That isn't really explaining the issue.

At present the max size of a block, a set of transactions that gets added to the blockchain every 10 minutes on average, is 1 mb.

1mb is able to hold x transactions. There are far greater than x transactions every 10 minutes. This means miners don't include certain transactions unless they have a higher fee. So a number of people send transactions that never get confirmed by miners, or they do, but it takes a few days.

Proposal 1 is to increase the max blocksize to 2mb to a size determined by the last x blocks. So it can gradually increase over time from 2mb to 4mb to 8, etc. To do this requires a hard fork, which means the majority of miners need to be in support of it. Rather than just looking for 51% support they are trying to signal for 75% I think.

The alternate proposal is as mentioned above for the segwit soft fork. You'll notice buried in the segwit description above is the subnetwork where people don't have to write the tx to the blockchain to transact. This is anti-miner as they get no fees from this activity. It is the proponent of a company called Blockstream that wants to create the lightning network. Bitcoin core developers are in Blockstream's back pocket which is why they refuse to upgrade blocksize and instead want to be able to do transactions off chain.

Segwit itself is not bad. There are some changed some wallets need to make but they are achievable.

I really see no reason to not increase blocksize. The only valid reason I see is it limits the value of Blockstream's product.

At the end of the day, the miners and users will decide what route to take.

my 2c.

i think everyone wants the benefits of segregating the witness portion of the tx. this feature, among others, will be similarly integrated into whatever client wins out.

fundamentally, its a debate between on-chain and off-chain scaling.

Those who want on-chain scaling to thrive do so primarily because it promotes a permissionless p2p electronic payment system, as outlined in the original white paper. Miners are supported by lots of little fees in this scheme. It sounds great because the blockchain becomes accessible to more users, but the primary consequence/downside is the ever-growing size of the blockchain and internet bandwidth requirements. its a fine line between usefulness and centralization of essential services (mining and tx validation).

Those who want off-chain scaling see a few certainties and act accordingly. No matter how large the block size gets, the system wont be able to handle every transaction on the chain. Essentially, it is unfeasible to expect every purchase/tx to occur on-chain and be stored by all users for all existence. Thus we need another off-chain solution where we can aggregate the small/micro txs and protect the primary asset - the immutable blockchain. The primary downside is it incentives off-chain third parties to provide these essential services for fees - perhaps siphoning fees away from the miners - and perhaps removing some of the permissionless nature of the system.

the reality is that a large portion of users want option A because they want everyone to be able to use bitcoin directly for low cost, while a large portion of users want B because it also makes sense and allows for new use cases (such as pay-per-use micro transactions).

Most miners wanted proposal 1(increase blocksize limit) and proposal 2(segwit). Bitcoin core has decided only 2. Some miners got fed up with this and now only want proposal 1. Some other miners think that the softfork brings a lot of technical debt and want a hardfork version of 2, for example flexible transactions:
https://bitcoinclassic.com/devel/Fle...nsactions.html

Great explanations, thanks

So how long will it take poloniex to start trading Bitcoin1mb if they hard fork and goto 2mb.

I'd say almost instantly unless there's no debate and its unanimous. Ethereum has forked 4 times in the last 6 months. There was only demand for one ethclassic coin. Could've been eth1, 2, 3, 4, 5 but knowing cared for the latter forked off coins

Whatever happens, I'm definitely not a fan of it turning into multiple coins. That just ****s everything up.

Imo fork it. Fork it often. Fork it hard. And may the best fork win. I want honey badger coin, not fragile coin. I assume that longest chain will be used by Bitpay etc, so any try to fork or not fork that is not longest chain will pretty quickly lose value.

Do any of these forks require me as a btc holder with coins in cold storage to make any decision at any time which will effect the value of my btc? If so, btc is doomed.

No. If it forks, you get both.

Right now you have 1 bitcoin. If it forks, you have 1 bitcoin and 1 bitcoin prong.

I assume I can't spend both though and I'll have to make a choice which direction to go and 1 direction will ultimately be more valuable than the other?

You can spend both. 1 would most likely be worth more then the other like in the case with ETH.

So you're saying I doubled my money? That's pretty sweet!


ETA: I guess nearly doubled my money since one will more likely be worth more than the other?

No you won't double your money. Any hard fork will come with a loss but ideally it is minimal where most/all value stays on one of the chains and you don't even have to bother trying to sell your coins on the other chain. But if there is a period of contention where nobody is sure which chain will come out on top then you could make or lose a lot of money by trading during that period. If you are in it for the long run and don't trade then a fork is just a temporary setback unless it kills the trust in bitcoin.

Nah. Say bitcoin is worth $1,000 right now. If it forks the market will decide value of each coin and together might be $1,000 or less. Hard to see more value being pumped in in the short term after a contentious fork.

Essentially bitcoin may be worth 750 and bitcoin classic 250...something like that. And other time, one should slide away and the other will regain its value.

The trick is to load up BTC on margin right before the hard fork because the dumb**** exchanges let you keep the classic coin for free and you only have to pay back the BTC. This happened to me when I had my ETH lent out and no one expected there to be a classic coin trading after fork. All I got back was ETH and no classic.

Guessing they will come out with a statement saying they are going to do it differently this time just to piss me off even more. If they dont, the market will be affected because everyone offering margin will obviously stop before hand and make sure all positions are closed out because they want their classic.

Which exchange

Bit finex and poloniex both did that. Still baffles me. They used some wording in the TOS about how the borrower is required to repay no more and no less of agreed upon amount.

Then the other kicker... finex gets hacked shortly after. Once again the lenders got ****ed. If they use the same wording as above, whoever the **** borrowed X amount of ETH from me owes me that amount of ETH back, hack or not. Nope, they let the people on margin off the hook because they knew they couldn't really enforce people to cover the debt.

Well it's safe to say I'm done loaning anything out. The sad part is I still have some coins in vulnerable areas like coinbase and kraken and polo. I also have other wallets like blockchain. Smaller amounts spread out. I really need to get myself more secure especially because I'm going to be getting some size over the next few years.

Get a nano s or trezor

Is there any way to track the progress of competing versions of bitcoin? In other words to track the percentage of miners running various versions of bitcoin?

On another note, does anyone know what is happening with XMR? I can't find any reasonable explanation for the large increase over the last 24 hrs.

https://coin.dance/blocks
https://coin.dance/nodes

who knows, but it has been getting a lot of positive press from bitcoiners recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...pkh2?context=3

Right on ****ing cue.

Go ahead, rekt bitcoin u tards.

Price seems to have gone up. Good testing

What an idiotic conclusion. This was not by any means "good testing", but rather a preview of what these incompetent developers can do to a $15 billion market. And a $3 move is completely irrelevant / noise.