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Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

Welp, heading out of town for a few days everyone, looking forward to catching up on the latest shenanigans when I get back :)

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@brighton36 Primarily I think the blocksize is a manufactured controversy. I think Gavin's views have clearly fallen out of favor amongst the other devs, and this entire blocksize debate was his attempt at gaining relevancy by petitioning his case to the community, once rejected by the experts. The block size debate was dying down (as it should have) and having exhausted his credibility with the core team, Gavin is now doubling-down for relevancy with Mike Hern (politics make for strange bedfellows) by forking.

I see it from the opposite point of view actually. Blockstream and affiliates appear to be asserting control over the development process (something which was predicted if you look at posts from late last year when they first announced funding), and from what I have seen it seems like they are the ones blowing it way out of proportion and making it seem like this huge controversy. I don't feel like naming names and digging up quotes right now, I'm sure you've read most of them. But yeah I don't think Gavin intended what should be a fairly obvious change (bumping the limit) to blow up into such a huge ordeal. Mike on the other hand I admit has been way more sensationalist about it, but not as bad as some of the blockstreamers IMO.

Also it's kind of annoying that it's always made out to be literally only Gavin and Mike, as if nobody else in favour of the changes exist, or that nobody outside some specific list of "bitcoin experts" matters.

Fungibility is a far more important issue that the community should be concerned about (though which - IMO, is progressing along very well), but since the community is largely unable to understand the technical issues (because they're not programmers) and since the community loves its doom and gloom porn, you have people like Adam Levine believing the hype.

Bitcoin is already pretty fungible, what's the outstanding issue related to that?

Also like @adam says, not sure what your obsession is with him. The decision to switch to XT quite literally went like this: [me on slack] "so I think we are going to switch all our servers to XT", [adam] "ok sure, I trust you". and that was pretty much the extent of it. Block size issue and XT has hardly been covered on LTB as well.. I've been the one that's been personally paying close attention to it, which is also why I'm the OP of this thread.

All that being said, we should not be moderating so heavily at r/bitcoin. Additionally, I like that bitcoinxt is/will raise good questions.

Agreed.

Questions such as "Why wouldn't Litecoin just be an out of consensus bitcoin fork too?"

Well that's a pretty easy one. Litecoin has a different genesis block, different transaction history, is branded as "Litecoin" and not "Bitcoin", uses a different mining algorithm and has different economic parameters. BitcoinXT is none of those things, except for a single parameter change to allow for more capacity.

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@brighton36

As for r/buttcoin, don't take it too seriously - a lot of bitcoiners (myself included) go there to make fun of ourselves. I don't think that's so real a community these days as it once was. In fact, I may go there and link to this very post :)

Oh I don't take /r/buttcoin seriously at all, I know what you mean. It's all good entertainment

I suspect what will happen is that the core devs will raise the block size, as expected, and on a reasonable time scale. At which time, adam levine will announce that this was his intent the whole time, and switch back to bitcoind.

You can blame me for the switch to XT actually, Adam doesn't know much about that stuff nor handle it. Currently waiting to port over the addrindex patch before really switching though since all but one of my nodes is also used by counterparty. I don't see any compelling reason to switch back to bitcoind afterwards since it's already just Core but with a few additions. That can change at any time though, I hold no loyalties.

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@brighton36 just to clarify, what is your stance on the block size (ignoring XT for a moment)?

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@ivanb

@brighton36 @adamlevine : We all know you love your shitcoins, but bitcoinxt is an obvious attempt by Gavin and Mike to use you like a tool: http://shitco.in/2015/08/19/the-bitcoin-xt-trojan/

The "you're too stupid to understand why BitcoinXT is bad" argument has been repeated fairly often by those clearly opposed to it. Do you think framing the argument in this manner is likely to accomplish your goals? Or is more likely to drive the wedge even further in the community and make it even less likely to have a common agreement on scalability?

Also, the long winded article you reference ranks very high on the conspiracy theory scale, which I'm sure is interesting to a number of people - I'm not one of them. A large part of the handwringing about blacklists centers around the anti-ddos mechanism in XT. In case you want to read more about it, here it is, when Mike Hearn announced it 3 weeks ago (not exactly a hidden feature).

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bitcoin-xt/wwj54iGCVmI/lGTsWSUyuAMJ

For those that don't want it, this feature is easy to disable via the -disableipprio flag.

I notice that a lot of the same types of people that /r/buttcoin likes to make fun of are the same ones in the anti-big-blocks crowd - very romantic view of bitcoin and seeing conspiracies at every corner, while at the same time seeming to have little idea on how this stuff works (often because they aren't programmers, or inexperienced/naive). And everybody loves to overthink things and take shit out of context to try and win their arguments or fit their narrative (e.g "omg Gavin talked to the CIA so therefore he's corrupt")... just makes them look stupid.. sad, really. Some of the stuff I have read the past few days makes you really understand why there is a community called buttcoin lol.

Some other thoughts:

• Some certain Maximalists are going to be very disappointed when no viable "XTCoin" "CoreCoin" market is created. I shouldn't have to explain why that is a) extremely unlikely and b) an extremely stupid idea for any serious exchange
• Putting a protocol change up for pure network consensus vote is a method of last resort, but is also one of the most important tools we have since it can prevent centralization of the development team. This could have been prevented a while ago, but it is what it is. Something like this would inevitably happen.. don't forget it's only year 6.
• @brighton36 Bitcoin is not punk rock, Bitcoin is death metal, punk rockers are pussies. Hope you can handle yourself in the Pit :)
• It's going to be fun a year from now looking back and then seeing what the losing side (whichever way it goes) has to say for themselves. For example luke-jr has said a few times already that if the switch to XT and block size increase happens he will probably go and find some other alt-coin to work on. Unfortunate that it's become that big of a deal to some people.

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@omniedge BitcoinXT is a fork which i doubt is widely demanded by the community. Even if it is it might arguably not make it better. A fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but a split in the developer community, a form of schism. This fork is dividing Bitcoin-core into 2 camps while there is, currently, no issue . A BIP would be more appropriate. Why doesn't the XT camp promote a BIP? Divide and conquer seems to be on the menu at the moment.

There is a BIP, it's BIP 101, submitted last month here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0101.mediawiki

The problem is that Greg Maxwell and a few others have explicitly said they will reject any pull requests from Gavin relating to this, so instead he's releasing it through XT. If the Core devs want to avoid any possible split in consensus, they can include the same patch implementing BIP 101 with minimal effort. It's compatible with both Core and XT. There is even a version of XT which is specifically just the default version of Core but with the added big blocks patch, making it even easier (https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/tree/only-bigblocks)

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@frankenmint

@cryptonaut

@ivanb "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave." -Theymos

It's consistent with the way he acts, but wow...hard to believe that we have 'leadership' like that in the Bitcoin community. Keep it up Theymos - you might actually push more people to run to XT and a different way of thinking than if you had just allowed discussions to take place.

Yeah, I think his time is coming to an end finally. You can see the subreddit subscribers slowly dropping down lol.

Calling BS there. Literally 1K members unsubscribed of over 172K...the number is already recovering back to where it was before people left which means that a lot of people were bluffing. In other news, it IS good to see XT attempting to push the 500 nodes barrier: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/?q=/Bitcoin%20XT:0.11.0/

Also, look at the reactions from bitcointalk - many of the users there are on the other side of the fence as those of reddit users...also a few people in my own local group of in person contacts agree for increased blocks but not through XT.

eh, that is still a pretty big amount of members to actually go through with unsubscribing after just a day or 2 of drama. Either way there is definitely a split occurring in the bitcoin community, with people spreading out to a bunch of other subreddits and other forums (maybe not everyone, but enough to be noticeable). Not surprising that many on bitcointalk feel the other way though.. most people fed up with Theymos stopped frequenting bitcointalk ages ago.

also a few people in my own local group of in person contacts agree for increased blocks but not through XT

Maybe they can push for Core to adopt the same BIP (101), and this whole ordeal can be avoided then?

@omniedge

@cryptonaut

@ivanb "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave." -Theymos

It's consistent with the way he acts, but wow...hard to believe that we have 'leadership' like that in the Bitcoin community. Keep it up Theymos - you might actually push more people to run to XT and a different way of thinking than if you had just allowed discussions to take place.

Yeah, I think his time is coming to an end finally. You can see the subreddit subscribers slowly dropping down lol.

Technically, Theymos might have point. It is a Bitcoin subreddit after all. BitcoinXT does not belong there. Same is valid for Ethereum and all other altcoins. if you create a fork that uses the same original codebase but diverges in another direction that competes with the original project, even if legally speaking the license doesn't require you to do that, ethically speaking you should change the name of the software. In this case BitcoinXT should not create spam in a Bitcoin subreddit. Worst case scenario, we should respect and protect the minority from the majority with basic rules.

Actually, he doesn't have a point because BitcoinXT is plain and simple not an alt-coin. It's a slight variant of the Bitcoin Core reference client, which if widely adopted will introduce some protocol changes which are being widely demanded by the community. This isn't the first and only time the protocol has ever changed, so if you are going to call BitcoinXT an alt-coin then by the same logic so is Bitcoin Core, and at that point the term "alt-coin" has lost all meaning completely.

even if legally speaking the license doesn't require you to do that

The bitcoin network does not recognize law. The longest and strongest chain which calls itself Bitcoin is the real bitcoin, doesn't matter if the entire network consists of nodes running Bitcoin Core, BitcoinXT or BitcoinXY.

Re: Upcoming Bitcoin Hard Fork & /r/bitcoin censorship

@ivanb "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave." -Theymos

It's consistent with the way he acts, but wow...hard to believe that we have 'leadership' like that in the Bitcoin community. Keep it up Theymos - you might actually push more people to run to XT and a different way of thinking than if you had just allowed discussions to take place.

Yeah, I think his time is coming to an end finally. You can see the subreddit subscribers slowly dropping down lol.