I don't think I said that.

There are two ways of doing a hardfork. The proper way is consensus:

• Create a proposal that has no significant opposition. A proposal has significant opposition if it is strongly opposed by any of: one Bitcoin Core committer, one large exchange or company (Coinbase, etc.), a few generally-recognized Bitcoin experts, several smaller but still economically-important companies, or a large group of ordinary users who have reasonable arguments and are willing and able to exert some real economic force. (The underlined groups are the ones with clearly-significant opposition as I currently see things.) This means that it's very difficult to do controversial hardforks. That's the point. You need to get consensus -- that is, make a hardfork non-controversial -- in order to do it.
• Put the change in the code set to take effect at some exact time 6-12 months in the future.
• Since the "flag day" is so far in the future, almost all of the economy will just naturally upgrade without any special effort. Since the change is non-controversial, no one of any economic significance will have reason to refuse to upgrade. The network will not split, since everyone will still have the same understanding of what Bitcoin is.

The way XT is attempting to push through a hard fork might be called "economic redefinition" (which is not consensus). For me to recognize an economic redefinition, both of these must be true:

• An absolutely overwhelming majority of the Bitcoin economy (99.9%, say) actively engages in the redefinition (ie. they actually exist only on the new network/currency). Verbal support is insufficient. Miners and nodes are irrelevant. Individual users have much less weight than big companies with more economic weight.
• The new currency must not break Bitcoin's absolute core principles. For example, it cannot create more bitcoins than are allowed. I currently believe that 8 MB blocks do not violate Bitcoin's absolute core principles.

(The above list where I even say "verbal support is insufficient" is a slightly modified version of this comment which I wrote 14 days ago. I am not being inconsistent about this.)


That was one hypothetical situation. I wasn't saying anything about other situations.


Agreed, but that doesn't make it Bitcoin. Many other altcoins could reach this point if they tried.

There are some important differences between XT and something like Litecoin, so it might be reasonable to call it something other than "altcoin". But it breaks Bitcoin's core rules without consensus, so it's not Bitcoin unless the economy overwhelmingly redefines Bitcoin to equal XT.

If we get into the habit of shattering the Bitcoin economy in order to adopt changes that most experts believe to be terrible, then Bitcoin will not survive long-term. The community needs to get used to fighting against this sort of thing very strongly.

Discussion of BIP 101 itself is on-topic, it definitely should happen, and can go in the main sections. But I will consider XT to be an altcoin (or "not-Bitcoin") for at least the foreseeable future.


Consensus about how to deal with the max block size going forward is necessary, though we're not as pressed for time as many people think. Blocks are only about 40% full on average right now, and this isn't growing very quickly, so we probably have at least a couple of years before this becomes any kind of pressing concern. Maybe/hopefully there will be a clear technical consensus as a result of the research/discussion at the Scaling Bitcoin Conferences (sponsored by bitcointalk.org!), which would help move things along.

Even if XT's change to the max block size was 100% objectively perfect, this sort of hostile hardfork is just amazingly, incredibly bad. Due to this, I condemn XT as strongly as possible.