Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
my fav bit.
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Bitcoin will have a hard-fork, eventually, I think. When bitcoin has a HF, there will be 2 chains after the fork and there will be 2 coins. It is almost guaranteed that some people will refuse the new chain and will remain on the old chain. There are enough people with significant amounts of bitcoin who will never agree to a fork and can afford to keep mining the old chain. Ethereum demonstrated this issue very well. In bitcoin it will be much bigger, because the old bitcoin may be worth as much as all of ethereum (1 billion USD). It will not undermine bitcoins value very much, but it will cause some chaos with users, wallets and exchanges. This is why a HF needs to be very carefully planned and executed with plenty of advance notice. We also need to learn from Ethereum and consider adding some anti-replay defenses to help users maintain separation of the two chains in their wallets.
I think hes right eventually we will HF but hes exaggerating the possibility of a chain split as a result IMO. if Core is supporting 2MB hardfork when the time comes ( in like 2years? ), i dont see a chain split as a possibility. I guess maybe there could be some die hard group that rejects the fork with <1% hashrate...but its not like the HF is proposing to alter the immutable blockchain, or something equally ridiculous. I disagree with the idea of adding some anti-replay defenses, the other chain should be viewed as INVALID, and there's no use catering to an invalid chain...
A 5%-hash chain of BTC will be producing blocks at something like ...200 minutes. And with difficulty adjustment in 10 months (which will not fix the issue) it'll be DOA.
A strong miner majority hard fork to a bigger max_block_size would be much more likely to dominate in Bitcoin vs Ethereum's DAO bailout fork, directly because of the difference in difficulty adjustment. A good point, which can't be overstated. Core won't be supporting the HF though. Any change from Core, from here on out, will be a soft fork. And with some clever programming tactics, you can do just about anything you can imagine with a SF. Just need a half dozen miners on-board with
It would require proof-of-work change and diff starting from a lower point. So then you have 3 coins and the one is unusable.
There is going to be a split Bitcoin one way or the other... if HF supporters get mining support, the 1MB4EVA clan will change PoW and reset diff... and if 1MB4EVA + soft-fork-salad retains ASIC warehouse mining support, HF supporters will change PoW, and reset difficulty. Just need to get it listed to Polo, and you're off to the races.
Wouldn't it be ironic?... if the "immutable 1MB ('cept for constant soft forks)" Bitcoin was mined in 4 gigantic chinese chicken coops... While the "higher max throughput" Bitcoin was highly decentralized with GPUs and stealing mining power and interest from ETH/ETC. It's a move in the game. We just haven't reached that point... yet.
my perception is that there simply is no support for the 1MB4EVA people.
economic majority isn't in that camp... ( we saw the open letter )
the miners certainly aren't int that camp
and the devs are not in that camp either.
most devs, outside of core, aren't in that camp
and i'd bet devs that contribute to core dont even put themselves in that camp
is Gmaxwellhouse really saying "4EVA"
1MB is not here to stay, but its here for now, and its not a big deal.