andref
While most altcoins are getting slaughtered, LTC shines propelled higher by Litepay and a new fork. Bitcoin continues its gains as well but stopped short of a new rally. Bitcoin Higher but Stops Short of New Rally Bitcoin prices traded even higher si...
sessin
The article is really interesting! I appreciate the decision of the Bank of England to conduct a study on cryptographic currencies and to introduce a national cryptocurrency by next year. Digital currencies continue to generate excitement these days....
andref
Ether is trading lower versus bitcoin this week. The crypto has lost 12 percent to big brother since Monday as BTC is the preferred crypto this week. Dash on the other hand continues to trade in a range. Ether Down 12 Percent As we mentioned above, E...
Buyer80
Distribution of a real aelf (ELF) !!! Ability to receive up to 5000 per week! traded on large exchanges https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/aelf/#markets https://candy.aelf.io/account/register?invitationCode=0Q1T51dGbUcV
andref
During the past week, we’re seeing more gains for Bitcoin. This, in turn, led to gains in altcoins like Litecoin as the general crypto market recovers from large losses. Bitcoin Up by 13 Percent Bitcoin is currently quoted at $8,520 dollars per coi...
bzeebee
Suggested Hardware for Monero (XMR) Mining Rig GPUs: Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 8GB Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 4GB MSI RX 580 GAMING X 8G Gigabyte GTX 1070 G1 Gaming Gigabyte GTX 1080 Ti GAMING OC Motherboard: ASRock H81 PRO BTC, GIGABYTE GA-H110-D3A,...
@edgelogic Sorry, but comments like: "For the record, at LTB we will be switching all our nodes over to BitcoinXT to ensure we stay on the proper chain when the fork is triggered early next year." Just confirm a clear bias and partiality.. "the proper chain" ... really?
When I say "proper chain", I mean "longest chain". If we use BitcoinXT, but nobody else does and no fork ever happens, we will still be on the "proper chain". However if we use Bitcoin Core and don't switch when the fork happens (which remember, only happens when a supermajority is triggered), then yeah we will be on the wrong chain.
A site such as LTB always had an opportunity to try and be impartial, but apparently has never bothered. Mike Hearn's open letter justifying his actions is full of so many logical contradictions its embarrassing. The essential nature of the whole Bitcoin movement is about 'consensus', anyone going along with this coup, clearly doesn't understand that. Disruptive innovation takes time.. Those who lack patience and want to force their ideas through without clear consensus are not in this for the right reasons.. But the history of the crypto currency movement over the last few years is full of people who took an opportunistic, tokensistic approach.. (pun intended).
Care to point out the specific contradictions you saw in Mikes post? I didn't notice any, seemed pretty spot on to me. I have been glued to the screen following this the past few days and the only response from the opposing side has been censorship and snarky twitter comments. This isn't something that is being rushed out, this has been a long time coming and many people paying attention have been aware of it.
Also, don't mistake support for XT as any sort of bias for Mike or Gavin specifically. The move to BitcoinXT is about keeping in line with the original values of bitcoin described by Satoshi and outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Global, electronic, P2P cash for the internet. It's the reason we are all here to begin with. Unfortunately much of the Core dev team (see: blockstream folks) seems to have strayed from those values and have decided bitcoin is better suited as a high value settlement network, and that it is better to stall growth and only do things their way, despite what the rest of the ecosystem thinks. If the same sort of deadlock situation happens with BitcoinXT years from now, then it will suffer the same fate.
And to re-quote what @adam just quoted :p
This is how the system is supposed to work. If the big-blockists are able to persuade the majority of miners, exchanges, and users that bigger blocks are better, they will win in the end. If not, the small-blockists will win. Either way, in the end, the shorter chain will be abandoned eventually, and there will be only one Bitcoin again.
Also, forgetting everything else for a moment.. I think it is worthwhile to prove that Bitcoin can be successfully evolved and forked away from the main project maintainers, and still survive afterwards. It's the anti-fragility of the internet in action
If Gavin was the boss he wouldn't need to get every single person to agree and in practice this is them saying they don't believe they can
Ironically, IIRC Gavin still has the main control over the Github repo, so if he really wanted to he could actually boot out everyone with commit access and start fresh. I'm sure he knows the epic levels of drama that would result in if he actually did though haha
@maxentropy Hi Cryptonaut,
Again... no one in software development rolls back to another fork eights months back in a live operational system... hundreds of code changes.
This is the definition of bizarre.
Not sure what you mean? Yesterdays release of BitcoinXT brings it up to the latest version of Core, but with the additional block size changes.
@MaxEntropy if you want to talk about potential conflicts of interest etc... are you forgetting Blockstream, which mysteriously raised $21 million (with no apparent business plan) in funding late last year and consists of several of the Bitcoin Core devs, including multiple with direct commit access? All of whom happen to be unanimously against increasing the block size or making any serious change to the protocol, while at the same time building their own off chain systems and pushing the idea of bitcoin as a purely high value settlement network.... how is that not a conflict of interest?
If as Hearn and Andresen argue, that the Block Size change is so urgent... simply advocate for changing the Bitcoin Core.
They are not doing that.
They did this for years. You can find posts on bitcointalk about how the block size limit is a bad idea, way back when it was first introduced. Discussion on removing the cap has been going on for years, you can even see Gavin talking about raising the limit back in October last year in his scalability roadmap post: http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/a-scalability-roadmap/ . Since the issue has been put in the spot light the past several months, over and over again Greg Maxwell and other Core devs have stated that they would immediately reverse any patch which includes the changes. They refuse to make any sort of decision that requires a hard fork, so now we are just doing it for them.
So while your question, Adam, is constructive, it remains bizarre to the observer that Bitcoin Core guys would drop their work and jump on board for another system - just to fix a narrow Block Size issue.
Bumping the Block Size can not be that difficult.
--
Something much larger is at play.
It's not that difficult, and it isn't even really a whole other system. BitcoinXT is literally a clone of Bitcoin Core but with some minor changes, and then also the block size code which itself isn't terribly complicated. It's sort of like how there is lots of different variants of Linux
@ademczuk I appreciate the alert but as a casual user I can see that Mike hearn (or whomever he represents) has created a problem to solve. @adam If XT cannot solve scaling then this fork is an attack.
The apache tribe was defeated by admiting that they could only survive by centralising their livestock. You tought me this in your first 20 episodes.
There is no such thing as "solving" scaling - it's a sliding scale, hence the name. We can't expect to just wait around until we figure out a solution that will let us go from the current 100,000 transactions a day to 7,000,000,000,000+ transactions per day instantly. We still have to get to the 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 per day mark, and the easiest and most obvious way to do that right now is to increase the block size limit, which has already previously been raised (everyone was using lower soft limits before) in similar situations of increasing TX volume.. So what we are talking about is keeping things business as usual for the next several years, and then we can work on figuring out how to get to a hundred million or a billion+ transactions per day. Additional nodes on the network come naturally with the adoption (main reason nodes have been going down up till now is actually the transition from hosting the blockchain yourself to just using SPV wallets like Mycelium)
Welcome Mike as our new bitcoin overlord? This feels wrong.
Wrong? Mike (and Gavin, apparently) just wants to get more than 75% of nodes to all use the same client. A client that he has complete control over.
Once the switch is made, it will make it easier for Mike to roll out some of his other pet projects. Perhaps we get redlists with v11.1?
And I haven't heard anyone mention the second part of the protocol change, the doubling every 2 years...
What could possibly go wrong?
Edit @Adam - re: "benevolent dictator or deadlock" .. how can you be sure that Mike Hearn is benevolent? Or that once he is given the keys to the kingdom he will stay that way?
That's true, but you can say that about anyone. I can sit here and pick apart 10 ideas from Greg Maxwell that I don't like, so why should I trust Core? Anyways I'm pretty sure Mike knows by now if he actually tried implementing stuff like that, people would lose their shit, plus a lot of his other ideas seem to just be him thinking out loud, rather than seriously "I'm going to do this". Either way, it doesn't matter because if BitcoinXT turns into the same sort of deadlock, or goes rouge and actively includes tools for censorship or w/e, then today's story will just repeat itself and you will see a movement to BitcoinZY or whatever else. Maybe that's inevitable, it only took about 5 or 6 years for it to happen to the Core project, so it could be a cycle :p
And I haven't heard anyone mention the second part of the protocol change, the doubling every 2 years...
I don't know anything about this, link or any light you can shed?
Yeah, every 2 years the cap doubles, for 20 years until it reaches 8GB IIRC. So in 2018 the cap will be 16MB, 2020 it will be 32MB and so on. Miners still have their soft limits though, so realistically no one is going to be mining blocks that don't make sense to mine. There is also another catch there though... the legacy network protocol has a fundamental limit of 32MB, so eventually it is going to need to be rewritten and there will need to be a hard fork. Gavin mentions this briefly in his scalability roadmap he posted last year http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/a-scalability-roadmap/
@twebit What ever happened to the hard fork policy at bitcoin.org? https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/hard-fork-policy Does the XT violate this policy? Always wondered?
Yeah, XT is actually precisely what they are referring to in that post, they just don't outright say it. There is a big argument about it on github.. Pretty much same day that Gavin had originally said he would move over and post the patches to XT if no consensus could be made, they posted that as a pre-emptive move.
@twebit What ever happened to the hard fork policy at bitcoin.org? https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/hard-fork-policy Does the XT violate this policy? Always wondered?
I emailed Gavin for comment on this - One important question is who actually does this apply to? Bitcoin.org isn't an "official" anything, just another site on the internet that can pick what info it displays
So the 'official" policy might just mean it won't be linked from bitcoin.org
Also worthy to note that the same people that run bitcoin.org are the ones that run /r/bitcoin, bitcointalk.org and the "official" bitcoin wiki. Good ole Theymos and friends..
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 :)
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
@imherenow Ok, I have photos taken. Whats the best way to post them here? Imgur? Whats the norm around these parts?
imgur would probably be ideal yeah
@pairmike I purchased some SOG (bitcrystals) yesterday, but I haven't received a confirmation email and they don't appear in my pockets wallet.
Has anyone else experienced the same?
You should have received a confirmation email, but the BitCrystals themselves are not actually being distributed until after the crowdsale is over IIRC
andref
While most altcoins are getting slaughtered, LTC shines propelled higher by Litepay and a new fork. Bitcoin continues its gains as well but stopped short of a new rally. Bitcoin Higher but Stops Short of New Rally Bitcoin prices traded even higher si...
sessin
The article is really interesting! I appreciate the decision of the Bank of England to conduct a study on cryptographic currencies and to introduce a national cryptocurrency by next year. Digital currencies continue to generate excitement these days....
andref
Ether is trading lower versus bitcoin this week. The crypto has lost 12 percent to big brother since Monday as BTC is the preferred crypto this week. Dash on the other hand continues to trade in a range. Ether Down 12 Percent As we mentioned above, E...
Buyer80
Distribution of a real aelf (ELF) !!! Ability to receive up to 5000 per week! traded on large exchanges https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/aelf/#markets https://candy.aelf.io/account/register?invitationCode=0Q1T51dGbUcV
andref
During the past week, we’re seeing more gains for Bitcoin. This, in turn, led to gains in altcoins like Litecoin as the general crypto market recovers from large losses. Bitcoin Up by 13 Percent Bitcoin is currently quoted at $8,520 dollars per coi...
bzeebee
Suggested Hardware for Monero (XMR) Mining Rig GPUs: Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 8GB Sapphire NITRO+ RX 580 4GB MSI RX 580 GAMING X 8G Gigabyte GTX 1070 G1 Gaming Gigabyte GTX 1080 Ti GAMING OC Motherboard: ASRock H81 PRO BTC, GIGABYTE GA-H110-D3A,...