Gavin's hard to get a read on here. His fork with XT is completely harmless until miners agree. He could very well just be trying to test the waters and see how much consensus there is. I have a feeling a lot the bigger industry doesn't give a **** about decentralization and this helps them, so they are behind it.

Miners have veto power but are insufficient for this to work. Miners do have the most to risk by switching, though.

Until anything actually goes through, there's just words and no war. Could just be sabre rattling and trying to force hands.


There's this big misconception about the Blockstream guys, that they are now under the thumb of someone and have vested interest. Really what you have is a group that comes from a similar background and has similar values from the cyperpunk community. What Gavin is proposing is taking that vision away and moving it more toward centralization, which of course they oppose. They also are invested in finding solutions that help scale Bitcoin such that it doesn't lose it's roots. AFAIK they really don't have much of a business model, they just are involved in building the technology out. Sure there is some conflict of interest, but basically they would be saying the same things if there was no Blockstream because this is what they believe in and why they formed the company.


I don't think Gavin believes this. He admits this kicks the can down the road and buys some time. Bitcoin, barring some breakthrough in blockchain technology, does not scale well. No one is denying this. Throwing bigger blocks can work for a little, but not for long. The 1 minute interval comment just completely made me lose faith in him. He seems desperate and seems motivated more by what he feels people want rather than technical reasoning, which scares the hell out of me. He's turning Bitcoin into something run by politics instead of by principles. I want no part of that.

The problem is this does not solve anything, it just kicks the can down the road and introduces tremendous risk. I understand there is a time for crisis actions, but those are when there is an actual crisis. A bunch of people who have transactions delayed a little because they only want to pay a penny instead of a nickel does not make a crisis.

The assumption that Bitcoin can just scale with bigger blocks is your mistake here. It does not work. While there still is some incentive for Lightning network without this issue, it diminishes by kicking the can down the road. We still have a safety valve right now for when things get bad, which is reasonable increases. Suppose we bump the block size, and these things still don't get built, even in the face of pain. There is no more relief valve, and we are screwed.

I don't know anyone who is in favor of the 1min intervals but is against the block size increase. Both fundamentally alter it in similar ways, although the 1min is far worse.

I can understand Gavin having an opinion on this, but his rashness is highly concerning, along with making this a highly political issue is extremely dangerous. Dare you speak anything negative about the increase, you get downvoted to hell on reddit. However, I almost wouldn't mind a clean divorce from those who are so desperate for something that won't work and those who actually understand the fundamentals, value be damned. Maybe I'll sell and come back later as an investor.

can you elaborate? how does this not solve anything?

i admit i'm not aware of all the technical details. but if the block size needs to eventually be changed anyway to allow things to scale, why not do it now instead of later?

it doesnt "solve anything" in the sense that we'll be faced with the same issue again, albeit in 2020 or something.

right ok. well the idea of all agile development methods is to iterate fast. its impossible to plan ahead for all scenarios. while this may not be the solution, at least the network will get a real world test case in terms of how it will handle a hard fork. because its more likely than not that in the future, another problem will arise, where maybe the only solution would be another hard fork.

theres already been a few hard forks over the years. One example was the implementation of the 1 mb block size limit to prevent spam attacks in 2010.

None of the previous hard forks created two perfectly viable blockchains. They all solved a serious immediate issue so nobody wanted to stay on the old version. If 1MB blocks were filling up and causing serious issues right now then none of these discussions would happen and the increase would go through. But core developers don't agree 1MB is too small and some believe increasing it will cause problems and want a different solution.

the previous forks did create two perfectly viable blockchains. people could have kept mining the using the protocol that allowed up to 35 mb blocks, we never came close. but they didnt, you're right. there were far less people around and much less knowledge about what was going on. people did what satoshi suggested and gavin and a few other devs helped out too. if you go back and read those discussions it was sort of assumed this safety change would be rolled back at it wouldn't be difficult. but its more complicated now.

other forks have occurred for transaction fees. previously, there was a 0.01 btc tx fee imposed if the tx was below that amount. back when the price was $0.1, a lot more people found out and said, "... well, when btc is $100 each, that wont fly... this must be changed." and over a few forks, that limit was lowered to the dust limit we have now.

there will other hard forks in the future. dust limits, tx fees, divisibility of units and new layers of protocols will require them.

If the mandatory transaction fee was raised to about $0.01, transactions on the block chain would drop about 90% imho. Satoshi dice was probably just a ploy to use the largest number of transactions as an advertisement to attract customers. There are other chains on the blockchain, video, pictures, messages, probably terrorists are using it to transfer messages, fbi, cia, nsa might be using it to transfer info, data storage, all at the expense of bitcoin users. If you buy $100 item the sales tax is $10.00, I think people can afford $0.01.

Maybe raise the transaction fee to a nickel $0.05 after the next halving of the mining reward.

$200.00/1
.00005 transaction fee.

The big complaint is "well you limit blocksize, how will you serve 7 billion people!?!". Fact is, Bitcoin, without major changes, does not scale well for too much longer. This kicks the can down the road. That by itself is not a huge issue, but it also takes away an incentive to create those innovations. And it also makes it implied we'll just keep removing the cap. Much like the pointless debt ceiling.


Bitcoin should not be compared to agile development. Agile development is about finding failure fast. Bitcoin cannot have failures like this, and needs to be stable first. I'm a huge agile advocate, but this isn't the place to fail.


The 1mb limit before was not a hard fork, but a soft fork. This means anyone following the old rules doesn't have to upgrade, since the majority of miners upgraded to enforce the 1mb limit. Hard forks have only occurred once before AFAIK, and in a very minor way - a bug existed that let some flaw happen for someone to send billions of coins. The network forked, and a fix was made (completely uncontroversial), and the network resolved itself. This is a historic moment for Bitcoin and really will define how it can change over time.

I agree it will drop a bunch. I don't think raising the fee to say 5 cents would affect most usages, and I really don't care too much if someone is now priced out of sending a quarter to someone on the blockchain.

I doubt Satoshi dice faked traffic, there's a lot of people who liked to gamble small amounts, and it adds up fast.

Transaction fees aren't a part of consensus and cannot be guaranteed to work. I'm not against a fee market, and it it goes out of control, we can evaluate.

TC, if we're categorizing hard and soft forks, heres a list from a theymos post:

Hard forks:
- The version message checksum change on Feb 20, 2012. This is sometimes not considered a real hard fork because old nodes could theoretically still connect to the network via a specially-designed proxy -- the format of the block chain wasn't actually changed.
- BIP 50. This is sometimes not considered a hard fork because the old behavior that was changed was non-deterministic.

Soft forks:
- Max block size & max sigops per block
- Huge changes in Script (removal of many opcodes; changes in how Script is processed)
- Fix for the output overflow bug
- P2SH (BIP 16)
- BIP 34
- BIP 66 (softfork in progress)

Not sure I'd consider the first to be a hard fork, as it doesn't change consensus rules. The second was an accidental fork reverted. Very obvious stuff there.

Soft forks are a lot easier to do, of course, and far less controversial, as they are a tightening of requirements rather than loosening.

We are in uncharted territories. Market is definitely reacting.

Been pretty stable imo

Anyone know why we have so many transactions the last week?
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

The first spike was the stress test, but the second spike?

240 -> 225 since Gavin announced his coup.

Wow, this thread is still going?

I will tell you guys why the BTC exploded - SILK ROAD.

Wake me up when it hits $15 again.

there are like 2-3x the amount of drugs being sold online now as compared to before when btc went to the moon

edit: tried finding the article i saw that in but can't find it now so i could be wrong

honestly, that sounds about right to me.

the press from the silk road shouldve just created this enormous wave of people trying out tor and finding these drug markets.

I would imagine its ALOT bigger now than before silkroad. I mean for example we now have atleast what I know 2 different sites for drugs etc just here in Sweden only for Swedish people.

You realize we are 2x higher than when Ross was arrested in terms of price? The last explosion only happened AFTER it was shut down.

Methinks you need to re-evaluate your theory.

silk road had a huge impact on it. enough said. wake me up when its at $15 again

Rip

Illegal activity had a huge impact on it (drugs, gambling, other shady stuff). In fact, it's pretty much all that bitcoin is if you look at the numbers.

The size of the illegal economy seems about on par with current activities. Highly illegal stuff is in the billions/year (without silk road), bitcoin gambling is in the billions/year as well. So the market cap is about right at a few billion for an economy that size.

For comparison, the US economy is ~17 trillion/year and the market cap is a few to 10 trillion in pure currency. Similar comparisons for other countries/economies. Bitcoin has fewer transactions so a few billion for $10 billion/year in transactions makes sense.

I don't see how you get to $15 from here. $15 is around a $200 million market cap. The economy sustaining it is far larger.

Didn't you miss the memo? Silk Road is dead, no one can ever buy drugs again with Bitcoin.

RIP.

Hi, im a bit of a noob so this question may sound stupid or something but searching google for answers, I read for 2-5 minutes and find that I have no idea whats half of each paragraph means and have to do an in depth googling to gain understanding, and so finding out which sources are good for info obv makes it a complete nightmare.

- So how will you guess the date of the fork? Or will it be announced?
- Is this inevitably going to happen? Is there any hope for BTC to become a household name given all the confusion (for mainstream human beings)? Or will it simply remain as a medium of exchange for people in the know?
- The new coins will be named BTC-XT I believe. Can you give a fish like me an overview of what the difference will be between the current BTC and the new btc-XT? (If you have to get heavy into crypto-currency language thats fine. I expect it and ill google the gobledygook when I need to, but at least this time the info will for sure be useful for me.) By difference, I mean not only scientifically, but also economically, like how they will be valued in comparison to each other.