Bitcoin Unlimited - Ideas, arguments, and proposals

[Justus Ranvier]

Is anyone interested in using Slack for communication? I've created https://bitcoinunlimited.slack.com in case we want to use it.

Other options include IRC, email lists, Reddit, and obviously https://bitco.in/forum/.

FYI: If you set up a Slack channel, you can enable IRC gateway access to it in addition to web access.

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP

 

[davecgh]

I think it's a good idea to offer choices to the users to make up their own minds which particular solution best suits their needs. Using a dropdown also seems like a reasonable way to indicate and enforce the exclusive nature of the choice.

 

[JVWVU]

I don't code but in theory is this all it takes, Changing a number to infinity?

Https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3yqgt0/this_is_to_give_an_idea_of_the_precise_amount_of/

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Apparently not. @theZerg, what say you?

 

[bitcartel]

@JVWVU There's a bit more to it than that, as transfer of blocks are considered network messages and those have their own limits which must be changed to allow big blocks. You can see some of the relevant commits linked from this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3in5mm/psa_correction_to_btcchina_letter_which_states/

 

[Richy_T]

I think this would be an ideal time to introduce something that has been a bit lacking so far: Rewards for running nodes.

Not directly in the code. But perhaps it would be possible to make use of the comment field in the version string to specify a reward address. This could be done from the command line or in the configuration file. Maybe use RA:1J213st.... or something. Please bear in mind that BIP014 already specifies a format for the version string though (this would be allowed in the comment field).

Then rewards could be dropped depending on how generous people were feeling. Possibly places like bitnodes could be convinced to adapt their incentive program https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/incentive/ to allow donations to specific useragents. It could be like the old faucets except you'd be working for it (or at least going to the effort of lying) or maybe there would be the occasional large reward (that's up to the donor). This would also help to incentivize upgrades since reward could also be by version.

This could be a real spur to adoption for BU (or other node software) and would really set up a market.

Note that bitnodes has an API. I wouldn't really advocate for it but that could be integrated into BU (or possibly as a separate applet. Hmm, would plugin functionality be a good idea? Certainly there's a bunch of cruft in the core client that would be better off as separate modules)

As a side note, it looks like Core is going to user-definable comment fields in 0.12 so it's definitely not untouchable.