Why is Bitcoin forking?

Post by zzalpha » Sun, Aug 16, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #26

Taek wrote: post #15

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…

> having a qualified opinion on something like the blocksize debate likely requires around a year of studying the academic properties of Bitcoin. 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 go…

Post by nathanm412 » Sun, Aug 16, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #30

This is common with many things now. The people in the know are treated like gods that cant be wrong. The global warming debate comes to mind.

Post by lawn » Sun, Aug 16, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #17

lawn wrote: post #13

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..…

Post by im3w1l » Sun, Aug 16, 2015, 3:02 PM UTC

ctz wrote: post #20

im3w1l wrote: post #7

This was bound to happen sooner or later. Good that is "only" about something relatively minor like this, so that the community can practice handling it. Maybe later there will be a conflict where serious money is on the line and it would be bad if that was the first one. I mean this change will affect miner revenue, but transactions fees are still completely insignificant compared to block rewards.

I thought that if the split does happen all existing coins will be spendable on both sides of the split. Does that not count as 'serious money' on the line?!

Post by hellbanner » Sun, Aug 16, 2015, 3:08 PM UTC

troymc wrote: post #36

Taek wrote: post #15

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…

"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan." - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle The argument that "I understand this and you don't, so you don't get a vote" seems like a lazy way to suppress democratic process. A better alternative is, "This might seem complicated, but really it's not; here's a simple but complete explanation to help you make a…