Bitcoin fork divides Bitcoin community

The Bitcoin community is facing one of the most momentous decisions in its six-year history. The Bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem.

Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required.

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Is there an actual valid reason for the drop in demand? As I understand it, if you own Bitcoins right now, in the event of a fork, you’ll have those coins on both chains.

If XT reaches 75% adoption and becomes incompatible with Core, I find it extremely unlikely that 25% of the miners will continue with Core. The longest chain is the real Bitcoin, the smaller chain is the fork. That has always been the rule right. So whichever side wins, I find it unlikely that this will do permanent damage to Bitcoin.

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@Seneca so that’s how this will play out? People will just have twice as much bitcoin? what about miners? people who are using the blockchain? they would have to choose now or use both blockchains simultaniously to wait to see which of the forks will come on top? I’m trying to figure it out. I was picturing XT would be another alt coin.

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Does anyone know if maidsafecoins will be safe in this fork thing? Good place to ask was the place on skype where Omni developers talk, let’s see what the reply is.

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All good from the maidsafecoin point of view. No real risks here.

[8/19/15, 10:01:50 AM] Daniel: Hello
[8/19/15, 10:02:33 AM] Daniel: is there an affect that the bitcoin fork will have on maidsafecoin
[8/19/15, 10:03:22 AM] Daniel: I see in the dialogue someone asked as well
[8/19/15, 10:03:28 AM] Daniel: and there hasn’t been an answer yet
[8/19/15, 10:10:53 AM] Adam Chamely: State of the layer update from Aug 18th - Reddit - Dive into anything
[8/19/15, 10:12:13 AM] Adam Chamely: @Daniel, we discussed this in the meeting yesterday. There is no impact at this time. Omni tx’s will still be based on the existing blockchain as will the reference clients. If/when we decided to add support for the proposed xt fork there will be further discussions/announcements about how it will work
[8/19/15, 10:12:51 AM] Daniel: on a basic level, the coins won’t be compromised
[8/19/15, 10:14:37 AM] Adam Chamely: No. all omni tx’s are currently taking place on the original blockchain not the forked chain. i.e. someone would have to intentionally go out of their way to try and create an omnitx on the forked blockchain for a tx to end up there
[8/19/15, 10:15:51 AM] Adam Chamely: but even if they did, none of the integrators/exchanges/software in the omni group are looking at that blockchain yet so it would not be a valid tx
[8/19/15, 10:17:01 AM] Adam Chamely: At the end of the day All omni tx’s are validated and referenced against mastercore and soon the new omnicore daemon. Those are the reference clients which are based on bitcoin-qt and do not leverage/monitor/handle the XT fork blockchain
[8/19/15, 10:17:31 AM] Adam Chamely: What they say is what goes. So no XT forks for now
[8/19/15, 10:18:21 AM] Daniel: Thank you Adam for your response, and to the team for making it possible the maidsafecoin

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I don’t think the fork poses much risk to any of the coins.

The fork will not happen until 85% of the blocks are mined by XT compliant miners. There will be 2 weeks notice before the first oversized blocks will be issued. At this point, any miners that have not switched will create their own fork, and be mining it with <15% of the hashpower and the same difficulty. Even if the all minority miners stuck with the old chain it would take them at least 10 weeks to get a manageable difficulty. They would have mining rewards that are only spendable on the minority blockchain – So they will be spending a lot of energy on coin that is nearly worthless and very difficult to spend.

In short, the minority fork will die quickly. The minority miners will either switch to XT or switch off …

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Not sure about that - just recently there were major hickups while upgrading to antispam? client someone mined the “wrong” block and others confirmed it without checking or smth… Theres always Murphy’s law around :slight_smile:

@ricmaric what do you mean?

In bitcoin or omnilayer?

Those forks died too though… And the miners that mined blocks without checking signatures lost a ton of money… All well deserved losses…

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Yes but the point is that prior to that micro fork all was tip top majority of miners agreed on that BIP…
just forgot to enforce it :smiley:

@dallyshalla - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c2cfd/psa_f2pool_is_mining_invalid_blocks/

Yes, but if a >1MB block is issued by XT, is the majority going to forget to accept it? Are the Bitcoin-core folks going to accept it on accident? No and No…

The fact that miners where intentionally cutting corners was their own peril… Not really an adequate lever for spreading FUD… Although unfortunately anything works for FUD talking points…

What FUD got to do with anything here? :smile:
Anyway I’ll tl;dr for you - shit happens…relax

No accusation intended. If that was how it was coming across. I agree with your tl;dr completely…

I just see the “Forks don’t always go smoothly see July 4th” as a stock argument from the XT FUD crowd… I don’t think it applies, and even if it did it isn’t a big deal.

I think the controversy is way overblown by the anti-XT crowd… Unless XT gets a huge majority 85%, it isn’t something worth worrying about. If it does, the bridge will be crossed, problems will be solved, and life will go on as it always has. It is kinda like a parliamentary election. The old government has dissolved and the community will pick the new one. It isn’t worth the fuss, but most don’t know that because this is the first rodeo…

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Oh… Well I just recently popped into r/bitcoin just to find out that there’s factions and stuff… :smiley:
The comment “what’s this a paycoin/GAWminers subreddit?” sums it all up :smiley:

Lol, this keeps bringing me back to @Melvin’s quote about how,

blockchain stuff was supposed to be against the status quo and the trends, and now that’s completely down the drain,

you have a choice just like in an election, pick one out of two, and one of them is going to win. Not both coexisting, and that is going to set the precedent for bitcoin, that it can be manipulated by a couple of guys.

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85% threshold seems to be pretty fair though – If bitcoin is really being held back by 3 guys on the payroll of companies making workarounds for bitcoin’s limitations – and 85% of the network agrees to progress rather than hacks – all the more power to it…

It isn’t like an election where you can get 41 percent of the popular vote and still get to proceed as if you have 85%…

You only need 51% to fork – you need 85% to be fairly sure you are going to take over entirely… Seems like a fair mathematical threshold to me. A VERY high bar to leap if you aren’t the best choice…

I suspect it is still way more likely to be resolved by compromise.

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This is massive when you think about it isn’t it? It seems to me to be like a speeded up mirror image of how the Capitalist system evolved, with the same end results/problems…the way Democracy has been hijacked/corrupted/centralised etc. The parallels are striking…so glad SafeNet model isn’t all about farmers and everybody incentivised primarily by a quick profit too.

Bitcoin fork divides Bitcoin Community

Obviously…could it do any other? :smiley:

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But are they the two guys the liberators or the captors?

The way I see it, Many of the core development folks opposed to block size increases are vested in other ways of working around the problem and thus have an interest in rerouting progress to their own projects… That there is the central problem of our current oligarchy…

Two guys who throw out a way to solve the problem and say “if 85% agree we will start doing it our way”, are not “two guys manipulating the system”

Revolution always starts with a few guys.

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I don’t think it matters really… if this only affect miners in any case…in fact, No…it doesn’t matter either way I don’t think, but the issues change a bit. The 2 guys aren’t so much the issue if only affects farmers, but there are Democratic concerns around the whole structure. Farming becomes centralised to large farmers (substitute Corporations) along with the right to vote. If the changes affect the whole community or eco-system then there are much bigger issues… it appears to me that Maidsafe have put a lot of thought into their model to me :smiley:

Not if it’s the same guys that were there previously.

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This is a really great and interesting point as well. A real majority has to agree for the change to definitely take place. So while two out of many can suggest a change, actually everyone (many of everyone) has to process that change for it to work.

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