor is it our place to so we're just acting in our own best interest, not being shy about what we perceive that to be and why that is so. LTB/Tokenly/AdamBLevine are not "leaders" in the community, just participants playing by the same rules as everybody else.

  It is good that Bitcoin can fork when faced with hard choices that have both sides arguing from what they perceive to be the best perspective and neither of them are wrong because they have opposite needs. Whether it's this time or five proposed forks from now, the bitcoin network will eventually come to a problem that neither side is willing to cave on and we'll have two bitcoins at least for a while.

  I am not afraid of that and you should only be afraid of that if the reason you're in bitcoin is because you want it to make you rich.

  By the way, Love the work you are doing and understand your need but please reassess your judgement that BitcoinXT is the only solution.

  Thanks - I don't believe BitcoinXT is the only solution as I've explained in the last few posts.

  Posted on August 20, 2015 at 12:45 PM
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• OmniEdge

  

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  @adam

  @omniedge Your answers lead me to suggest that you should consider to openly support one of the proposed Bitcoin core BIPS. Seems BIP 101 (bigger blocks and it includes a scheme to gradually increase the blocksize) works for your need. The majority of developers are not against bigger blocks. They just can not come to consensus with how much and when. There are different BIPS on the table with different proposals for bigger blocks. Other stakeholders such as LTB should express what BIP they prefer. The Core developers are sensible to the Bitcoin community in case they clearly support a BIP proposal.

  I don't want to take a stand on it because it's not my place, I'm not an expert or a developer and I don't want to jump in front of any parade. I just want people to be able to talk about these ideas as we're doing here and for those discussions or the understanding that results from them to guide our course.

  I am not more important than anybody else, I should not have to advertise my opinion as a flagging mechanism for others.

  Jumping to BitcoinXT in the name of preparedness feels excessive. As Charlie Lee stated: "the reason why BitcoinXT is dangerous and irresponsible is because it could potentially destroy Bitcoin and split the userbase into 2 separate Bitcoin networks". Clearly demanded BIPS by the community will avoid that split.

  The thing you're missing is there is no trouble to jump or we wouldn't bother and no trouble to jump back. If the problem gets solved through the normal process, we'll change back and if it doesn't we won't.

  We have no ability to control this process nor is it our place to so we're just acting in our own best interest, not being shy about what we perceive that to be and why that is so. LTB/Tokenly/AdamBLevine are not "leaders" in the community, just participants playing by the same rules as everybody else.

  It is good that Bitcoin can fork when faced with hard choices that have both sides arguing from what they perceive to be the best perspective and neither of them are wrong because they have opposite needs. Whether it's this time or five proposed forks from now, the bitcoin network will eventually come to a problem that neither side is willing to cave on and we'll have two bitcoins at least for a while.

  I am not afraid of that and you should only be afraid of that if the reason you're in bitcoin is because you want it to make you rich.

  By the way, Love the work you are doing and understand your need but please reassess your judgement that BitcoinXT is the only solution.

  Thanks - I don't believe BitcoinXT is the only solution as I've explained in the last few posts.

  Thanks for your time Adam but I do hope LTB and your other services don''t switch to soon to XT. By switching to XT, LTB is casting a vote in favour of that contentious fork. A super majority of 75% of full nodes is only required. Take your time and when it becomes clearer then you can easily make that switch if needed. That action is more powerful than all the words. I personally care more about Bitcoin the system than bitcoin the unit of measurement.

  Posted on August 20, 2015 at 4:35 PM
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• elokk

  

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  I get the impression blocksize debate is a distraction from other patches Mike Hearn has implemented such as IP address blacklisting and who knows what else. I am not fully up to speed on the entire issue but seems as though the other patches are left completely out of the debate. Also, I can't seem to forget Gavin did meet with the CIA awhile back and question if he is being used for some nefarious purpose that he may not understand.

  If something is not broke, there is no need to fix it. I am generally in favor of a blocksize increase but the issue has been made into a huge fiasco and has me very suspicious of XT.

  Posted on August 20, 2015 at 4:39 PM
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• IvanB

  

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  @omniedge

  Thanks for your time Adam but I do hope LTB and your other services don''t switch to soon to XT. By switching to XT, LTB is casting a vote in favour of that contentious fork. A super majority of 75% of full nodes is only required. Take your time and when it becomes clearer then you can easily make that switch if needed. That action is more powerful than all the words. I personally care more about Bitcoin the system than bitcoin the unit of measurement.

  Happy to have Adam respond, but a point of clarity - it's a 75% supermajority of mining power, not nodes. Nothing happens unless > 750 / 1000 blocks mined in January of 2016 are marked with the XT / BIP 101 block version.

  Posted on August 20, 2015 at 4:40 PM
  Last Edited: August 20, 2015 at 4:41 PM
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• adam

  

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  Thanks for your time Adam but I do hope LTB and your other services don''t switch to soon to XT. By switching to XT, LTB is casting a vote in favour of that contentious fork. A super majority of 75% of full nodes is only required. Take your time and when it becomes clearer then you can easily make that switch if needed. That action is more powerful than all the words. I personally care more about Bitcoin the system than bitcoin the unit of measurement.

  The point is it's a symbolic vote until January, you do understand that even if 100% of blocks are voting for XT there will still be no switch to XT until january? So the bitcoin core developers have quite some time to work this out and give us an upgraded version of core including bip101 or whatever the solution winds up being.

  I don't understand your concern about this, it's just not that big of a deal.

  Posted on August 20, 2015 at 4:41 PM
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• adam

  

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  @ivanb

  @omniedge

  Thanks for your time Adam but I do hope LTB and your other services don''t switch to soon to XT. By switching to XT, LTB is casting a vote in favour of that contentious fork. A super majority of 75% of full nodes is only required. Take your time and when it becomes clearer then you can easily make that switch if needed. That action is more powerful than all the words. I personally care more about Bitcoin the system than bitcoin the unit of measurement.

  Happy to have Adam respond, but a point of clarity - it's a 75% supermajority of mining power, not nodes. Nothing happens unless > 750 / 1000 blocks mined in January of 2016 are marked with the XT / BIP 101 block version.

  Good clarification - LTB / Tokenly run no miners, just full nodes so while our switching can be viewed as support I think it really is better characterized as very minor risk mitigation.

  Posted on August 20, 2015 at 4:42 PM
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• sangye

  

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  I haven't been leaning one way or another regarding the BitcoinXT but i had some thoughts.

  1. This may not be the best PR - but then we are always getting bad press from the established media anyway. They write everything from a fairly ignorant point of view and of course this period is called "future of bitcoin in question" on some headlines. However, like all meaningless statements, you can look at it from a lot of angles. Is it so bad to question the future of bitcoin, doesn't that give more chances for reply - news coverage to show how resilient P2P type applications and their community are.

  2. BitcoinXT - even if you hate it, don't want to support it etc. Well, it has definitely presented a chance for the other core developers to be a bit more clear what they are going to do for scalability. BIP100, BIP102, BIP103 ... flexcap and the lightning network need to be fast tracked if they want to say "whoa back there" because they are implementing solutions. In other words - its a good incentive to move forward other ideas - expressed as frustration and a hard fork. We don't have to choose that fork.

  3. Personally my biggest concern for many years has been how sustainable and endlessly can we grow the blockchain. In fact i didn't dive into bitcoin because i had to wait for a while to see if the blockchain would last this long. My personal IT design experience is over 30 years - and i have predicted the demise and success of many things that came and went. I am quite convinced by the reasoning of Mike Hearn and Gavin A. In the future, dealing with a large blockchain could itself be a new BIP. I know that some Miners like the big cloud mining group Genesis Mining - perhaps the only cloud miner consider to probably not be fake - would like to see a moderate increase. So even greedy miners have some love for keeping Bitcoin moving on its current trajectory even if they want to have higher transaction fees.

  4. Economically speaking, timing may matter a great deal. It might be that we have to wait for blocks to get halved a couple of times and the price to grow a great deal before even small amounts of bitcoin pay well for being processed.

  5. I love tokenly and many ideas that use the Bitcoin Blockchain for other applications but i believe those should be stored perhaps in sidechains and that keeping the blocks small might be necessary to prevent all that "extra space" to be used up for strange transactions that don't really improve the "currency" aspect of Bitcoin. Adam was saying that its in his interest to see the blocks get bigger for that reason - but that might also be a reason prevent over-use of the blocks. Tokens and related algorithms can be re-engineered to work with other blockchains.

  6. On the "for" side - I find that when it comes to "voting" democracy end up choosing them most charismatic people, and those who speak with forked tongues. Abrasive, socially inept people get passed by when it turns into a popularity contest. You might consider that in some ways Mike and Gavin are a bit like that quite bad in the PR deparment but are very involved in the development department so if you are choosing - you want to really check what makes you choose. Liking or disliking the personality of people must come into it.

  7. The intentions of BitcoinXT in terms of who can contribute in future to the development - that is in question. Some call this a coup - but that is a way of making it seem illegitimate as though there is an "official government" for bitcoin and these are new dictators. The whole lot of the developers might just join forces again in future.

  8. A lot of the nonsense about this not being needed yet - risk management isn't based on certainty. You have to plan for possible events. So great, if you don't want BitcoinXT make another better Bitcoin Core very soon that answers some of these risk related concerns. Now i don't want the blocksize to keep growing following some kind of random doubling theory. However, if Bitcoin suddenly gets mass adaoption it could be a victim of its own success - that is what capacity planning should be about. Bitcoin should be more elastic to give time for people to really address the scalability in many creative ways.
  Posted on August 21, 2015 at 8:59 AM
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• Dlight

  

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  @Adam

  I'm extremely surprised that LTB would be supporting this obvious attempt at a "coup d'etat" against the Bitcoin system. To put control over the system in the hands of one guy is nuts.

  @Cryptonaut's statement "For the record, at LTB we will be switching all our nodes over to Bitcoin XT to ensure we stay on the proper chain when the fork is triggered early next year."

  is clearly stating that the LTB network is taking sides - the opposite of neutrality.

  The whole point of a distributed system like Bitcoin is that it should be a set of rules that are extremely hard for anyone to alter. The idea that one guy (using the Gavin's name recognition) can fork the network is outrageous and pretty much defeats the whole purpose of crypto-currency.

  While it probably doesn't hurt anything to increase the block-size to 8MB - the further increases up to 8GB are extremely questionable - opening the network to attack in the future. Plus there are numerous other changes to the XT code which are not even being discussed. Why should all of Mike Hearn's pet projects suddenly become adopted with no discussion? Not to mention all of his future pet projects.

  At the moment the public has largely forgotten about Bitcoin so traffic on the system is minimal. But once the public wakes up to the fact that Bitcoin is alive and well - traffic could increase by orders of magnitude in a short time. Just increasing the block size by 8 times doesn't even catch one order of magnitude.

  So as many have said - increasing the blocksize is just a stopgap measure until far more scalable solutions - like payment channels are introduced. Solutions which could handle the many orders of magnitude increases that will be required for Bitcoin to become widely adopted globally.

  We need to remember that these increases tend to happen all at once - not gradually. The network needs to be able to very rapidly explode in size without choking. Just altering the blocksize doesn't achieve this.

  But allowing a coup just to make this temporary fix - is crazy. As the person claiming to be Satoshi said - it will give Bitcoin the appearance of a failed experiment - since it will give dictatorial control to a single person - one who has vowed to do whatever he wants regardless of what the community thinks.

  I definitely recommend that Cryptonaut remove his prominent statement declaring that LTB is switching over to XT.

  Posted on August 23, 2015 at 8:34 AM
  Last Edited: August 23, 2015 at 8:45 AM
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• adam

  

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  @dlight @Adam

  I'm extremely surprised that LTB would be supporting this obvious attempt at a "coup d'etat" against the Bitcoin system. To put control over the system in the hands of one guy is nuts.

  We're not supporting it but we are very much supporting its right to exist and be talked about.

  @Cryptonaut's statement "For the record, at LTB we will be switching all our nodes over to Bitcoin XT to ensure we stay on the proper chain when the fork is triggered early next year."

  is clearly stating that the LTB network is taking sides - which is a big mistake.

  I'll assume you haven't read the whole thread because this has been discussed at length. We are not supporting XT but we are planning to take steps to be compatible with the network, whatever network, emerges from this kerfluffle. Whether or not XT happens, we'll be working explicitly because we're not taking an idealogical stance against the upgrade.

  So to recap, by upgrading our nodes (which, since they do not produce blocks do NOT contribute to the XT change) we are protecting our services and our users from disruption, not taking an ideological stance. @cryptonaut and I have both explained this in previous posts - "proper fork" does not mean that XT is the proper fork, it means whatever the network decides we will be compatible with.

  The whole point of a distributed system like Bitcoin is that it should be a set of rules that are extremely hard for anyone to alter. The idea that one guy (using the Gavin's name recognition) can fork the network is outrageous and pretty much defeats the whole purpose of crypto-currency.

  While it probably doesn't hurt anything to increase the block-size to 8MB - the further increases up to 8GB are extremely questionable - opening the network to attack in the future. Plus there are numerous other changes to the XT code which are not even being discussed. Why should all of Mike Hearn's pet projects suddenly become adopted with no discussion? Not to mention all of his future pet projects.

  At the moment the public has largely forgotten about Bitcoin so traffic on the system is minimal. But once the public wakes up to the fact that Bitcoin is alive and well - traffic could increase by orders of magnitude in a short time. Just increasing the block size by 8 times doesn't even catch one order of magnitude.

  So as many have said - increasing the blocksize is just a stopgap measure until far more scalable solutions - like payment channels are introduced. Solutions which could handle the many orders of magnitude increases that will be required for Bitcoin to become widely adopted globally.

  Fundamentally bitcoin is a peer to peer system. Peer to peer means that blocks must get bigger or instead of scaling vertically the system will need to scale horizontally (more blockchains that can each be intercompatible with each other but stay smaller individually) if it is to stay a "peer to peer" system

  Payment channels are interesting, Lightning network is interesting, lots of things are interesting but none of them are solutions by themselves and all of them contain sacrifices that aren't really discussed when we talk about them as if they are solutions.

  We need to remember that these increases tend to happen all at once - not gradually. The network needs to be able to very rapidly explode in size without choking. Just altering the blocksize doesn't achieve this.

  But allowing a coup just to make this temporary fix - is crazy. As the person claiming to be Satoshi said - it will give Bitcoin the appearance of a failed experiment - since it will give dictatorial control to a single person - one who has vowed to do whatever he wants regardless of what the community thinks.

  I hope @Andreas weighs in on this and I definitely request that cryptonaut remove his prominent statement declaring that LTB is switching over to XT.

  I understand your frustration but appreciate that actually it is you who have picked a side here, not me. You view one potential fork as not having legitimacy in your eyes to exist, you've picked your team and now you're fighting for your team.

  I have not picked. LTB has not picked. Tokenly has not picked. We are being conservative, taking precautions to not be impacted regardless of what happens to the bitcoin network and watching the behavior and arguments coming from both camps.

  There isn't really any advantage to be had picking sides for those of us who just want a good outcome and aren't invested in a particular team. I'd encourage you to step back and just see how this thing plays out rather than crying heresy and supporting the inquisition just because people you respect are calling an undesirable alternative (from their perspective) a coup.

  Posted on August 23, 2015 at 8:56 AM
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• frankenmint

  

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  @adam wow just wow. This is definitely interesting news. I think I've also put it out there that I am against putting us all against each other. The thing is that everyone is here to see bitcoin succeed. I personally want to see a bip that we can all agree to proceed with at a time when it is clear we need to upgrade. People will use bitcoin when there is a killer use case for it, not because it 'now scales'. Thank you for speaking publicly on this Adam.

  People respect both of your viewpoints because this is sort of an authoritarian source as much as bitcointalk or reddit or the next place. Many new persons are drawn onto the podcast. This place is sort of the next level for us to communicate back and forth with us, your audience.

  Posted on August 23, 2015 at 9:07 AM
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