Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Peter R]

I just realized that to me, to hardfork is basically to undergo a small inconvenience in order to obtain the ability to harvest multiple realities in the future.

Is Ethereum better off undoing TheDAO or leaving it be? Is Bitcoin better off with a big blocksize cap or a small one? For a small price in inconvenience, each community of investors can try out both possible futures simultaneously and benefit if *either* succeeds. While not being harmed at all if the fork turned out to be pointless (except the minor inconvenience). In contrast, choosing NOT to fork during controversy and NOT to have a persistent split is subjecting the ledger to great risk.

Framed this way, doesn't it seem like hard forks (with persistent splits if there is traction) should be the obvious default thing to do in any controversy? Hodlers win because their bets are hedged with no downside, and partisans stand to win big if they bet correctly and be rid of their opponents. It's looking more and more to me that we should be taking advantage of every hardfork opportunity as it can only add value and resilience to the system. I believe in the future this will be obvious. The ledger is all. Copy it a hundred times and purchasing power is never diluted. (This also spells doom for the altcoin concept, since new ledgers are completely unnecessary, even as backups.)

It depends on whether you believe in the wisdom of the market or not. Earlier, @jonny100 objected to a comment I made when he said

"Nobody wants top down diktats from Core. This is just a political misrepresentation of your opponents. This language is not helpful to healthy debate."
​

But I don't think this is true. There is a subset of the community that believes that leaving bitcoin governance to the market will result in failure. I don't want to dig up the quotes, but Greg Maxwell, Adam Back and many others have made their view clear that bitcoin governance needs to be curated by "wise developers." If this is your view, then hard forks are bad because they give the market a chance to make a decision and--according to them--the market could easily make the "wrong" decision.

If they didn't have this view, then why wouldn't they make it easy for people to change their node's block size limit, as we did with BUIP001?

 

[cliff]

@Bloomie - you do a good job w/ this forum, thank you for hosting and working on it - its a great space and has the best features by far.

That said, I think maybe you've read cypherdoc's posts (starting with first spam removal post from a few days ago) wrong - I did not perceive him as attacking you or even criticizing you.

Just as an example b/c its convenient, the quoted exchange w/ cypherdoc does not suggest he thinks or was arguing you are " running a gangbuster business here without telling anybody." You claimed to host the forum for free and for good. Cypher's response points out that you do attempt to offset with your expenses with ads, so its not for free per se - its just not profitable atm. You confirmed that by conceding ads pay for part of the costs, but not all. How anyone would know that before today I am not sure - but the ads have been visible for a while. I have no clue whether that sort of thing is profitable or not - I don't care and I'm not judging. Personally, I think you should run ads or do whatever helps offset the expenses with this site - including cost for you time. Nonetheless, I can't help but think this whole line of discussion is the result of a misunderstanding due relaxed nature of and language used in this forum.

Probably, this whole line of discussion is TMI.

 

[chriswilmer]

Watching the ETH/ETC thing is making me think. If a large-block fork started with only minority hashing support... could the market swing the price of BTC-large-blocks higher to the point that miners would see that as a signal/incentive to switch where they hash?

 

[jonny1000]

Because a concrete problem in the here and now trumps a theoretically-possible problem in some imaginable far-off future. I would think this would be obvious.

Increasing the limit to 8MB now should address most of your concerns..

 

[jonny1000]

The people who feel that way are wrong. Name anything in life that is only good is it is never changed?

Please stop mischarectising the position, this strong consensus requirement only applies to hardforks, a tiny narrow subset of the possible changes. Also I never said hardforks can never happen

 

[taxed4ever]

@Peter R

Wise developers????? I laughed so hard I spilled my cup of tea all over the floor, poor floor

@jonny1000

You are advocating a lost argument, nobody trusts Core, amongst so many other issues, I could write a book.

We see what they did to Gavin, Ethereum and everything else inbetween. We know their history and you're proving it for the world to see by your actions.

When the alarm bells are ringing, am I going to trust millions of dollars to move through Core, or something else?

I'll choose the second option while sticking to the original money making plan, it has worked for me,

thanks Satoshi!

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@freetrader

Spinoffs are fine, because they effectively do the same thing: copy the ledger so that new tech or controversial changes can be tried without diluting holder purchasing power nor putting it at risk (in fact NOT doing a ledger copy is putting it at risk). It's the starting of bran new ledgers every time that I say serves no purpose (other than to enrich newcoming founders).

 

[megadeth]

Silbert buying in to ETC.

@Zangelbert Bingledack called it. Healthy testbed for market backed BTC hardforks.

 

[freetrader]

Increasing the limit to 8MB now should address most of your concerns..

Over the course of this multi-year debacle we've found out that our concerns are greater than simply changing the blocksize limit...

 

[solex]

The 2-week retargeting will be a thing of the past after the first real hard fork in Bitcoin.
Guaranteed.

@freetrader
I was thinking about this. ETC has its strongest "selling" point as being the original ETH (unstoppable contracts). For this reason they could and would not want any other changes.

For the same reason, after a BTC hard-fork the 1MB chain would have to run without any other changes, otherwise it is not true to its own principles. So, it makes sense for the HF grace period to be flexible such that it ends in 2 to 4 weeks, so the first >1MB block can occur just after a difficulty change giving a maximum time that small-blockers have to slog away to make their coinbase rewards spendable after 100 blocks.

 

[freetrader]

@solex: Perhaps it's a symptom of the morning after, but I'm having trouble following. If I understand you right, you are you suggesting a HF should set its activation so that it maximizes the inconvenience of the existing 2-week retargeting for the small block, slow retarget chain. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's an interesting consideration, possibly something to take into account - thanks for pointing it out.

~~~{~{@ X @}~}~~~​

I'm slightly encouraged by these posts coming from BW / Bitbank:

BW has launched BTC, LTC and ETH mining pool services since formal operation in 2014, which is one of the world's largest public mining pools. BW persists in providing reliable service of low rate PPS mining and will never make any form of 51% attack.

In the Ethereum chaos caused by DAO attacks, BW follows the pace of the Ethereum community to implement SF and HF (SF is canceled after on-line soon due to the security).

In the position of DAO crisis, BW fully respects the community consensus and the interests of miners and have made declaration of official support HF in the platform of DwarfPool, EthPool, EtherMine, NanoPool and other mining pools. Based on the principle of community consensus, BW has implemented the HF program to protect the interests of miners.

ETH hard fork will carry on from the height of 1920000 block, BW has found and broadcast the block. https://etherscan.io/block/1920000

Height: 1920000 Time: July 20, 2016, 21:20:40 (UTC+8) Difficulty: 62413376722602 Hash：0x4985f5ca3d2afbec36529aa96f74de3cc10a2a4a6c44f2157a57d2c6059a11bb Information: dao-hard-fork (Raw:0x64616f2d686172642d666f726b)

As a public mining pool, BW will always remain neutral position in the ETH and ETC disputes. BW once again solemnly declare that all mining pool services have never and will never carry out any form of 51% attacks.

BW will continue to pay attention to the trends and development of this event, we respect the community consensus, respect miners’ choice, hope social medias not over interpret for some news of event, hope event related party can seriously consider the views of the community, to balance the interests of all parties and promote the development and progress of the ecological community.

www.bw.com

July 25, 2016

https://www.bw.com/news/show-91-proclamation

Source: https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4un38d/bw_statement_about_eth_and_eth_classic/

In particular:

[we] hope event related party can seriously consider the views of the community

Could it be that some sensitity among the miners extends beyond Antpool/F2Pool?
That comment towards the organizers of the July meeting seems at least a little related to requests from developers other than Core to attend as observers.


Curiously, a pretty highly-upvoted post expressing similar sentiment was removed from /r/btc (according to their mod log):

https://r.go1dfish.me/r/btc/comments/4uk4tm/interested_in_attending_the

EDIT: I clarified that the post in question was not simply removed by the /r/btc mods - the poster had cleared the content out beforehand with the intention to remove it.

 

[solex]

@freetrader
Yes correct.
Interesting info about BW. Bigger miners should be more responsible, looking at preserving BTC value and their business model. We are seeing major conservatism from them, in contrast to all the FUD theories about rogue miners being a risk.

 

[cypherdoc]

presiding over this thread is not something i care to do anymore in this forum atmosphere. thus, i am closing it. i’ll consider reopening it over at some place, like forum.bitcoin.com, if there’s enough interest. pm me on Twitter or Reddit to make sure i get the message.

 

[Bloomie]

This thread was never about a single person "presiding" over anything. The purpose of the thread and the whole forum was to give support to the voices who were getting suppressed elsewhere.

Re-opening.

 

[Norway]

Soo... is @cypherdoc on board?

 

[pekatete]

@Norway - I suppose once he gets over his hissy-fit he'd be OK to jump on board again. Place wouldn't be the same without his contribution and dedication but there are many contributors (not to forget the censorship free environment) that make the thread tick, IMO.

 

[Norway]

@pekatete
I take that as a no. (At least for the moment.)

 

[pekatete]

@Norway - Not authoritatively, but I believe so going from the last message he posted.

 

[Dusty]

Thanks @Bloomie for reopening the thread.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

Is there a real reason for the bad blood or just two egos colliding?

Anyway, good that the thread is open again. And btw, from my point of view, this forum is perfectly moderated (aka pretty much unmoderated).

----

Anybody else suspects, that Blockstream is using some of it's venture capital to buy some ETC?
I find it hard to believe, that so many Etherians would care for this and Corists try to push it because they want to have two working chains to present them to the Chinese miners...

Sadly I think it will be twisted into a big propaganda show by Core. And btw, if I was involved in Ethereum I would like ETC more than ETH, the fork was a mistake imho. But I don't think that position is common in the Ethereum community so I doubt, that ETC will live for long.

The Ethereum HF didn't come at a good time. The reason for the fork is very bad and completely different from the blocksize issue.

And at this point I would be happy with two different Bitcoin chains: Bitcoin 1, with no Blocksize limit or Bitpay Scheme or the like, and Bitcoin Old with 1 MB limit and the promise of SW & Lightning soonish (TM).

I wonder, which chain would have more appeal.