Technical questions in preparation for a forced split of bitcoin into two coins

[steffen]

I started the thread https://bitco.in/forum/threads/the-case-for-an-”orgcoin”.236/.

I still haven't found a technical explanation of how a forced split could (best) be accomplished and what the practical implication would be.

Maybe one way to do it technically is to prepare some software which I will call "Newcoin Unlimited". Newcoin Unlimited includes the logic that if after block xxx the bitcoin network has not removed the 1 MB block size limit then the Newcoin Unlimited miners and other nodes continue on their own separate blockchain which is a (modified?) copy of the old bitcoin blockchain with a new set of rules which of course only apply to the new blockchain. Future changes on the "max 1MB blockchain" become irrelevant to the new blockchain. Among the new set of rules or conventions I suppose we must have there must be something like this I guess:
A new name. I will just call it Newcoin for now. Does the bitcoin name appear in the code or is it just a convention?
Some changed (blockchain and address?) identifiers.
How does a bitcoin wallet determine if a particular address is a valid bitcoin address and not fx a dogecoin address?
How does a bitcoin miner find and determine which nodes and miners are part of the bitcoin system and ignore those which are part of for example the dogecoin system?
Is there some kind of blockchain id? If yes, what is that id for the bitcoin blockchain?
Since the new blockchain might only have a few miners in the beginning there should probably be some kind of recalculation of how difficult it should be to find a new block. Correct?

All help is appreciated.

 

[theZerg]

I don't feel like we are at the point where a fork makes sense yet. I think that we may still succeed in scaling bitcoin to the capacity of the underlying hardware.

But if we ever do fork, I think that we'd have to make some pretty compelling advances to ensure that the coin survives in various niche markets while it starts to challenge Bitcoin for normal transactions. For example, Litecoin and Monero scale higher AFAIK but they are not taking off.

I hope that you remain involved in advocacy for scaling Bitcoin, rather then getting lost in yet another of the innumerable alt-coins on the market.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Sounds like @steffen is talking about a spinoff rather than a true altcoin. Not a new ledger, just a new protocol for Bitcoin's ledger (he said copy of Bitcoin's blockchain, but I assume he meant Bitcoin's ledger/UTXO set?).

 

[steffen]

I am considering what technical alternatives there are if it is not possible to create a hard fork which removes power from the Bitcoin core / Blockstream guys. I don't believe it is to early to think about that.

 

[Gavin Andresen]

Forking the blockchain without supermajority consensus and removing power from Bitcoin Core are two separate things. I think the first is a bad idea that would be really hard to make work.

It will be very interesting to see what happens in the next two to eleven months; I think Core needs to listen more to it's biggest customers or it will become an irrelevant software project, but they think they're on the right path. I'm not the lead of Core any more, so it's not my place to tell them what to do any more.

 

[chriswilmer]

@Gavin Andresen : So, what do you think we should be doing to help a non-Core implementation gain wider adoption? If you think there's nothing that can be done, that's fair.

 

[davecgh]

I'm interested to hear Gavin's take as well, but speaking from experience with btcsuite/btcd, it is quite difficult to get people to adopt alternative implementations, even when they are better in some respects, due to a (very successful) multi-year FUD campaign that has generally convinced people that not running bitcoind (and now Bitcoin Core of course) is extremely dangerous.

There is certainly some risk involved, but just like anything else, any issues would be resolved and life would go on. The end result would be a much stronger ecosystem and the inability for a major bug in a single client to take out the entire network until it is resolved. Instead, only a small portion would be affected.

 

[chriswilmer]

As basically just-another-Bitcoin-user... I can perhaps spend $1000-$2000 on mining equipment and choose an appropriate pool (that follows the implementation I support). I can't think of much else I can do besides sending chocolates to miners to convince them to switch

I'd donate to a kickstarter-like campaign to build a 100 PH/s mining operation if the plan/team was credible!

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I like the idea of including enticing (read: money-making) new features that give miners and node operators a reason to use the alternative implementation. Things like thin blocks, weak blocks, and IBLT - things that could boost a business's bottom line.

"Focus all your energy on building the new rather than trying to fix the old."

Of course, once blocksize becomes a clear and present pinch point actually costing businesses money, a larger blocksize cap itself becomes such a feature. And unlike the features mentioned above, it of course cannot be simply copied over to Core without them capitulating on blocksize. That would be victory on blocksize, even if not on decentralization of development (well, it would have successfully shown that dev is less centralized than it appears, because even though everyone still uses Core it becomes clear they do not have unconditional power).

 

[Windowly]

@Gavin Andresen I'm very interested as well: how can we as regular users support bitcoin block scaling? (Or are we just stuck to whatever the miners decide, and praying they decide something sensible?)

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Windowly

Welcome to the forums!

I don't think we're just stuck praying. In the case where the miners don't cooperate, there's always the spinoff option, but...


Spinoffs are how investors can veto miners in this chart, besides just selling BTC:

This is the investors' option labeled "Tier 3" in the following reddit post, though changing the mining algo can hopefully be avoided:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3t4kbk/forkology_301_the_three_tiers_of_investor_control/

 

[Windowly]

@Zangelbert Bingledack
Wow thank you for your welcome, your info about the spinoffs (which I agree might have to be done by the economic majority) and the charts on governance!