Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

I'm not against bigger blocks. I am, however, vehemently against some minority coercing rather than appealing on merit a change that affects every member of a system for some collectivist notion of "the common good" without everyone's voluntary consent. Great, bigger blocks can fit more transactions, but maybe we should wait until there is full consensus that fees are indeed too high and we all agree to move together to using bigger blocks. Til then...Perhaps we can even work out a dynamic block size schedule based on rigorously proven and acceptedly fair feedback cycles by then and not have to go through the whole process again.

Quote from: TECSHARE on August 15, 2015, 11:46:17 AM

If XT is so great, no one should have to sell it to anyone, people will just switch.

But people won't because there is greater risk cost to switch than to stay until some situation demands full consensus migration. Antifragility.

Quote from: theymos on August 10, 2015, 03:18:04 AM

Activating a hardfork based on what miners do is really bad. You could easily have a situation where 75% of miners support XT but none of the big Bitcoin exchanges or businesses do. Then miners would start mining coins that they couldn't spend anywhere useful, and SPV users would find that they can't transact with the businesses they want to deal with. The currency would be split, and in this case XT would be in a far weaker position than Bitcoin.

The possibility of this sort of network/currency split is what makes XT not a "legitimate hardfork", but rather the programmed creation of an altcoin. A consensus hardfork can only go forward once it has been determined that it's nearly impossible for the Bitcoin economy to split in any significant way. Not every Bitcoin user on Earth has to agree, but enough that there won't be a noticeable split.

Bitcoin is not ruled by miners. In a hardfork, miners barely matter at all. (Softforks are different.) What's important is what the economy does.

If the economy splits without full consensus in either direction, then this may happen:

Quote

mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes if one block's large and the other small, all i need a tx that's included in the large block but not the small one. then doublespend it on the small one, which will be rejected necessarily by the large block blockchain.
mircea_popescu: now i have bitcoin separated in two addresses, one for each chain.
mircea_popescu: the attempt may fail, but the cost to me of this failure is not significant, so i can keep on trying until it succeeds.
mircea_popescu: the only way to guard against it is, obviously,for the ."large" chain to maintain 1:1 identity with the "small" one. because you don't just fork bitcoin.,
ben_vulpes: i still fail to see how you're going to make a txn that gets included in the large block chain and not the small block chain.
artifexd: ben_vulpes: You don't. You keep sending money to yourself until it happens.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes what do you mean ? it necessarily will occur.
mircea_popescu: since one contains more txn than the other by definition.
mircea_popescu: suppose i make 50k 1btc txn. they don't fit in a 1mn block. they do fit in a 10mb block. what now ?

If that happens, trouble for those on the fork and any businesses/entities that forked over without full consensus.