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If there is a fork and it is because of this advocacy of Mike Hearn and friends, do they become more prominent as the defacto leaders of bitcoin?
For more context, here's a list of posts by Mike giving some background and some more thoughts: The capacity cliff: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf771... Crash landing: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32 On consensus and forks: https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050... They were quite useful for someone not familiar with the topic.
Let's balance the discussion out a bit: Greg Maxwell's thoughts (small blocks): http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34090559/ About internet bandwidth growth (~neutral): http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=493 An attempt at a well-rounded overview (~neutral): http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535 some thoughts by bittorrent creator Bram Cohen (small blocks): https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a..…
> some thoughts by bittorrent creator Bram Cohen (small blocks): https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a...
I give him a fair bit of credit and he really portrays this quite differently than in the main article here.
Has anyone responded to Bram Cohen's writeup on the pro side of things?
what exactly happens to the value of the currency after the fork? the number of Bitcoins in circulation effectively doubles?
what exactly happens to the value of the currency after the fork? the number of Bitcoins in circulation effectively doubles?
Nobody wants to buy unspendable BTC, so it's in almost everyone's interest to find consensus, even if it's tragedy-of-the-commons consensus, very quickly.
For people who have not been following along, the Bitcoin block size debate has been very intense and pulled out a lot of interesting psychology from the Bitcoin community. Most of the core devs of Bitcoin are strongly opposed to increasing the blocksize to 8mb. 2 people in particular, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, have been making very strong political pushes to get the majority of Bitcoin users to favor their bloc…
I do not like statements like that -- it basically says unless you know as much as me (and if you knew as much as me you'd agree with me), you can not have an opinion. It is pretty exclusionary. Most people can get up to speed fairly fast than that if they have access to good information on both pros and cons.
Security is my concern, even simple changes open big bugs. Bitcoin is not a blog engine where you are just exposing your content, it is one of the most delicate protocols found on Internet and most transactions are irreversible (indeed all transactions are irreversible but sometimes you can recover your money). Forking code sounds great but we are talking here about money and assets, I would prefer agreement even whe…
"...bitcoin is an experiment. It's getting to be a scarier and scarier experiment as it gets larger and larger, because if it fails there will be a lot of people who will lose the money they've invested..." Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin Developer, 2014 - http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/gavin_andresen.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And in a world with only physical gold and no electronic payments, credit cards, wires, how quickly would business move?
That old problem has of course been addressed, e.g. by using things like gold certificates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate Which add their own set of problems, but at least you get a clear signal when they get repudiated. Or you use banks, letters of credit from them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_credit ), etc.
Many crashes in the 1800s were about Banks issuing too many certificates for the amount of Gold that was actually stored in their vaults.
Gold Certificates are no different than credit cards or fractional reserve banking. The bank makes a promise without proving anything, and people are expected to trust the banks for things to work out.
And when the poop hits the fan, people look into the vaults and realize they've been fooled. Maybe the gold really was there, but has been loaned out to another bank (and the banks have gold certificates to another bank). And maybe _THAT_ other bank has been lying this whole time. Its your standard economic issues, too big to fail and all that.
Besides, leaving the Gold Standard was how the world recovered from the Great Depression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Gold_standard
For people who have not been following along, the Bitcoin block size debate has been very intense and pulled out a lot of interesting psychology from the Bitcoin community. Most of the core devs of Bitcoin are strongly opposed to increasing the blocksize to 8mb. 2 people in particular, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, have been making very strong political pushes to get the majority of Bitcoin users to favor their bloc…