Re: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

First of all I never said that you should not distrust anyone. I said that you should never have to trust a developer of a Bitcoin client that is open source. I think that the DDOS protection feature within XT is innocent, however I do not even need to argue that point, because it does not matter what we think about it in terms of consensus. Since only the block size increase is fundamental to the protocol in terms of it causing a hard fork, It makes the other changes within XT optional. Since anyone can create their own client and make it behave in any way they would want as long as it is consistent with the fundamental rules of the protocol, the only fundamental rule that is changed within XT is the increase of the block size. You can turn off, any of the extra patches contained within Bitcoin XT inside of the client itself. There is even an alternative version of XT that does not include any of these other changes and only increases the block size. You could even run a patched version of Core that implements BIP101, which would then be compatible with XT after the fork if the miners reach consensus.

https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/tree/only-bigblocks

Yeah, that's the standard answer. Assuming bitcoin is forked to BIP 101 and XT becomes mainstream -- unlikely, I know Wink

-- what percentage of people do you think will use the standard XT client with standard settings? You, I and everyone reading this knows that the vast majority of users will not be compiling their own code. It's up to the community to make people aware of such controversial patches to prevent XT from becoming the norm in the first place (as unlikely as that is).

To be clear, you don't actually deny that a third party uploading a list of deprioritized IP addresses is a centralized, trust-adding feature, do you? But I assume it's okay, because the apocalypse will happen if BIP 101 isn't implemented yesterday....right?

What you are saying here is the equivalent of saying that people should not be trusted with the freedom of choice. To think that we should only have one "official" client because people are not capable of making the right choice for themselves is an extremely centralizing point of view.

I suppose that I do think that increasing the blocksize is more important then the specifics of an optional DDOS protection feature within Bitcoin XT. I can agree that there is an aspect of centralization with uploading IP addresses for this purpose, However this should not be considered as a trust adding feature as you claim it to be, since it is optional and rather innocent in practice. Furthermore placing our trust in the Core development team is a far more dangerous form of centralization then compared to anything else that is within the Bitcoin XT client.

You do realize that this feature was only added as a direct response to XT nodes being DDOS from TOR? Furthermore this feature is disabled by default unless the node in question is being directly attacked, in which case it would be better to have this feature compared to not having it at all right? Since without this feature the full node would not be able to connect or function whatsoever. This feature is also disabled when connecting through TOR by default. So I personally do not think it is a big deal. Certainly not enough of a reason to stop supporting XT especially since other options for increasing the blocksize do not exist yet.