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Why is Bitcoin forking?

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Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#71

Post by pron »

zekevermillion wrote: post #51

There is no law against publishing software that would introduce a blockchain hard fork if run. Yes, XT infuriates those who hope to make money based on the appreciation of their pre-fork bitcoins. Publishing XT introduces economic uncertainty in the short term, and long-term undermines confidence that we can rely on the mathematical promises of bitcoin at all. If XT is successful, why wouldn't Hearn (or Coinbase, or…

> No need for politics, in this case mathematically dictated incentive structures will decide who wins.

Whenever I see a statement like this I smile because that's what politics is[1]. If many people decide to do something based on their interests (rather than, say, being forced to leave their homes because of an erupting volcano) -- that's politics. Thing is, people who say they hate politics usually don't know what it is, and the result is that they just do politics badly. You can't not have politics in any social structure -- it is an inherent process in any kind of social interaction. Whenever one person tries to convince someone to do something, or to reach any sort of an agreement -- that's politics by definition. Whether the incentive are mathematical (though they never really are when it comes to humans) or not doesn't matter. Politics is the process by which a decision -- any decision -- is eventually taken by a group.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#72

Post by AJ007 »

lambda wrote: post #66
davidgerard wrote: post #57

All of this is noise. The opinion that counts is the miners: if the four largest mining pools go for it, it happens; if they don't, it fails.

Mmm, no. If the four largest mining pools go for it, but the various exchanges and online wallets do not, then you get a very dangerous fork where you now have two separate currencies, and have the possibility of double spends. The nodes that are not updated to allow these larger block will keep on going along with their chain, just rejecting the other chain as invalid; and the ones that do accept the larger blocks w…

Should we assume any update that "fixes" the mining pool problem will be rejected by the pools? If so is a dangerous fork of Bitcoin certain?

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#73

Post by harryh »

compcoin wrote: post #60

Bitcoin is Forking on it’s principals There is great debate and concern about Bitcoin trying to change its core software. Network tests have found the credit card processor can process many more transaction per second than Bitcoin can. Some influential leaders want to make changes that will make the protocol more competitive with VISA/MASTERCARD. They want to change increase amount of transaction processed in each bl…

Bitcoin originally did not have this 1MB limit. It was only added when there were concerns about spam transactions or blocks that could clog the network.

Why do you think it was OK to make a change to add a limit but not make a change on the size of the limit?

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#74

Post by hga »

dragontamer wrote: post #69
hga wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Gold Certificates are fake money. Which might be why I said: but at least you get a clear signal when they get repudiated. When, not if. I think this may be better than how fiat money "works", but obviously opinions vary.

http://news.gtp.gr/2015/07/28/greek-depositors-allowed-to-wi... I don't see how a gold standard would change any of this. Should the banks have issues, they will legally prevent bank runs by making it impossible to withdraw money. Whether or not a bank is tied to the gold standard, this will occur. > When, not if. I think this may be better than how fiat money "works", but obviously opinions vary. No sarcastic "quote…

Bank runs a plenty, private persons losing their entire savings as banks folded.

The fixes for those have only a limited bearing on a gold standard, which, BTW, I have no interest in debating, don't know much about them.

It was institutions like the FDIC with its limited backstop of bank accounts, and during the recent crisis a backstop for non-interest bearing business transaction accounts (e.g. those used for payroll, accounts payable, etc.) that fixed those problems well enough. As far as I can see a gold standard would only be an issue if it would prevent the government from doing that, which is certainly possible, but would not be a direct or inevitable thing.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#75

Post by Taek »

3pt14159 wrote: post #50
zzalpha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have absolutely no horse in this race (I'm here for the schadenfreude), but to be honest, when it comes to deeply technical decisions, I think this is entirely fair. I wouldn't expect Linus to listen to my opinions about the Linux task scheduler. Why should the Bitcoin community listen to some random guy's unsupported opinions about block size? This isn't about politics or being nice and listening to everyone. This…

The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes, and not everyone involved has a year to devote to learning about Bitcoin, so it essentially amounts to "just trust us, we won't enrich ourselves by fucking you". Which has been said by people involved in banks and currencies for centuries. If you want to say something like that, better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that…

> The difference is that the opinion has political and economic outcomes.

That is the crux of why this is a huge deal, and Linus changing the Linux scheduling algorithm is not a huge deal. People are afraid that Bitcoin is going to break, or meet an obstacle that prevents them from making massive ROI on their speculation, and they have a lot of stake in the game in protecting Bitcoin.

> It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach.

"It took me about 2 months from not knowing how cryptographic hashing worked to implementing my own hash with a novel sponge function."

The hard part is not making a cryptocurrency that works when people use it normally. The hard part is making a cryptocurrency that works when people around the world can profit tens of millions of dollars by breaking the cryptocurrency (either abusing the mining, spending coins that don't belong to them, DoS'ing competing miners, etc.)

I don't know which cryptocurrency you made (I tried to look it up via your HN profile, but didn't find anything), but if you get it peer reviewed I imagine that experts will quickly be able to find a reason or two for why it is either broken or uninteresting.

Anyone can make a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break. Bitcoin is among the most complex and cutting edge cryptosystem we have today. Even in the past few months, several important and severe flaws in Bitcoin have been discovered and fixed.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015...

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsw60/upc...

Decisions as seemly small as updating the blocksize limit are enormously nuanced. It changes the entire game theory behind the mining, affects how people will be running validation nodes, and requires a strong understanding of how blocks propagate around the world, and what a nice 'average' block looks like vs. a block that was made maliciously.

> better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed

This is a very difficult thing to do, especially because Bitcoin is so new. Much of the important discussion that has happened resides only in mailing lists, blog posts, irc logs, github issues, and forum posts.

But here is a good set of papers to get started:

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/

A smaller, more focused list:

http://bitcoin.ninja/

It will also help if you read the full #bitcoin-wizards log, dating back to around 2013 I believe. There you will find lots of highly technical discussion with links to more discussion and research papers. It's probably got the highest signal to noise ratio of any public discussion.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#76

Post by zekevermillion »

pron wrote: post #71
zekevermillion wrote: post #51

There is no law against publishing software that would introduce a blockchain hard fork if run. Yes, XT infuriates those who hope to make money based on the appreciation of their pre-fork bitcoins. Publishing XT introduces economic uncertainty in the short term, and long-term undermines confidence that we can rely on the mathematical promises of bitcoin at all. If XT is successful, why wouldn't Hearn (or Coinbase, or…

> No need for politics, in this case mathematically dictated incentive structures will decide who wins. Whenever I see a statement like this I smile because that's what politics is [1]. If many people decide to do something based on their interests (rather than, say, being forced to leave their homes because of an erupting volcano) -- that's politics. Thing is, people who say they hate politics usually don't know wha…

I agree that politics operate in bitcoin. I disagree that politics will decide which network branch remains in use, at least not conventional politics of influencing people through polemic, logrolling, or subsidy. Politics in the sense of any attempt at influencing people aside from the literal design of your favored protocol implementation. You may be correct to say that incentive structures designed in software protocol is in fact politics itself, a new and effective form of politics. In that case I would agree with you. Perhaps my original comment would be more interesting if I had thought of bitcoin protocol proposals as a form of politics!

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#77

Post by JustinAiken »

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…

> Most of the core devs of Bitcoin are strongly opposed to increasing the blocksize to 8mb

2/5 of the core devs support increasing the blocksize, and of the remaining 3, at least 2 have vested interests in companies/technologies outside of core bitcoin that could stand to benefit from smaller blocksize, eg Blockstream.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#78

Post by datashovel »

facepalm wrote: post #58
datashovel wrote: post #2

It's somewhat ironic that one of the big selling points of Bitcoin was decentralization. The thing that they failed to realize is the team also needs to be decentralized. For something like this to take off it needs to be a specification for a federated network with zero single points of failure, and not an actual codebase with a dedicated team.

There are several different implementations of the protocol, nobody controls "THE" codebase.

But all of the different implementations require the same centralization.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#79

Post by BrokenPipe »

JustinAiken wrote: post #77
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…

> Most of the core devs of Bitcoin are strongly opposed to increasing the blocksize to 8mb 2/5 of the core devs support increasing the blocksize, and of the remaining 3, at least 2 have vested interests in companies/technologies outside of core bitcoin that could stand to benefit from smaller blocksize, eg Blockstream.

You got that backwards, one of the two, Mike, suggested to that they should spend some time working on payment channel and improvements like lightning and since they though it was a good idea they did.

Blockstream has to benefit from blocks as large as possible without losing decentralisation and security properties, like everyone else.

Re: Why is Bitcoin forking?

#80

Post by olalonde »

hollerith wrote: post #70
olalonde wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also one possible scenario where both forks survive and become two distinct currencies.

OK, but then if you have one BTC now, you will have one of each kind of BTC later, so that scenario does not explain why "XT infuriates those who hope to make money based on the appreciation of their pre-fork bitcoins".

It is correct that bitcoins mined before the fork will be spendable on both chains. That being said, it is also possible (and in my opinion probable) that the combined value of both currencies (BTC and BXT) will be less than the current value of BTC for a variety of reasons (Metcalfe's law, loss of confidence, etc.). That being said, I think it's more likely that one of the forks will win (e.g. the core devs will merge Bitcoin XT to Bitcoin Core if the fork happens).
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