Quote from: RoadStress on August 28, 2015, 11:46:01 PM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on August 28, 2015, 11:48:37 AM

So how are you going to meet the 0.01% of users who know that, have got some coinbase satoshis from one of the branches, and are interested in trading single-branch bitcoins?

Well the same way you get satoshis right now. You either mine yourself or find someone that can provide you with them.

Yeah, that seems quite easy. Why didn't I think of that? [/sarcasm]

Quote

If you think 99.99% of the bitcoin holders will NOT know about that then you are lying to yourself. I do agree that there will be some that will not know about this, but 99.99% is an absurd percent.

Estimates of people who own some bitcoin range from 3'000'000 (Coinbase, BCI claims) to 300'000 (me). The latter is my estimate of how many people own at least 1 BTC; together, those users own 99% of all bitcoins in existence.

So, how many bitcoiners do you think know enough about the bitcoin protocol to understand how they can get get their transactions executed in one chain only; and know how to do that without messing up their wallet file; and can obtain a few satoshis that were mined after the fork; and are interested in handling split coins; and can find buyers who can also do all of that; and are dumb enough to buy coins that may die in a few days?

To help you: Reddit's /r/bitcoin section lists 172,115 subscribers, but less than 1000 are logged in at any time. However the moderators of /r/bitcoin delete most posts about BitcoinXT, so I doubt that its readers will learn about that there. There are new sections for bitcoiners who dislike censorship and for people interested in BitcoinXT; they have ~2000 and ~12'000 subscribers, respectively.

My most optimistic guess is that the "market" for minority-branch coins will not exceed 300 people, worldwide. There is of course a network effect there: once they realize that they are so few, they will realize that their chances of making money from coin splitting are small, and they will lose interest -- and then there will be fewer still...

Quote

Also it's not a bug. It's a feature. It's how the system works. It seems that you still don't understand it. It's 100 blocks, not 50. And it's not a hackery. It's how the system works!

Yes, I have observed already that, for the fanatic bitcoiner, *every* detail of bitcoin is a feature; and *everything* that happens is "how the system works".

Sorry, but it is a bug that the coins on each branch may or may not be moved independently, with most clients being unable ot understand or control what is happening.

Hackery is what you propose to do: move coins independently on the two branches by tainting them with coinbase coins, and sell the version you think will die to anyone fool enough to buy them, or to anyone naive enough to not understand what he is buying. The 100 block delay was probably meant to discourage that kind of hackery after forks -- soft, hard, or accidental.

Quote

Also you don't need to taint the coins from the 25% branch if a hard fork happens because you already have coins on that branch. You will need to taint coins on the other branch that has 75% because on that branch you need tainting.

Correct. More precisely, any UTXOs that were created before the fork exist and can be used on both branches. If you try to move them without tainting, they will be moved on both branches, to UTXOs that are still untainted. Once you get hold of some satoshis that were mined on one branch (either one), you can first move all your old UTXOs on that branch to new UTXOs, with tainted transactions, and then you can move again the same old UTXOs to still other UTXOs with untainted transactions, that will be executed only on the other branch (because on the first one those outputs are already spent).