This is a message I sent to @solex privately, to see if this is something BU wants to slowly move towards or if it is better to present this as a new alt-coin. I've decided to post this message verbatim, to gauge community feedback before expanding the idea.
Hey,
Maybe I'm preaching to the choir here, and all this has been said. But bear with me.
I was thinking about how BU has a huge uphill battle to climb just because Hardforking is hard and destructive. Which is part perception and part reality. ( Btw. You already made hardforking less dangerous with better fork detection right? )
But why don't we take this a step further and try to get the cost of Hardforking to absolute zero? Make sure forks can even live side-by-side?
Compare this with evolution where if any animal develops a trait which is beneficial it gets killed immediately. Everyone would understand that this prevents evolution completely. Yet in the Bitcoin world the dangers of hardforking are perceived mostly as something good.
In reality this means that the Bitcoin economy isn't in full control of what is best for Bitcoin as a whole. Any change which is incremental and doesn't offset the cost of Hardforking (or doesn't seem to) has no chance of getting adopted. Ever.
Therefore there is no true consensus driven development. There is "whoever can bundle the most changes can add all kinds of un-economical changes, and block anything which is deemed 'controversial' "-developer model.
So how can you reduce the cost of hardforking to zero? Well most importantly would be to make a fork easily distinguishable and thereby tradable. So for instance, a payment-URI should indicate from where it wants to recieve coins (which chain). And a wallet should be able to grab such coins and send these, or automatically trade coins and pay with those (via ShapeShift or something comparable).
Going a step further you would want a fork not to be denoted by a chain, but you might want to have the consensus library/code available as byte-code (a coin represents future intent, not only past performance). Where a coin is simply a hash of this consensus library. But that would need a new coin. And it might be too similar to Ethereum already...
This might align with Bitcoin Unlimited, in the sense of Unlimited choice, and to ...well. ...remove limits and stuff.. But it might merit / need a new coin altogether, and call it "ForkCoin" or something.
What do you think?
Hey,
Maybe I'm preaching to the choir here, and all this has been said. But bear with me.
I was thinking about how BU has a huge uphill battle to climb just because Hardforking is hard and destructive. Which is part perception and part reality. ( Btw. You already made hardforking less dangerous with better fork detection right? )
But why don't we take this a step further and try to get the cost of Hardforking to absolute zero? Make sure forks can even live side-by-side?
Compare this with evolution where if any animal develops a trait which is beneficial it gets killed immediately. Everyone would understand that this prevents evolution completely. Yet in the Bitcoin world the dangers of hardforking are perceived mostly as something good.
In reality this means that the Bitcoin economy isn't in full control of what is best for Bitcoin as a whole. Any change which is incremental and doesn't offset the cost of Hardforking (or doesn't seem to) has no chance of getting adopted. Ever.
Therefore there is no true consensus driven development. There is "whoever can bundle the most changes can add all kinds of un-economical changes, and block anything which is deemed 'controversial' "-developer model.
So how can you reduce the cost of hardforking to zero? Well most importantly would be to make a fork easily distinguishable and thereby tradable. So for instance, a payment-URI should indicate from where it wants to recieve coins (which chain). And a wallet should be able to grab such coins and send these, or automatically trade coins and pay with those (via ShapeShift or something comparable).
Going a step further you would want a fork not to be denoted by a chain, but you might want to have the consensus library/code available as byte-code (a coin represents future intent, not only past performance). Where a coin is simply a hash of this consensus library. But that would need a new coin. And it might be too similar to Ethereum already...
This might align with Bitcoin Unlimited, in the sense of Unlimited choice, and to ...well. ...remove limits and stuff.. But it might merit / need a new coin altogether, and call it "ForkCoin" or something.
What do you think?