Best explanation of how this will work is on their site:
"By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes. At that point a waiting period of two weeks begins to allow news of the new consensus to spread and allow anyone who hasn't upgraded yet to do so. During this time, existing Bitcoin Core nodes will be printing a message notifying the operators about the availability of an upgraded version.
If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants."
https://bitcoinxt.software/
What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet".
I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it.
Even though the other stakeholders will certainly be able to make their preferences known to the miners, any effect the other stakeholders will have on the success or failure of the fork will be through the miners, which IMHO makes my statement "it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet" correct, at least for a sufficiently narrow definition of "vote".
Even when we consider the situation more broadly, none of the other stakeholders have (as far as I can tell) as much at stake as the miners. The miners for example might be hoping that if the 1-meg limit remains in place, transaction fees will become a significant fraction of mining rewards, which would increase the total income of mining (income being essentially the built-in rewards, which are not affected by the fork plus the transaction fees). Holders of large positions in Bitcoin on the other hand -- what is their reason for preferring one fork or the other? Ditto merchants who accept a lot of Bitcoin transactions.
ADDED. As far as I can tell, the designers Bitcoin XT sofware have done what they can to minimize the distruptiveness of the fork on the lives of the other stakeholders -- by, e.g., refraining from doing anything to affect anyone but the miners till 2 weeks after a full 75% of miners (or 75% of hashing power -- not sure which) are running the XT software.
ADDED. Yes, I realize that any additional income gained by the miners will be paid by Bitcoin senders (e.g., people using Bitcoin to pay for things), so in that sense Bitcoin senders have just as much at stake as the miners do, but transaction fees will always be a very small fraction of the costs (considered collectively) of the senders of Bitcoin, so this is another instance of the very common situation where a large number of people are affected in some very small way by some policy decision whereas a smaller number of people are affected in a more significant and material way, and we know (from experience with democratic governments) that what usually happens in that situation is that the smaller group (whose interests are "concentrated") has a much larger influence on the decision than the larger group (whose interests are "diffuse").
Right, good point, since it'd effectively be the hashrate making decisions, not "one user one vote", which is maybe not really workable in a standard blockchain system.
I thought gavin and most of the established bitcoin devs were in favor of increasing the blocksize.. so why is this "lightning" system no one has heard about suddenly the new plan for bitcoin core? Whose clout is pushing this through? I was aware of argument about the 1MB limit but I thought the voices in favor of increasing it far outweighed those against.
Two developers, nullc and pieter are against increasing the blocksize at a reasonable rate. Gavin, Jeff Garzik and Mike Hearn wish to increase it by early next year. Following some three months of debate, an agreement could not be reached, so Gavin and Mike are forking Bitcoin to the new Bitcoin XT. The vast majority of users, businesses and miners support Gavin and his bigger blocks, but blockstream, a relativley new for profit company which employs nullc aka Gregory Maxwell and Pieter as well as some other bitcoin devs and is developind lightning and sidechains which they offer as an alternative to increasing the blocksize has managed to stall this process, thus leading to a fork.
One side - your side specifically maaku and that of your employer blockstream - loses complete legitimacy when they start censoring posts and spoofing Satoshi's email address.
Oh, please. The reddit moderators and satoshi asshat have nothing to do with Maaku or Blockstream.
Andrew, your logic is slimy. You are trying to associate Maaku and Blockstream with something they are not. You didn't respond to Maaku's point at all. You're being such an asshole!
Neither Blockstream nor any of the core developers have affiliation with r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, or bitcoin.org. By design, mind you, for the purpose of ensuring decentralization. I may have the book badge on the subreddit, but I'm as helpless about censorship as you are.
Lightning Network is a system that merges a collection of transactions over so called payment channels to an LN hub into one on-chain transaction. It is designed to add as few trust requirements as possible vs using standard transactions (a multisignature model is used with the hub to prevent any possibility of direct theft, as one example of a security mechanism).
The idea is that your wallet commits a number of coins to a payment channel at one hub, and then payments to and from other LN users are routed along payment channels across hubs. This means less blockchain bloat, faster verification (you trust the hub to not sign conflicting transactions, because doing so is proud of fraud valid in court and kills their reputation in 5 seconds) and cheap transactions.
It still needs larger blocks, because adding funds to payment channels and taking funds out of then requires on-chain transactions. With millions of users, 1MB isn't enough.
This is quite helpful, but it does not answer the question of why they don't switch to larger blocks now if most of the devs are in favor of it.
You also have to get the users to switch, in particular miners and exchanges, so therein may lie part of the answer. But I suspect those people will generally follow what the devs recommend. I thought some of the big Chinese miners had said they would accept switching to 8MB blocks. So why hasn't the switch been made?
Everyone is in favor of increasing the block size at some point. One side is simply being more conservative / less reckless and trying to make sure that the right proposal is accepted, rather than the first implemented. They are organizing a series of workshops on this topic:
I don't think there is any disagreement that the block size will be increased by some amount at some point. It seems to me the major disagreement is by how much and how fast to increase it.
Mike Hearn who seems to be the strongest proponent of the XT 'we need larger blocks asap' philosophy and the person who wrote the blog post referenced in the OP is _not_ a core dev as far as I can tell.
I've seen comments to the effect that he has repeatedly tried to gain more influence in Bitcoins direction over several years and some people posit that this is him attempting to do more of the same by forking and taking the majority with him leaving him with a lot more power over 'new' XT core's development. Hard to say how much if any truth there is to that. The things Mike says make a lot of sense to me.
Gavin Andresen, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin project is also very outspoken about the need to remove the block size limit kludge that was originally put in by Satoshi. You can read his series of blog posts outlining the arguments here: http://gavinandresen.ninja
If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.
That's not really true - Garzik has expressed support for a size increase, just more modest than Gavin and Jeff's. And the only other two committers are against both plans. That's hardly a "majority".
2. Your point is that Jeff "also" is for the blocksize increase? But... but... that's what I said: "Gavin and Jeff are the only two committers in favor."
So... what's your point? What's your math? Your problems go far beyond typos.
It's been some time since Bitcoin has given me reason to break out popcorn, the next few days should be quite fun to watch. :)
I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either.
While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.
Gavin stepped down as lead developer on April 7, 2014. [1]
Most people would call that a year ago, or maybe one and a half years ago (rounding up from one year and four months). You purport to be “simply doing fact corrections” elsewhere in this thread. Misreporting basic periods of time does not jibe well with that assertion.
I would not normally be so pointed in my criticism but there is a strong disinformation and censorship campaign going on around this development fork. While that is happening you would do well to be very careful in what statements and ‘corrections’ you make.
Care to point to what Gavin has worked on in that time frame?
There are very few changes that Gavin has contributed back to Bitcoin Core since he handed most of the day-to-day repo management over the Wladimir.
I honestly don't know what you are referring to, unless it is the small patches here and there of similar size and importance to things we receive on a daily basis from dozens of people. Gavin pretty much disappeared from core development when he stepped down 2 years ago.
Sorry Maaku, but I think you are taking this thread off-topic. The number of contributions Gavin has made since stepping down from Leadership is not relevant to the point "Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them."
More specifically, the number of his recent commits (or other contributions) does not speak to (1) the length of time he has been a member of Bitcoin, (2) whether he has been in "good standing", or (3) whether there are obvious reasons to doubt him.
It appears, rather, that you have some ill feelings towards Gavin, and are letting these feelings leak into your thoughts by belittling Gavin's contributions to Bitcoin.
A better way to address this point, while still expressing your feelings, would be to say "Gavin is not in good standing with me. I think he's an asshole for going around our consensus process. Fuck him. I disagree that he is in good standing, and I doubt his leadership."
Maaku, your thoughts are getting sloppy. Nobody here claimed that Gavin leads bitcoin. Go back and read the post you were replying to, and try to find the words that you were "correcting." They don't exist.
It was you who first mentioned him leading Bitcoin when you said "Gavin stepped down 2 years ago." Now you are just arguing with yourself. You came into this conversation, imagined people talking about him leading Bitcoin, and then tried to do some "corrections" to the claims that you hallucinated.
r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic), so thought maybe you hackers can have a discussion about the upcoming bitcoin fork in regards to the blocksize. Some suggest that bitcoin blocks should remain at 1mb, which currently covers around 200k transactions, a limit that is close to being reached. The vast majority seem to want an increase on this capacity for pretty much obvious reasons. However, some relatively newcomer bitcoin developers argue that increasing it will affect decentralisation, and everyone should use a hubs and spoke system instead. Others argue that as the number of users increases, the number of the blockchain applications increase, the number of nodes and miners increases, thus decentralisation increases. In regards to lightning it is still vapourwear, it requires hot wallets - something which has caused many problems - the hubs are likely to be centralised - and fundamentally users should have a choice. So yeah looks like bitcoin will fork.
The XT developers could probably defend against the "decentralization" argument by implementing IBLT to speed block propagation and ultimate blockchain compression to reduce disk usage before increasing the block size. But that would probably take years and they don't have years, so never mind.
I do not understand bitcoin and the blockchain. Isn't your bitcoin tied up in the mathematics the blockchain? Will those who trade away their money on one blockchain be able to retain it on the other blockchain? Will they synchronize the ledger in some way?
If the chain forks, then in theory you have the same money on both chains, and could spend it differently in each.
In practice, this fork only happens if >75% of miners switch to the new software, and I suspect the whole community would quickly abandon the other fork.
Bitcoin, like all monies, is a social protocol. We agree that a coin has value if it follows certain rules.
Some people want to change the rules. But some other people don't want them changed. So now we have two sets of people, the Changers (XT) and the Don't-Changers (Core) who will be following different sets of rules.
So their softwares won't play together in places their rules disagree. This will create a "fork" in the ledger histories. If your coins existed before the fork, everyone will see them. But if you transact them in a way that's incompatible with one set of rules, the transaction will only exist on one side of the fork.
So the public will then have to choose which side of the fork to live on. They will probably want to live on the dominant side. Then the losing side will give up and switch!
Bitcoin-XT actually has a few built-in mechanisms to make this transition graceful. It will only deploy the incompatible rules once it has a 75% majority vote, and is thus confident of success.
In some ways it is like an alt coin. The difference between a 'fork' and a alt coin like litecoin for example is that the 'fork' shares the same genesis block and transaction history as the original up until the point of the 'fork'.
Practically speaking if you own Bitcoin prior to the fork I believe it means you will then be able to use your coins on both post 'fork' versions. Once the fork happens you will have to decide which version you want to transact on when you receive new coins.
It remains to be seen which version will survive, or if perhaps both versions will.
With the Bitcoin price on a steady downward spiral into oblivion, I'd have to say that the XT fork was a really stupid idea. Thanks for scaring all of the investors, you bunch of retards. Smooth move, X-Lax!!!
You have the same number of coins, and will continue to until the point that a block is mined on the XT chain that would not be accepted by Core clients. The absolute earliest that could possibly happen is January 25 (Jan 11 activation date + 2 week grace period). But that 2wk grace period only actually activates after 75% of the hashing power globally moves to XT. So at the time XT actually forks, users will have had plenty of notice.
Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.
I may be wrong here but assuming you're broadcasting to both networks, your transaction is valid in both XT and Core so they'd both try to add it to a block.
The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.
There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746, but it's hard to know whether that one is factual. Since the two threads are closely related, this seems like the one to go with. (This is not based on any opinion about the story itself.)
If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants." https://bitcoinxt.software/
What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet".
I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it.
Interesting times.