Re: Bitcoin Core or XT, you dont have to choose NOW. Dont bother with the poll....
Youre right. Sounds like a big problem wont arise. Only thing that might be possible is that some people might download it and use the old blockchain as base to run the new client. They might send their coins to someone and he doesnt get it because the transaction is only on the wrong chain. Or he might send his coins from the old wallet to the new one. Which might mean having sent their real bitcoins to an address that doesnt have a corresponding on the real chain. Though it should be possible to import the keys from the altchain into the old chain
and get the coins back as long as the private keys system wasnt changed.Does that sound right? If im right then this might mean some bad press or people complaining but youre right, it wont be the big problem most probably.
Let's say that someone holds a gun to Hearn's head (or Vladimir for Bitcoin Core for that matter) and makes them do a commit like "reject all blocks larger than 100KB". I think that a situation like this wouldn't last even 1 hr before alarms and the community went apeshit all over reddit, twitter and this forum, but let's say that it lasts for even 24 hours before someone figures it out. At that point, perhaps 1000 users download the client.
Any new users needing to download a new chain would basically get a broken client since they probably wouldn't be able to download any blocks past sometime in 2010 once larger blocks started happening.
Users who upgrade would get a huge warning on QT wallet (or in the logs for bitcoind) telling them they are diverged more than 3 blocks from the main chain. I don't think that they'd even be able to do a successful spend, since the client wouldn't be able to find other clients with a current block.
Again, it's not a zero concern problem it's just not a credible threat short of creating nasty code that does stuff like "send via FTP wallet.dat and keylog passwords to ftp.pwned.ru" - that's a risk that we all have to deal with and only run releases that have been vetted, signed and not released < 24 hours ago.