Quote from: Rampion on August 18, 2015, 05:13:42 PM

And this (Not Bitcoin XT) is exactly why contentious hard forks are doomed. Andresen and Hearn should grow a pair and bootstrap their own altcoin from scratch instead of trying to piggyback Bitcoin Core's network effect.

Gavin and Mike have the right to do what they did, and each client has the right to choose which version of the software to run.

Just as some jerk created NotBitcoinXT, another jerk could create NotBitcoinCore -- a version of BitcoinXT that accepts puts out blocks with the Core stamp, but actually accepts block with more than 1 MB, and may generate them if there is enough stuff in the pool. What woudl be the point of doing either, I don know.

However, I must concede that this initiative already made two valuable contributions to the project.

One, it underscored the silliness of the idea of blockchain voting. That is the typical hacker mentality at work: use a complicated programming solution to avoid a simpler one that requires human interaction. The right way to do a protocol change is to describe the intended change to the major players and users, listen to their opinions, try to convince them, find a solution that they could all agree to (that is what 'consensus' means to normal people), then formalize the proposal, and confirm that it will be accepted by the majority of affected people. Only then post the code that will implement the change, programmed to be activated at a fixed block number, a couple months in the future.

That is what Gavin and Mike did. That is what the Blockstream hackers are quite incapable of doing. And that is what the Blockstream devs mean when they accuse Gavin and Mike of "populist tactics". And, finally, that is why the Blockstream devs like soft forks: because they allow changes to be implemented without having to explain and justify them to the community. (That is also why they did not program a grace period in the BIP66 fork: because the purpose of the grace period is to send alerts to all clients still running the old version -- and they did not want to do that.)

Two, the NotBitcoinXT initiative prompted this message from Alan Back, Ph. D., to the bitcoin developers' mailing list:

Quote

The recent proposal here to run noXT (patch to falsely claim to mine on XT while actually rejecting it's blocks) could add enough
uncertainty about the activation that Bitcoin-XT would probably have to be aborted.

So Adam Back, Ph. D., thinks it is okay (if not wonderful) that nodes lie to the bitcoin community in order to preserve Blockstream's exclusive control of the protocol.

Think of that before trusting your savings to a system whose security strongly depends on the integrity of the BitcoinCore implementation.