Copy of the deleted HaoBTC post, courtesy of
http://cachedview.com/ :
---
A Call For Core Developers to Clarify Their Stance on 2MB Hard Fork
After having received some feedback, we would like to take some time to explain the intent of the piece:
- We do not intend to use this to criticise the Core devs － on the contrary, we admire the professionalism and foresight they have demonstrated and are pleased to see the progress that they have made — CSV and Segregate Witness, etc.
- There is no fundamental differences between our visions regarding the future of Bitcoin. There is, however, confusion regarding some implementation-level details.
Before we dive into it, please be reminded that this piece of writing is an effort to improve understanding and engage in discourse in an open, candid and transparent fashion.
This is no veiled threat, neither is it moral grandstanding.
Use of inflammatory language, argumentum ad passions, FUD, or downright character assassination will be out of the question, as they will only be counterproductive to the aforementioned purpose.
We will try to stick to basic facts that are clear and least controversial thus hopefully steer clear speculation as to one’s motives. If you take issue with the veracity of what we believe are facts, we are happy to discuss.
With the tone of this piece thus having established, let’s start with a brief recap of the events that eventually led to this:
In December last year, amid the heat and noise of the blocksize debate, representatives from both the Bitcoin Core developer community and the industry at large, including some executives of BTC companies and some large miners (the majority of whom, by coincidence, are geographically based in China) met in Hong Kong at the Scaling Bitcoin Workshop and subsequently, the first Bitcoin Roundtable conference. At the second of the two events, on Feb 21 this year, an agreement was reached and signed by the attendees including both Core developers and industry insiders — this document, published online, came to be known as the Hong Kong Consensus.
The reaching of such an agreement is a significant event and is widely perceived a positive development, especially given a new round of skepticism and criticism set off by the rage quit of former Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn. Now with the Consensus signed, criticisms, such as Bitcoin has a fundamental and irremediable governance issue and that the Bitcoin community is at a civil war with itself with two camps dueling each other to death, were put at bay, at least temporarily. One may even argue that it serves to rekindle hope by showing Bitcoiners that in a time of crisis, the community are willing to discard their differences, and make compromises when greater good is at stake.
In this Consensus document, one part stands out:
We will continue to work with the entire Bitcoin protocol development community to develop, in public, a safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit. The Bitcoin Core contributors present at the Bitcoin Roundtable will have an implementation of such a hard-fork available as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core within three months after the release of SegWit.
This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community.
Many perceive this as the outcome of the political arm wrestling between the Chinese miners and Core developers. The developers, in order to secure the support of the vast majority of hash power, strategiclly promised the miners 2mb hard fork. The miners, leveraging their hardware assets, had a chance to express their demand face to face to the developers and even had the later make a promise in written form.
There is no doubt that the 2mb hard fork is important in this document, actually if people were not serious about it, they wouldn’t have taken the trouble to assign a deadline to it:
The code for the hard-fork will therefore be available by July 2016.
Now with June approaching its end and June a few days away, there has been increasing concern whether the Core devs are ready to deliver on their promise, or any effort have been made during the past months towards this end. Some may feel compelled to ask: Were the Core devs who signed the document sincere in their promise or just squeezing the situation for all it’s worth?
Whatever the answer is, the Chinese community present at the Roundtable and signed on the Consensus saw the 2MB hard fork as a key negotiating point and something important to their interest. Today, this stance hasn’t changed.
Arguments were sometimes made that the Chinese didn’t hold up their end of the bargain — for instance, some mining pools gave users the option to mine Classic blocks — which was seen as a breach by some; however, this doesn’t negate the fact that people like HaoBTC made a strenous effort in fending off criticism from Chinese Classic supporters and Blockstream conspiracy theorists.
Diminishing the importance of mining in the Bitcoin economy, or calling the Chinese miners as whole corrupt and detrimental to decentralization is not a valid argument for its obvious falsity, not to say that it is not helping solve the issue — some of the Chinese attendees, such as HaoBTC, are heavily involved in mining, but are also run other services such as exchanges and wallets. Today, few would doubt that the Chinese bitcoiners account for a significant chunk of the economy and a legitimate constitution of the Bitcoin political system.
While we are under no illusion that the Consensus is a binding, enforceable legally enforceable document, we see it at least an authentic expression of the intensions of parties involved — If things have moved on to a point that some signatories now feel they have to reconsider or rescind their positions, it would be fair that they make public anouncement to such effect so the rest are aware of such developments and take actions accordingly. It would be disingenuous and unfair to keep others in the dark. As a signatory of the agreement, we (HaoBTC ) are interested in hearing any comments from the Core devs, especially those that signed on the document, regarding the current status of affairs.
Thanks and Best regards,
The HaoBTC Team
