6 ms·

Bitcoin XT 0.11A

60 points by Andrew_Quentin 11y ago

Andrew_Quentin 11y ago
r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic), so thought maybe you hackers can have a discussion about the upcoming bitcoin fork in regards to the blocksize. Some suggest that bitcoin blocks should remain at 1mb, which currently covers around 200k transactions, a limit that is close to being reached. The vast majority seem to want an increase on this capacity for pretty much obvious reasons. However, some relatively newcomer bitcoin developers argue that increasing it will affect decentralisation, and everyone should use a hubs and spoke system instead. Others argue that as the number of users increases, the number of the blockchain applications increase, the number of nodes and miners increases, thus decentralisation increases. In regards to lightning it is still vapourwear, it requires hot wallets - something which has caused many problems - the hubs are likely to be centralised - and fundamentally users should have a choice. So yeah looks like bitcoin will fork.
- gruez 11y ago
  >r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic) As in, actual censorship about all blocksize discussion, or just about XT?
  - jamoes 11y ago
    The #1 story was removed by the moderators. It was an article by Mike Hearn about why he's moving forward with the Bitcoin XT hard fork. [1] The justification for the removal is that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin, and altcoin discussion is not allowed. [2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitcoin_forking https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitcoin_forking/cu4498v https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...
    - johndevor 11y ago
      It's like saying Congress is not allowed to discuss or propose amendments to the constitution. Bitcoin is designed to be fought over and amended, it's built into it. Software is never complete and XT is not an altcoin.
      - Caprinicus 11y ago
        and /r/bitcoin is designed to be completely stupid.
mastermojo 11y ago
Can someone explain what is means for bitcoin to be forked?
- 0x0 11y ago
  you're fucked, sell your BTC, sell your house
- pmorici 11y ago
  In some ways it is like an alt coin. The difference between a 'fork' and a alt coin like litecoin for example is that the 'fork' shares the same genesis block and transaction history as the original up until the point of the 'fork'. Practically speaking if you own Bitcoin prior to the fork I believe it means you will then be able to use your coins on both post 'fork' versions. Once the fork happens you will have to decide which version you want to transact on when you receive new coins. It remains to be seen which version will survive, or if perhaps both versions will.
- toomim 11y ago
  Bitcoin, like all monies, is a social protocol. We agree that a coin has value if it follows certain rules. Some people want to change the rules. But some other people don't want them changed. So now we have two sets of people, the Changers (XT) and the Don't-Changers (Core) who will be following different sets of rules. So their softwares won't play together in places their rules disagree. This will create a "fork" in the ledger histories. If your coins existed before the fork, everyone will see them. But if you transact them in a way that's incompatible with one set of rules, the transaction will only exist on one side of the fork. So the public will then have to choose which side of the fork to live on. They will probably want to live on the dominant side. Then the losing side will give up and switch! Bitcoin-XT actually has a few built-in mechanisms to make this transition graceful. It will only deploy the incompatible rules once it has a 75% majority vote, and is thus confident of success.
therealidiot 11y ago
Some of the messages on the mailing list started to feel a little personal
dang 11y ago
There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746, but it's hard to know whether that one is factual. Since the two threads are closely related, this seems like the one to go with. (This is not based on any opinion about the story itself.)
agorabinary 11y ago
I thought gavin and most of the established bitcoin devs were in favor of increasing the blocksize.. so why is this "lightning" system no one has heard about suddenly the new plan for bitcoin core? Whose clout is pushing this through? I was aware of argument about the 1MB limit but I thought the voices in favor of increasing it far outweighed those against.
- pmorici 11y ago
  I don't think there is any disagreement that the block size will be increased by some amount at some point. It seems to me the major disagreement is by how much and how fast to increase it. Mike Hearn who seems to be the strongest proponent of the XT 'we need larger blocks asap' philosophy and the person who wrote the blog post referenced in the OP is _not_ a core dev as far as I can tell. I've seen comments to the effect that he has repeatedly tried to gain more influence in Bitcoins direction over several years and some people posit that this is him attempting to do more of the same by forking and taking the majority with him leaving him with a lot more power over 'new' XT core's development. Hard to say how much if any truth there is to that. The things Mike says make a lot of sense to me.
  - flarex 11y ago
    Gavin Andresen, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin project is also very outspoken about the need to remove the block size limit kludge that was originally put in by Satoshi. You can read his series of blog posts outlining the arguments here: http://gavinandresen.ninja http://gavinandresen.ninja If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - maaku 11y ago
      Wladimir is the current maintainer of Bitcoin Core.
- 11y ago
altcognito 11y ago
I do not understand bitcoin and the blockchain. Isn't your bitcoin tied up in the mathematics the blockchain? Will those who trade away their money on one blockchain be able to retain it on the other blockchain? Will they synchronize the ledger in some way?
- Rusky 11y ago
  The blockchain is distributed, so "other blockchains" are alternate currencies like Dogecoin.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- DennisP 11y ago
  If the chain forks, then in theory you have the same money on both chains, and could spend it differently in each. In practice, this fork only happens if >75% of miners switch to the new software, and I suspect the whole community would quickly abandon the other fork.
wmf 11y ago
The XT developers could probably defend against the "decentralization" argument by implementing IBLT to speed block propagation and ultimate blockchain compression to reduce disk usage before increasing the block size. But that would probably take years and they don't have years, so never mind.
- maaku 11y ago
  IBLT is basically already implemented and deployed as part of TheBlueMatt's relay network. Improvements to scaling isn't going to come from IBLT.
wfunction 11y ago
Seems like the blockchain is forking too...? What happens to everyone's bitcoins in the meantime? Wouldn't this practically destroy the system?
_wmd 11y ago
It's been some time since Bitcoin has given me reason to break out popcorn, the next few days should be quite fun to watch. :) I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either. While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.
- maaku 11y ago
  Mike was never really involved in Bitcoin Core, and Gavin stepped down 2 years ago.
  - toomim 11y ago
    Make coined the name "Bitcoin Core". Gavin is still a core developer. He stepped down from his Leadership position to become "just" a regular core developer. (I know that Maaku knows this. Just clarifying for the crowd.)
    - maaku 11y ago
      Care to point to what Gavin has worked on in that time frame? There are very few changes that Gavin has contributed back to Bitcoin Core since he handed most of the day-to-day repo management over the Wladimir. I honestly don't know what you are referring to, unless it is the small patches here and there of similar size and importance to things we receive on a daily basis from dozens of people. Gavin pretty much disappeared from core development when he stepped down 2 years ago.
      - toomim 11y ago
        Sorry Maaku, but I think you are taking this thread off-topic. The number of contributions Gavin has made since stepping down from Leadership is not relevant to the point "Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them." More specifically, the number of his recent commits (or other contributions) does not speak to (1) the length of time he has been a member of Bitcoin, (2) whether he has been in "good standing", or (3) whether there are obvious reasons to doubt him. It appears, rather, that you have some ill feelings towards Gavin, and are letting these feelings leak into your thoughts by belittling Gavin's contributions to Bitcoin. A better way to address this point, while still expressing your feelings, would be to say "Gavin is not in good standing with me. I think he's an asshole for going around our consensus process. Fuck him. I disagree that he is in good standing, and I doubt his leadership."
themgt 11y ago
Best explanation of how this will work is on their site: "By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes. At that point a waiting period of two weeks begins to allow news of the new consensus to spread and allow anyone who hasn't upgraded yet to do so. During this time, existing Bitcoin Core nodes will be printing a message notifying the operators about the availability of an upgraded version. If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants." https://bitcoinxt.software/ https://bitcoinxt.software/ What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet". I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it. Interesting times.
- hollerith 11y ago
  >let users "vote with their feet" Let's be precise: it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Doesn't matter what miners do.
  - themgt 11y ago
    Right, good point, since it'd effectively be the hashrate making decisions, not "one user one vote", which is maybe not really workable in a standard blockchain system.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jsprogrammer 11y ago
So...I now have double the coins, but separated onto two chains?
- STRML 11y ago
  You have the same number of coins, and will continue to until the point that a block is mined on the XT chain that would not be accepted by Core clients. The absolute earliest that could possibly happen is January 25 (Jan 11 activation date + 2 week grace period). But that 2wk grace period only actually activates after 75% of the hashing power globally moves to XT. So at the time XT actually forks, users will have had plenty of notice. Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    I mean, the coins I hold now (or whatever the fork date is) can be spent on both the XT chain and the Core chain.
  - pilgrim689 11y ago
    I may be wrong here but assuming you're broadcasting to both networks, your transaction is valid in both XT and Core so they'd both try to add it to a block. The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.
Jaystone 11y ago
With the Bitcoin price on a steady downward spiral into oblivion, I'd have to say that the XT fork was a really stupid idea. Thanks for scaring all of the investors, you bunch of retards. Smooth move, X-Lax!!!

r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic), so thought maybe you hackers can have a discussion about the upcoming bitcoin fork in regards to the blocksize. Some suggest that bitcoin blocks should remain at 1mb, which currently covers around 200k transactions, a limit that is close to being reached. The vast majority seem to want an increase on this capacity for pretty much obvious reasons. However, some relatively newcomer bitcoin developers argue that increasing it will affect decentralisation, and everyone should use a hubs and spoke system instead. Others argue that as the number of users increases, the number of the blockchain applications increase, the number of nodes and miners increases, thus decentralisation increases. In regards to lightning it is still vapourwear, it requires hot wallets - something which has caused many problems - the hubs are likely to be centralised - and fundamentally users should have a choice. So yeah looks like bitcoin will fork.

gruez 11y ago
>r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic) As in, actual censorship about all blocksize discussion, or just about XT?
- jamoes 11y ago
  The #1 story was removed by the moderators. It was an article by Mike Hearn about why he's moving forward with the Bitcoin XT hard fork. [1] The justification for the removal is that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin, and altcoin discussion is not allowed. [2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitcoin_forking https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitcoin_forking/cu4498v https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...
  - johndevor 11y ago
    It's like saying Congress is not allowed to discuss or propose amendments to the constitution. Bitcoin is designed to be fought over and amended, it's built into it. Software is never complete and XT is not an altcoin.
    - Caprinicus 11y ago
      and /r/bitcoin is designed to be completely stupid.

mastermojo 11y ago

Can someone explain what is means for bitcoin to be forked?

0x0 11y ago
you're fucked, sell your BTC, sell your house
pmorici 11y ago
In some ways it is like an alt coin. The difference between a 'fork' and a alt coin like litecoin for example is that the 'fork' shares the same genesis block and transaction history as the original up until the point of the 'fork'. Practically speaking if you own Bitcoin prior to the fork I believe it means you will then be able to use your coins on both post 'fork' versions. Once the fork happens you will have to decide which version you want to transact on when you receive new coins. It remains to be seen which version will survive, or if perhaps both versions will.
toomim 11y ago
Bitcoin, like all monies, is a social protocol. We agree that a coin has value if it follows certain rules. Some people want to change the rules. But some other people don't want them changed. So now we have two sets of people, the Changers (XT) and the Don't-Changers (Core) who will be following different sets of rules. So their softwares won't play together in places their rules disagree. This will create a "fork" in the ledger histories. If your coins existed before the fork, everyone will see them. But if you transact them in a way that's incompatible with one set of rules, the transaction will only exist on one side of the fork. So the public will then have to choose which side of the fork to live on. They will probably want to live on the dominant side. Then the losing side will give up and switch! Bitcoin-XT actually has a few built-in mechanisms to make this transition graceful. It will only deploy the incompatible rules once it has a 75% majority vote, and is thus confident of success.

therealidiot 11y ago

Some of the messages on the mailing list started to feel a little personal

dang 11y ago

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746, but it's hard to know whether that one is factual. Since the two threads are closely related, this seems like the one to go with. (This is not based on any opinion about the story itself.)

agorabinary 11y ago

I thought gavin and most of the established bitcoin devs were in favor of increasing the blocksize.. so why is this "lightning" system no one has heard about suddenly the new plan for bitcoin core? Whose clout is pushing this through? I was aware of argument about the 1MB limit but I thought the voices in favor of increasing it far outweighed those against.

pmorici 11y ago
I don't think there is any disagreement that the block size will be increased by some amount at some point. It seems to me the major disagreement is by how much and how fast to increase it. Mike Hearn who seems to be the strongest proponent of the XT 'we need larger blocks asap' philosophy and the person who wrote the blog post referenced in the OP is _not_ a core dev as far as I can tell. I've seen comments to the effect that he has repeatedly tried to gain more influence in Bitcoins direction over several years and some people posit that this is him attempting to do more of the same by forking and taking the majority with him leaving him with a lot more power over 'new' XT core's development. Hard to say how much if any truth there is to that. The things Mike says make a lot of sense to me.
- flarex 11y ago
  Gavin Andresen, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin project is also very outspoken about the need to remove the block size limit kludge that was originally put in by Satoshi. You can read his series of blog posts outlining the arguments here: http://gavinandresen.ninja http://gavinandresen.ninja If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - maaku 11y ago
    Wladimir is the current maintainer of Bitcoin Core.
11y ago

altcognito 11y ago

I do not understand bitcoin and the blockchain. Isn't your bitcoin tied up in the mathematics the blockchain? Will those who trade away their money on one blockchain be able to retain it on the other blockchain? Will they synchronize the ledger in some way?

Rusky 11y ago
The blockchain is distributed, so "other blockchains" are alternate currencies like Dogecoin.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
DennisP 11y ago
If the chain forks, then in theory you have the same money on both chains, and could spend it differently in each. In practice, this fork only happens if >75% of miners switch to the new software, and I suspect the whole community would quickly abandon the other fork.

wmf 11y ago

The XT developers could probably defend against the "decentralization" argument by implementing IBLT to speed block propagation and ultimate blockchain compression to reduce disk usage before increasing the block size. But that would probably take years and they don't have years, so never mind.

maaku 11y ago
IBLT is basically already implemented and deployed as part of TheBlueMatt's relay network. Improvements to scaling isn't going to come from IBLT.

wfunction 11y ago

Seems like the blockchain is forking too...? What happens to everyone's bitcoins in the meantime? Wouldn't this practically destroy the system?

_wmd 11y ago

It's been some time since Bitcoin has given me reason to break out popcorn, the next few days should be quite fun to watch. :) I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either. While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.

maaku 11y ago
Mike was never really involved in Bitcoin Core, and Gavin stepped down 2 years ago.
- toomim 11y ago
  Make coined the name "Bitcoin Core". Gavin is still a core developer. He stepped down from his Leadership position to become "just" a regular core developer. (I know that Maaku knows this. Just clarifying for the crowd.)
  - maaku 11y ago
    Care to point to what Gavin has worked on in that time frame? There are very few changes that Gavin has contributed back to Bitcoin Core since he handed most of the day-to-day repo management over the Wladimir. I honestly don't know what you are referring to, unless it is the small patches here and there of similar size and importance to things we receive on a daily basis from dozens of people. Gavin pretty much disappeared from core development when he stepped down 2 years ago.
    - toomim 11y ago
      Sorry Maaku, but I think you are taking this thread off-topic. The number of contributions Gavin has made since stepping down from Leadership is not relevant to the point "Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them." More specifically, the number of his recent commits (or other contributions) does not speak to (1) the length of time he has been a member of Bitcoin, (2) whether he has been in "good standing", or (3) whether there are obvious reasons to doubt him. It appears, rather, that you have some ill feelings towards Gavin, and are letting these feelings leak into your thoughts by belittling Gavin's contributions to Bitcoin. A better way to address this point, while still expressing your feelings, would be to say "Gavin is not in good standing with me. I think he's an asshole for going around our consensus process. Fuck him. I disagree that he is in good standing, and I doubt his leadership."

themgt 11y ago

Best explanation of how this will work is on their site: "By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes. At that point a waiting period of two weeks begins to allow news of the new consensus to spread and allow anyone who hasn't upgraded yet to do so. During this time, existing Bitcoin Core nodes will be printing a message notifying the operators about the availability of an upgraded version. If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants." https://bitcoinxt.software/ https://bitcoinxt.software/ What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet". I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it. Interesting times.

hollerith 11y ago
>let users "vote with their feet" Let's be precise: it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet.
- maaku 11y ago
  Doesn't matter what miners do.
- themgt 11y ago
  Right, good point, since it'd effectively be the hashrate making decisions, not "one user one vote", which is maybe not really workable in a standard blockchain system.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jsprogrammer 11y ago

So...I now have double the coins, but separated onto two chains?

STRML 11y ago
You have the same number of coins, and will continue to until the point that a block is mined on the XT chain that would not be accepted by Core clients. The absolute earliest that could possibly happen is January 25 (Jan 11 activation date + 2 week grace period). But that 2wk grace period only actually activates after 75% of the hashing power globally moves to XT. So at the time XT actually forks, users will have had plenty of notice. Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  I mean, the coins I hold now (or whatever the fork date is) can be spent on both the XT chain and the Core chain.
- pilgrim689 11y ago
  I may be wrong here but assuming you're broadcasting to both networks, your transaction is valid in both XT and Core so they'd both try to add it to a block. The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.

Jaystone 11y ago

With the Bitcoin price on a steady downward spiral into oblivion, I'd have to say that the XT fork was a really stupid idea. Thanks for scaring all of the investors, you bunch of retards. Smooth move, X-Lax!!!