Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#331

Post by sobani » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

olegkikin wrote: post #256

comex wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if blocks are being produced at 10% of the expected rate, it will take 14*10=140 days before the difficulty is recalculated.

If you're hard-forking, you can increase the recalculation rate for a few first new blocks. You can even recalculate every block for, say, 1000 or 5000 blocks .

But that wouldn't work for the 'victim chain' of the fork. In this case the idea is that 90% of the miners fork, while 10% remain on the original version.

I don't know if non-miners also check the difficulty or difficulty calculations, but if they do, even the minority chain can't fork without affecting existing users.

In that case everyone would need to fork in which case you're back to square one: what to do with the users that can't or don't want to fork. And if you need to fork anyway, it makes little sense to go with the minority chain.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#332

Post by sobani » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #213

BenoitP wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as one miner is still mining the core chain, the transaction will be validated. It may take a little while at first, but difficulty will adapt. It's going to be 2 legitimate currencies that are going to differ in value in exchanges. And each current BTC holder will be able to spend 2 coins (provided they take precautions against replayability; like making at first a double-spend to different wallets on the tw…

That's not true. If not enough people are mining the core chain, then it will be attacked, and your money will be stole due to double spend attacks.

You can't steal with a double spend. At worst you can send a transaction and then later undo it. But that would require the dishonest party to work together with or be the hostile miner.

I'm pretty sure the backlash against both the hostile miner and all of Bitcoin combined would not be worth it, except in a Joker 'Let's burn all this cash' kind of way.

The worst a majority can do, is to create a new longest chain without any transactions. But in that case the transactions would still exist and can be mined again later (and supplanted again later).

But that would require a miner to want to spend resources to hurt the minority fork.

If the minority fork is big enough to be a threat, that would require a lot of 'majority' miners to work together to pull off this attack, which would lead to a tragedy of the commons situation. Any majority miner who doesn't participate in the attack would gain.

If the minority fork is small enough to be a toy for a single miner, it still doesn't make sense to put in the still substantial effort.

Just look at the Ethereum fork. Afaik there have been no shenanigans pulled of by a majority miner on the minority fork, even though it's only about 10% of the size.

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#333

Post by erikpukinskis » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 7:21 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #93

erikpukinskis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There is no Bitcoin to control. Bitcoin is an idea, and there can be as many variations as people have ideas. There will be a main trunk, centered around the middle of the market, but the whole point of cryptocurrencies is they can be forked and survive. In the new world, everyone has their own universe. The sooner one believes, the stronger their position in the 2030 economy.

Name one that has forked and survived. Ethereum Classic is not "surviving".

It's early days my friend.

Imagine a "Confederacy Coin" that forks from a "US Federal Coin". You don't think that cold survive?

Re: Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month

#334

Post by knocte » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 9:15 AM UTC

buttershakes wrote: post #151

knocte wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if I don't like the consensus driven code of Bitcoin my only choice is to sell Wrong. What's the choice you have when you disagree with what the maintainers of an opensource project do? You can fork. You're welcome to fork at any time. And in fact this is what we're seeing these days: an attempt of a fork. I believe that, as with the majority of the forks in the opensource world, the fork will not succeed, beca…

You seem to be missing my point. I can fork Linux right now, make some random changes and I have a fully functioning equivalent system with those minor changes. I can fork Bitcoin right now, make some random changes to the consensus code, and I have a useless token that has absolutely no value. These two things, are not the same. How can you possibly refute that?

> I can fork Bitcoin right now, make some random changes to the consensus code, and I have a useless token that has absolutely no value.

The value and usefulness of the token you would create is directly proportional to how good your change (divergence) to the software is.