8 ms·

Yeah, if the fees are lower and the network is less congested I wonder if legacy Bitcoin could get overtaken for small transactions?

TekMol 9y ago
If so, that would be a historic victory of pragmatism. A lot of popular engineers in powerful positions have been working for years on how to scale Bitcoin. Now some people said "Fuck that! We will just increase this integer from 1 to 8". Reminds me of how Linus Torvalds created a simple monolithic Kernel while GNU&Co were working on sophisticated microkernels. Now, 26 years later, everything from servers to smartphones runs on Linux. And GNU Herd is still considered experimental.
- omgtehlion 9y ago
  With the same success you could have forked bitcoin with the same block size, or just minor increase. BCC is currently not congested only due to small number of transactions happening there.
- poorman 9y ago
  And here I thought Linux won out because BSD was wrapped up in a lawsuit. http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/062615/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-compan...
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers' ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD's legal future. In the time frame they are talking about, 1993-1994, almost nobody was using Linux commercially (except tjhe distros selling it). Even after that, Linux was fairly immature. If BSD was going to be a real contender, it still had a sizable lead. That it didn't win in the end leads me to believe other factors were more important, such as the license (which the article you linked also notes). The BSD license is more permissive and appealing to a lot of organizations, but the requirement of the GPL to give back ultimately lead to a virtuous cycle where companies moved portions of their code in-kernel, because out of kernel is more problematic if it's also not proprietary.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    I've heard that's one of the big reasons Linux succeeded over 386BSD (?), but GP is right that GNU could have just made their own OS a few times over in the time Linux has been around and they've barely achieved anything other than starting over at least once with a new kernel.
    - ue_ 9y ago
      GNU has made an OS, and it is frequently used in conjunction with Linux. HURD on the other hand according to Stallman is of lower priority because there is already a major copyleft kernel and so the pressure of necessity is much lower, leading developers to want to spend more time on other projects.
      - legulere 9y ago
        GNU is not an operating system, but a collection of mostly commandline tools. If you look at Linux distributions, GNU ist just a relatively small part if you look at lines of code. And of that most is GCC and GDB: http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux/ http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux/
        snakeanus 9y ago
        GNU is often used with Linux in order to comprise a full OS as defined by POSIX. It so happens that GNU can also be used by itself to do the same thing (by using GNU HURD and GNU MACH). >GNU is not an operating system Could you please elaborate on this position? >but a collection of mostly commandline tools. "Mostly" being the keyword, it also contains multiple implementations of different programming languages as well as their standard libraries, a kernel as well as a package manager. Also in the commandline tools it includes most (if not all) of the tools that are required by POSIX. > If you look at Linux distributions, GNU ist just a relatively small part if you look at lines of code I am unsure how this is relevant. In fact, I would argue that this is to be expected, especially when considering that the link checked everything in the main repository.
        9y ago
- justadeveloper2 9y ago
  Except nobody was "investing" (speculating) on GNU Herd. It should give a lot of people pause that Bitcoin can just suddenly split like this. What's to stop it from being split again and again?
  - epistasis 9y ago
    It's not so sudden, it's been a continuous debate for years. It's likely that there will be future splits as well. The split is only successful if enough people start using it. It involves a lot of trust, but no more than one has had to have from the beginning of bitcoin. What should give us pause about that?
  - opportune 9y ago
    The split itself is not damaging. It's like if 100 bars of your gold were suddenly 100 bars of gold and 100 bars of gold cash. The original gold marketplace is only affected as much as it is replaced by the gold cash marketplace. So it doesn't matter how many times the coin gets split in this fashion
    - johannes1234321 9y ago
      While This analgy works only to some limited degree - gold has a value in itself, you can use it to build some jewels, an electric conductor or a door stopper among other things. A Bitcoin has no inherent value. If nobody is interested in Bitcoin (or Bitcoin cash) anymore it's just a few bits in a disk which can be overwritten.
  - sayurichick 9y ago
    simple. The cost of pulling it off. Even if I had a million dollars in funding, that would buy me mining power for oh so long. All the meanwhile, If I change the rules too much no one would even attempt to join my fork. Even If I had another million dollars to pay developers to build services on my new fork, there'd be no users and no economic activity. The fork would die. There SHOULD be a lot of hard forks. Why? Because they're voluntary and most will fail without doing harm (they require consensus to matter). The good ones will survive on merit and act as protocol upgrades.
Zarath 9y ago
No, Litecoin already exists.
- hendzen 9y ago
  The killer feature is having the same UTXO history as legacy Bitcoin. That is a genius way of on-boarding a huge array of users without having to worry about a premine/crowdsale considering those are ridiculously overcrowded at the moment.
  - antocv 9y ago
    The other genius part was doing this today, when the small-blockers and segwit proponents already had marketed this day for their supposed "USAF" - the anti-miner consensus-by-amount-of-nodes change. Had this fork been done months before, not many would have noticed or cared. Well played.

TekMol 9y ago

If so, that would be a historic victory of pragmatism. A lot of popular engineers in powerful positions have been working for years on how to scale Bitcoin. Now some people said "Fuck that! We will just increase this integer from 1 to 8". Reminds me of how Linus Torvalds created a simple monolithic Kernel while GNU&Co were working on sophisticated microkernels. Now, 26 years later, everything from servers to smartphones runs on Linux. And GNU Herd is still considered experimental.

omgtehlion 9y ago
With the same success you could have forked bitcoin with the same block size, or just minor increase. BCC is currently not congested only due to small number of transactions happening there.
poorman 9y ago
And here I thought Linux won out because BSD was wrapped up in a lawsuit. http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/062615/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-compan...
- kbenson 9y ago
  Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers' ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD's legal future. In the time frame they are talking about, 1993-1994, almost nobody was using Linux commercially (except tjhe distros selling it). Even after that, Linux was fairly immature. If BSD was going to be a real contender, it still had a sizable lead. That it didn't win in the end leads me to believe other factors were more important, such as the license (which the article you linked also notes). The BSD license is more permissive and appealing to a lot of organizations, but the requirement of the GPL to give back ultimately lead to a virtuous cycle where companies moved portions of their code in-kernel, because out of kernel is more problematic if it's also not proprietary.
- MBCook 9y ago
  I've heard that's one of the big reasons Linux succeeded over 386BSD (?), but GP is right that GNU could have just made their own OS a few times over in the time Linux has been around and they've barely achieved anything other than starting over at least once with a new kernel.
  - ue_ 9y ago
    GNU has made an OS, and it is frequently used in conjunction with Linux. HURD on the other hand according to Stallman is of lower priority because there is already a major copyleft kernel and so the pressure of necessity is much lower, leading developers to want to spend more time on other projects.
    - legulere 9y ago
      GNU is not an operating system, but a collection of mostly commandline tools. If you look at Linux distributions, GNU ist just a relatively small part if you look at lines of code. And of that most is GCC and GDB: http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux/ http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux/
      - snakeanus 9y ago
        GNU is often used with Linux in order to comprise a full OS as defined by POSIX. It so happens that GNU can also be used by itself to do the same thing (by using GNU HURD and GNU MACH). >GNU is not an operating system Could you please elaborate on this position? >but a collection of mostly commandline tools. "Mostly" being the keyword, it also contains multiple implementations of different programming languages as well as their standard libraries, a kernel as well as a package manager. Also in the commandline tools it includes most (if not all) of the tools that are required by POSIX. > If you look at Linux distributions, GNU ist just a relatively small part if you look at lines of code I am unsure how this is relevant. In fact, I would argue that this is to be expected, especially when considering that the link checked everything in the main repository.
        9y ago
justadeveloper2 9y ago
Except nobody was "investing" (speculating) on GNU Herd. It should give a lot of people pause that Bitcoin can just suddenly split like this. What's to stop it from being split again and again?
- epistasis 9y ago
  It's not so sudden, it's been a continuous debate for years. It's likely that there will be future splits as well. The split is only successful if enough people start using it. It involves a lot of trust, but no more than one has had to have from the beginning of bitcoin. What should give us pause about that?
- opportune 9y ago
  The split itself is not damaging. It's like if 100 bars of your gold were suddenly 100 bars of gold and 100 bars of gold cash. The original gold marketplace is only affected as much as it is replaced by the gold cash marketplace. So it doesn't matter how many times the coin gets split in this fashion
  - johannes1234321 9y ago
    While This analgy works only to some limited degree - gold has a value in itself, you can use it to build some jewels, an electric conductor or a door stopper among other things. A Bitcoin has no inherent value. If nobody is interested in Bitcoin (or Bitcoin cash) anymore it's just a few bits in a disk which can be overwritten.
- sayurichick 9y ago
  simple. The cost of pulling it off. Even if I had a million dollars in funding, that would buy me mining power for oh so long. All the meanwhile, If I change the rules too much no one would even attempt to join my fork. Even If I had another million dollars to pay developers to build services on my new fork, there'd be no users and no economic activity. The fork would die. There SHOULD be a lot of hard forks. Why? Because they're voluntary and most will fail without doing harm (they require consensus to matter). The good ones will survive on merit and act as protocol upgrades.

Zarath 9y ago

No, Litecoin already exists.

hendzen 9y ago
The killer feature is having the same UTXO history as legacy Bitcoin. That is a genius way of on-boarding a huge array of users without having to worry about a premine/crowdsale considering those are ridiculously overcrowded at the moment.
- antocv 9y ago
  The other genius part was doing this today, when the small-blockers and segwit proponents already had marketed this day for their supposed "USAF" - the anti-miner consensus-by-amount-of-nodes change. Had this fork been done months before, not many would have noticed or cared. Well played.